near-eradication of cattle and hogs in combat zones: no ranging animals
to speak of, no need for crop field protection.
Certainly the war marked the beginning of the end of the open range.
This would require decades of political struggles. In some states these grew
heated by the s; in others the dispute continued until the second de-
cade of the twentieth century, when the authority of professional agrono-
mists and foresters, who all favored closing the range, added irrepressible
weight to the argument for confinement. Edmund Ruffin and other improv-
ing planters would have been delighted. Even then, some states’ county-
option scheme for closing the range left pockets of the old world of razor-
backs as late as World War II—in remote rural Appalachia, for instance,
and in Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s Alachua County, Florida.
The long view of these protracted struggles over the range, however,
might be that they were more about ordinary and poor men’s traditions
and dreams of renewal than about substance. Not only were meat ani-
mals massively slaughtered in wartime, not to recover in absolute num-
bers until well into the twentieth century, but the broad region’s human
population growth surged quickly, negating war losses and an unbalanced
ratio between the sexes. Fewer animals, in other words, supported far more
middling and poor folks. Enormously worsening the postbellum ratio be-
tween animals and humans, one must also calculate, was the sudden and
massive augmentation of the free, but generally quite poor, population
at the close of the war. Black southerners never realized their dream of a
stake in society as recompense for their enslavement—the ‘‘forty acres and
a mule’’ for every emancipated household. Instead they were thrown into
the labor market helpless, for the most part. Two centuries and more be-
fore, penniless Europeans had come to America as indentured servants,
served their five or seven years, and became free. Whether or not they re-
ceived from the crown a ‘‘head-right’’ of fifty acres (as in Virginia), such men
and women might and could secure themselves in the vast commons. Typi-
cally they bought, begged, or appropriated a few range hogs, marked them,
and let them gorge on whatever nature presented. The ambitious and lucky
might ultimately thrive. Most, it seems, rose rapidly to the cracker sub-
classes, content to work (or not) when they wished yet participate in mar-
kets near and far that provided cash enough. Beginning with the Civil War,
and more direly after or so, poor white men lost out and became de-
pendent. Few black folks ever saw such an opportunity. Instead, they were
swept up in dependency from the start, becoming mere grubbing opera-