tives in the stunning recovery and expansion of the cotton kingdom and
other, new, industrial principalities.
tFor all the devastation of war—to people, animals, farms and plan-
tations, cities, and forests—the so-called New South not only burgeoned
rapidly but made important contributions to U.S. westward expansion.
First, the South not only remained an agricultural region of global signifi-
cance, but it expanded commodity production and exports during the post-
war decades and long thereafter. Astoundingly, southern cotton harvests at
the end of the nineteenth century weretriplethe production of . The ex-
pansion was accomplished in part by reconstruction of antebellum farms
and plantations, but more by territorial expansion: the clearing of swampy
forests, notably in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, then across the Mississippi
in northeastern Arkansas and southeastern Missouri; the deforesting of
upper piedmont and low mountain landscapes (e.g., in northwestern Geor-
gia and parts of Ozark Arkansas); then an invasion of cotton culture into the
subhumid Southwest—central Oklahoma and Texas—and later, during the
twentieth century, onto the southern high plains themselves. A few post-
bellum cotton growers were newcomers, Yankee and foreign opportunists;
most, however, were white and black southerners, mobile people, some
rich but most poor, scions of large families that survived the war and pro-
duced yet larger families of their own. The postbellum population boomed,
labor was cheap, and the war’s great losses were no impediment to vast
growth. Likewise the supply of agricultural power—horses and especially
mules—recovered quickly and expanded. Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennes-
see, as in antebellum times, were the great postbellum breeders and sellers,
to be joined by Texas early in the twentieth century. Railroad construction
propelled everything, sometimes following but usually leading territorial
advances of cotton and corn.^11
The Civil War’s destruction of countless trees—relentless harvests by
soldiers as well as burning both intended and inadvertent—was not to be
fixed in less than a generation, as was cotton production. The ravages of
war, though, must be considered within the very large chronological con-
text that forest history nearly always requires. The holocaust within the
Battle of the Wilderness, for example, was a horror uncomfortable to re-
visit: wailing, wounded men trapped by fire, and horses and mules scream-
ing, roasting alive. Yet this burned-over patch of north-central Virginia after
the battle hardly compares with alterations of forests wrought by at least
a thousand years of human management (and carelessness). Native south-