Robert E. Stalhope,John Taylor of Caroline: Pastoral Republican(Columbia: University
of South Carolina Press, ); and esp. Taylor’s agronomy, Avery Craven,Soil Exhaus-
tion as a Factor in the Agricultural History of Virginia and Maryland, –(Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, ), –.
. On the East Anglian ‘‘revolution,’’ see G. E. Mingay, ed.,The Agricultural Revolu-
tion: Changes in Agriculture, –(London: Adam and Charles Black, ), –,
–. On the Anglo-centricity of Chesapeake planters, see T. H. Breen,Tobacco Cul-
ture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of the Revolution(Princeton:
Princeton University Press, ). On the switch to grains, see Carville V. Earle,The Evo-
lution of a Tidewater Settlement Pattern: All Hallow’s Parish, Maryland, –(Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Geography Department, ), esp. –; Allan Kulikoff,
Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, –
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), esp. ; and esp.The Diary of
Colonel Landon Carter of Sabine Hall, –, ed. Jack P. Green, vols. (Charlottes-
ville: University Press of Virginia, ), :–, , (on English agronomy), :
(on turnips in rotation). An important demurrer to an English agricultural ‘‘revolution’’
is G. E. Fussell, ‘‘Science and Practice in Eighteenth-Century British Agriculture,’’Agri-
cultural History (): –.
. See David F. Allmendinger Jr.,Ruffin: Family and Reform in the Old South(New
York: Oxford University Press, ), esp. –. Quotation fromIncidents of My Life:
Edmund Ruffin’s Autobiographical Essays, ed. David F. Allmendinger Jr. (Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia for the Virginia Historical Society, ), .
. On European chemistry, esp. Liebig’s in England, see J. D. Sykes, ‘‘Agriculture and
Science,’’ inThe Victorian Countryside, ed. G. E. Mingay (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, ), :–. Ruffin’s response and significance is summarized inEdmund
Ruffin: Nature’s Management—Writings on Landscape and Reform, –, ed. Jack
Temple Kirby (Athens: University of Georgia Press, ), xxiii–xxv.
. Ruffin’s South Carolina Institute address was printed eight years later inSouthern
Planter ( July ): –, and (August ): –. This version (slightly different
from the original text) is reprinted in Kirby,Edmund Ruffin, – (quotation, ).
. On nineteenth-century agricultural ‘‘improvers’’ north and south, and the sig-
nificance of guano, see Steven Stoll’s invaluableLarding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society
in Nineteenth-Century America(New York: Hill and Wang, ), esp. –. Ironically
(I think), Avery Craven acknowledged and applauded the introduction of guano and
credited it above marl in the Chesapeake’s successful ‘‘reform.’’ See Craven,Soil Ex-
haustion, esp. .
. William M. Mathew,Edmund Ruffin and the Crisis of Slavery in the Old South: The
Failure of Agricultural Reform(Athens: University of Georgia Press, ). I have treated
Craven, Ruffin, and historical memory of ‘‘soil exhaustion’’ in somewhat more detail
inPoquosin, –, andEdmund Ruffin, xii–xviii. On the antebellum southern food
supply and exports, see the works of the historical geographer Sam Bowers Hilliard:
–