Andrew Jackson and his successor effectively engineered this final solution,
yeoman democracy was lost, and Georgia’s vast lower piedmont was trans-
formed into an empire of cotton dominated by planters, many of whom
commanded scores, sometimes hundreds, of slaves, who toiled on estates
of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of acres. The land lottery’s democratic
promise was undone by Eli Whitney’s gin, invented on a coastal Georgia
plantation in , and three decades earlier, by the colonial government’s
capitulation to the institution of slavery. Whitney’s (and other inventor-
mechanics’) gins made possible the cultivation of upland, or short-staple,
cotton over the sprawling red clay landscape stretching southwestward.
Chattels would plant and pick the cotton, feed the gins, and crank gin
handles. Had there been no gin and no cotton kingdom, Georgia’s frontier
(then Alabama’s and Mississippi’s and onward) might have become Euro-
Americanized like the emergent states of the Old Northwest. Instead, the
piedmonts and black belts, and the black prairies and deltas, were to be-
come the cotton kingdom and the heart of Dixie. Still, all this said of the
reconfiguration of Georgia’s landscape from ‘‘democratical’’ to plantation,
the perversion is but a variation on a model already quite old by .
t‘‘Plantation’’ entered the English language in a brutal sixteenth-century
context: the beginning of the English conquest of Ireland. A plantation was,
first of all, simply a conquered place and a colony. The conquerors might
then plant their own people on the new frontier, having effectively weeded
the original occupants of the space, or at least disinherited them, consign-
ing the conquered to dependent laborer status. The conquerors might also
plant a church, so a plantation could also be a religious mission, to bene-
fit the colonized, the colonizers, or both. Francis Bacon employed ‘‘planta-
tion’’ in this sense at least as early as , two years before John Smith and
company planted the first permanent English American colony, at James-
town. Later John Milton also used the word, and the separatist Calvinists
who arrived in Plymouth in called their settlement Plymouth Planta-
tion. By the s, nihilists and other troublemakers from Puritan Massa-
chusetts Bay migrated or were banished to Providence Plantation.
Gradually and ultimately, though, ‘‘plantation’’ came to describe a con-
quered place where capital and labor were organized and applied to extrac-
tive industry—the production of agricultural commodities. This was so in
Ireland, where early English law created reliable ‘‘plantation measures’’ in-
strumental to surveying and taxing land. This sort of plantation thrives best,
however, in balmier climes than Ireland’s, with growing seasons and soils