most of the Italian newcomers ducked their contracts and fled to New
Orleans in short time.^4
Ultimately in the American plantation South, postemancipation immi-
grants were little more than local curiosities. The scheme of sharecropping
with native African American labor actually supplied the insatiable require-
ments of a newly expansive cotton kingdom. Sharecropping evolved dur-
ing the late s and after as a labor regime specifically for freedmen. It
superficially resembled tenancy or renting, but in actuality sharecropping
was a labor system with neither tenant rights nor regular wages. Instead,
croppers simply shared landowners’ risks in future commodity prices each
year, their reward being one-half the final market value of the crop pro-
duced—minus many deductions imposed by planter-owners (more of this
below). Occasionally sharecroppers made handsome returns and improved
their status. This tended to occur when prices were high and costs low—
for example, on ‘‘new’’ ground in opening cotton frontiers that required no
expensive fertilizers. More often than not, croppers were simply another
version of powerless, dependent, and perpetually indebted laborers. Vir-
tually all plantation labor, then, historically has been alienated—that is,
only marginally at best invested in efficiency, much less in what has (since
about ) been called conservation. At its very heart, then, the planta-
tion tradition seems to present consistently, over at least five sad centuries,
not only a purgatory (if not hell) for workers but a disaster for landscapes.
Logically (although ironically, too), in the American South it was planters
themselves who persistently proclaimed the intimate relationship between
plantations, forced labor, and the breaking of the land.
tMore than a century before anything resembling a conservation move-
ment appeared in North America, yet at a moment when coastal land-
scapes had been farmed plantation-style for more than a century and a
half, Jeremiahs foreign and domestic began to decry American, and in par-
ticular southern, agronomy. The first important foreigner was a Yorkshire
farmer named Edward Strickland, who arrived in the northeastern United
States in . Strickland’s journey of investigation took him as far south as
the Chesapeake states, and his summary findings appeared as a large pam-
phlet (published in London in ),Observations on the Agriculture of the
United States. ‘‘Decline has pervaded all the states,’’ Strickland concluded,
yet unevenly. ‘‘Land in New-York, formerly producing twenty bushels to the
acre, now produces only ten,’’ he continued; but it was the Chesapeake re-
gion that approached actual ruination: ‘‘Virginia is the southern limit of my