Millions of West and Central Africans were victims of the cruelest of pushes,
across the Atlantic. In the Americas, millions were migrants yet again. An
African arriving late to Brazil’s northeastern sugar plantations may have
ended her life tending coffee trees a thousand miles to the south. Likewise,
many enslaved South Carolinians came to clear forests and plant cotton in
Mississippi and then Texas.
White southerners, their population (like the rest of America’s) finally
burgeoning in the nineteenth century, were pulled in droves to widowed
western landscapes. The West’s widowhood appeared at a remarkable
demographic moment. For at least a century and a half, southeastern fami-
lies had barely survived. Men outnumbered women for a long time. Parents
died early and had no or few children. Neighbors raised unrelated orphans.
Family lines disappeared. Edmund Ruffin’s Virginia line illustrates both
this and the Malthusian revolution to come. Edmund and his wife, both
born during the s, were orphan survivors of families long in Virginia yet
who barely escaped extinction. Amazingly, they became parents of eleven
children, nine of whom survived to adulthood. Typically, the young Ruffins
considered heading west; untypically, they remained at home.
What was called the South in the decade of the Ruffins’ births—the
coastal states below Delaware through Georgia, plus Kentucky and Ten-
nessee—contained fewer than million people. Mountain Virginia, west-
ern Kentucky and Tennessee, and nearly all of Georgia were unorganized,
unsettled, and practically vacant. By Appalachian Virginia and North
Carolina averaged close to ten persons per square mile, as did the upper
and central piedmonts of Georgia, and Alabama’s south-central black belt
approached twenty. In the South’s total population was about mil-
lion. Georgia’s lower piedmont as well as Alabama’s black belt, southwest-
ern Mississippi, and adjacent eastern Louisiana were all relatively crowded,
with densities of at least thirty persons per square mile. Southern Missouri,
Arkansas, eastern Texas, and northern Florida were settled and growing
fast. This sixfold increase in population and the constant movement—the
fiery reclamation, as it were, of old native landscapes—led to four years of
war fought principally on these same landscapes, followed by reconstruc-
tions of several sorts, then the creation of a second and much larger cotton
kingdom that endured well into the twentieth century. One begins to ap-
preciate the discontinuity, the disruption-as-norm, and the chaos, perhaps,
that is the history of the South.^14 Yet this is not what is remembered.
When the Civil War got under way, along the banks of the rivers James,