ports, suggesting that supposedly indolent Carolinians not only subsisted
on range swine but were engaged in a well-organized and lucrative market.
Planters were not the only southern white folk in business.
More than a century later, toward the end of , Frederick Law Olm-
sted, riding alone in Prince George County, Virginia (downriver from West-
over, in Edmund Ruffin’s old neighborhood), experienced scenes hardly un-
like Robert Beverley’s: sparse human populations, seemingly endless pine
forests, and squadrons of hogs darting across his trail as though, he wrote,
on a fox hunt—all this in a tidewater countryside settled by Europeans for
almost years. By this time, federal census takers were trying, at least, to
enumerate farm animals, including pigs. In and again in , there
were at least twice as many hogs as humans in the Virginia ‘‘Southside’’ (i.e.,
below James River) tidewater and adjacent northeastern North Carolina.
The count was probably low, especially of swine belonging to the middling
classes of white and free black farmers and herders. Planters were not only
disciplined record keepers, but some of them had already begun to confine
their animals. In Prince George County’s riverside precincts, for instance,
Edmund Ruffin had initiated creation of a ‘‘ring fence association’’ more
than a decade before Olmsted’s sojourn. The ring fence enclosed all cooper-
ating and contiguous plantations, so their masters might pen their cattle
and hogs instead of their crop fields, saving enormous expenses for fenc-
ing and permitting close management of livestock. Still, this was an excep-
tional practice.^1
Everywhere else the open range prevailed and would long endure. Own-
ers of hogs made some attempt to keep track of the animals. They rounded
them up each fall, usually, sometimes with herding dogs; checked their
identifying marks (usually notches cut in ears); and marked new litters. Big-
ger hogs were held for fattening and winter slaughter, and the rest were set
at large once more. In what were called ‘‘good mast’’ years, sows gorged on
acorns and other nuts, pine seeds, and plant shoots and roots and prob-
ably dropped larger litters. By any account, though, swine, and often cattle
as well, were the foundation of the cultures and economies of the masses
of white southerners and not a few free Afro-southerners.
If good estimates of the number of swine versus humans in the longest-
settled parts of the South surprise, figures on newer Euro-southern locales
in the nineteenth century may amaze. Grady McWhiney, the most authori-
tative chronicler of southern herding, reports that in , in twenty-five
of Mississippi’s thirty-two southern, piney-woods counties, hogs and beef
cattle outnumbered people four-to-one; in Greene and Perry counties the