ratio was thirteen-to-one. At the next federal census—after Mississippi’s
south had become more populous—twenty-three counties still had four
times as many cattle and hogs as humans. So it was throughout the piney
coastal regions by the Atlantic and the Gulf, but hardly less so in piedmonts
and other upland places on both sides of the Appalachians. Southern farms
(not plantations) were nearly twice as large as average northern ones—
versus acres in —but typically worth less than a quarter of the value
of Yankee farms. This was owing to southerners’ economy of minor cultiva-
tion (relative to farm size) mixed with extensive range herding. Most south-
ern farms consisted overwhelmingly of woods, which collectively, along
with planters’ woods and publicly owned forests, comprised an enormous
land commons. Ordinary southern farm owners’ crops may or may not have
included surpluses for market, but in meat-for-market they were massively
engaged participants. A substantial minority of southern herdsmen owned
no land at all, yet they were men of substance nonetheless. McWhiney iden-
tifies a number of landless Alabamians—one, for instance, with cattle
and hogs worth ,, another with cows and swine worth
,, and a third owning cattle plus hogs at . Such numbers
indicate much more than capacity for family subsistence. Like landown-
ing and farming herders, the landless were also marketers. In alone,
,-odd swine passed through Cumberland Gap and Asheville, North
Carolina (along what was called the ‘‘Great Kaintuck Hog Highway’’), on
their way to seaport markets. McWhiney calculates that during the last
fifteen years of the antebellum era, southerners drove and/or marketed
no fewer than ,, hogs, an annual average of ,,. Compare
this with the much-better-known postbellum (–) cattle business cen-
tered in Texas: The annual average was ,; the grand total, ,,.^2
No wonder that typical farms seemed carelessly, even sloppily, operated
and that the southern yeomanry (as small and middling owners have ever
been called) were, with few exceptions, viewed as the great obstacle to im-
provement. Edmund Ruffin and most other agronomic reformers ignored
them, generally, as hopeless. Outsiders such as Olmsted deemed them in-
tractable. Nonlandowners were everywhere condemned by the privileged
and educated, who actually knew little of the scope of the meat market and
nothing of the culture of herding folks.
Consider another famous commentator, Frances Anne ‘‘Fanny’’ Kemble,
and her informants among the island plantations of Georgia. A celebrated
leading lady of the English theater, Kemble was touring the United States
during the s when she met and married the fabulously wealthy Phila-