The White Horse Press Full citation: Stewart, Mart A. "If John Muir Had Been an Agrarian: American Environmental History West and South." Environment and History 11, no. 2 (May 2005): 139–62. http://www.environmentandsociety.org/node/3231. Rights: All rights reserved. © The White Horse Press 2005. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism or review, no part of this article may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, including photocopying or recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission from the publishers. For further information please see http://www.whpress.co.uk. If John Muir Had Been an Agrarian: American Environmental History West and South MART A. STEWART Department of History Western Washington University Bellingham, Washington 98225-9061, USA Email: [email protected] ABSTRACT Environmental history in and of the American South has developed in a different direction than the field in general in the U.S., which has been shaped by its origins in the history of the American West. The history of humans and the environment in the South has been much more driven by the history of agriculture than by frontier or wilderness interactions, as well as by the history of the relationship between white and black Americans and their respective uses of the land in the region. It also has more in common with environmental history outside the U.S. than with the field as it at first developed in the U.S. KEY WORDS Regions and environmental history, history of agriculture and the environment, African American history, agrarian struggles, environmental history and the American South Imagine, if John Muir, during his thousand-mile trek through south-eastern North America to the Gulf of Mexico two years after the end of the Civil War, had developed more than a passing infatuation with the landscapes of ʻhappy negroesʼ and ʻdark mysterious Savannah cypress forestsʼ of Georgia or the pal- metto ʻhummocksʼ of Florida, and had decided to stay and live in the South.1 If he had met up with Sidney Lanier and Joel Chandler Harris and imbibed from them the sensibilities of the southern Arcadian tradition. And if he had written a series of essays about a nature pastoralised and had become an inspiration to the Vanderbilt Agrarians as they took their stand. If this Muir, like the other one, had also been one of the founding fathers of American environmentalism, what kind of Sierra – or Appalachian, rather – Club would have been founded? Environment and History 11 (2005): 139–62 © 2005 The White Horse Press 140 141 MART A. STEWART IF JOHN MUIR HAD BEEN AN AGRARIAN What landscapes would have been venerated and called up for protection if Muir had been agrarian and pastoral, rather than wilderness and biocentric, in his sensibilities? Would he have proclaimed, ʻIn the agrarian is the preserva- tion of the world?ʼ2 Of course, Muir was no Southerner and his passage through the Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida countrysides, though on foot, was ultimately feverish in pace. Muir remained blind throughout the trip to the social turmoil and changes on the land that were occurring – in the parts of Georgia he visited, especially – because of Emancipation and realignments of land and labour in the post-Civil War South. And he never returned. But conducting this thought-exer- cise might tell us something about an ongoing issue in American environmental history. Why has environmental history, a growing and now well-established field, developed more slowly and much differently in the American South? And by what measure should we judge this? At the same time, historians of this region have often talked about the land, and southern history has a deep tradition of agricultural history and human geography that can be described as ʻenvironmentalʼ – yet American environmental historians in general scarcely know about this literature and this tradition. The huge literature that considers the struggle of agricultural labourers against masters, landlords, lenders and their supporters in local and state governments over access and control of resources – what can be called ʻagrarian struggleʼ – is akin to the literature, some of it by environmental historians, about agrarian struggle in places not American, and some historians of the South are quite aware of this kinship. But this awareness has yet to have much of an impact on American environmental historians. What kind of environmental history would have developed, indeed, if John Muir had stayed in the South and become an agrarian?3 Muir, of course, was not the only, and probably not even the most important, source or intellectual influence in the development of American environmen- talism and environmental history in the United States. And the importance of an agrarian sensibility as well as an agrarian experience – and the hopes for a republic of yeoman citizens – in shaping the early history of American relation- ships to the land certainly has its historians. But much of the strongest founding work in American environmental history was written by historians of the West and shaped by sensibilities akin to Muirʼs: with an interest in ʻwildʼ places and in the preservation of them, a concern with capitalist despoliations of pristine environments, the assumption that nature has fundamental value apart from what we ascribe to it, and an engagement with the politics of conservation and environmental protection – all out on the frontier bee meadows and sequoia margins of American settlement, and under a very big sky.4 The history of humans and nature in the South, however, has more often assumed a different measure of the ʻnatural,ʼ one that does not take humans out of nature, and that is more informed by an agricultural experience than a wilderness one. The South has been an agricultural region, and more profoundly 140 141 MART A. STEWART IF JOHN MUIR HAD BEEN AN AGRARIAN an agricultural region than other parts of the United States where agriculture was important but not so woven into both sense and sensibility as in the South. Every attempt by scholars to understand, as pioneering agricultural historian Lewis Gray explained his mission, ʻthe way of life of a great section of an country which was almost entirely agriculturalʼ has required a close look at the interaction of cultivators and the cultivated – and at perceptions of and ideas about this interaction. Agricultural history, as Donald Worster has both observed and demonstrated, can provide a lens for examining environmental history itself.5 For most of the history of the South, further, significant social and political relationships cannot be separated from the agricultural landscapes in which they are embedded without a loss of meaning and understanding. In parts of the South these relationships have persisted well beyond the demise of the original form of agriculture that gave rise to them. America was generally a rural nation with most Americans engaged in the work of agriculture until the early twentieth century. But the imprint of agri- culture was deeper in the South, lasted longer, and almost from the beginning (at least after Europeans arrived) was driven by a set of relationships that gave landowners control over both land and labour. Agriculture in many parts of the South evolved within or in relationship to a distinctive form, the plantation. Plantations where staple crops were worked by unfree labour emerged very soon after the first Southern British colonies were founded in the Chesapeake and the Carolina lowcountry. And the social and economic effects of plantation agriculture have lasted in the South long after the demise of plantation agricul- ture in the mid-twentieth century – sometimes with profound environmental consequences as well, in old cotton belt communities blighted by poverty that became the sites (or proposed sites) of toxic waste dumps.6 The plantation itself was an adaptation to the difficult environment that the first colonists encountered –but also one that allowed them to transfer to North America a form of agricultural production that had worked in kindred climates and soils in the Caribbean. Long growing seasons and ample moisture, and a good river system for transporting cash crops, made commodity crop production possible at the same time that poor soils and the conditions of slavery forced mobility in both land and labour. By the nineteenth century, plantations were the backbone of nineteenth-century southern agriculture and drove the economy of the region. Cotton agriculture moved from Georgia and South Carolina to Texas; the significant frontier in southern history is the cotton frontier – and slavery moved along with it. How the South as a region – given its geographical diversity and that a large percentage of landowners did not own slaves – can be identified has been an issue of perennial debate for historians of the South. But that the planter class held most of the wealth and the power in the region and that Southern society was from the beginning at least biracial is beyond question.7 By reorganising agricultural labour, landowners were able to re-invent plantation agriculture after Emancipation. The Civil War had been the first 142 143 MART A. STEWART IF JOHN MUIR HAD BEEN AN AGRARIAN ʻtotal war,ʼ in which armies warred not only against other armies but against the societies that sustained them and even against the very landscape itself. The scorched earth tactics practiced in Georgia and other places by Union troop gave the South a distinctive regional history, unique in the United States, of defeat and subjugation by occupying troops. Union troops cut a swathe through both the cultivated and uncultivated environments of the South. Making Georgia howl for example meant the destruction of seed and livestock and agricultural infrastructure, and the confirmation of emancipation at the same time. Large amounts of land in the South were temporarily abandoned after the war was over, farm animals that had been drafted into military service were gone and so were many that had not. In those places where Union foragers had extracted harvests and sometimes everything else, residents, both black and white, were forced to rely more extensively on wild resources, intensifying a relationship between the cultivated and uncultivated portions of the South that already had a long history. Five years after the war less than half the formerly improved land was in use.8 Southerners set to work at reviving regional agricultural regimens, and improved land stabilised at about one-third of the total area after 1880. The ag- ricultural economy that postbellum Southerners put together had far more farm units and labourers were dispersed in separate households and worked smaller fields instead of living in quarters and working in gangs on large fields – but the same class of Southerners owned the land and the same class worked the land after the war as before. The profoundly agricultural culture of the South was badly damaged by destruction wrought by the war, but the struggle to recover what had been lost dug it even deeper into the region. Long after the South began to modernise through infusions of capital by New Deal programs and the invention of the mechanical cotton picker, the geography of plantations continue to shape the southern economy and southern culture, and the bustling Sunbelt has a shadow landscape of exhausted soils, pine (and marijuana) plantations, and impoverished rural communities in its stead.9 Those who worked the land and the understandings they developed and employed as agricultural workers were as important to the environmental history of the South as was the structure of agriculture and of crop regimens. Much of the South was shaped by the production of a very few staple crops on plantations, but more directly by the labourers who grew these crops. As Philip Morgan and Ira Berlin have pointed out, cultivation and culture were always linked in the plantation South and Caribbean; how people worked tells us a great deal about their cultures. Morgan and Berlin emphasise labour much more than land and the work culture of slaves more than the complex set of relationships they had with the environment. The work that these scholars have collected and themselves done has made the hands that shaped southern landscapes more visible, but for them and for other historians who have studied Southern labour land continues to be no more than abstraction or scene of action. The 142 143 MART A. STEWART IF JOHN MUIR HAD BEEN AN AGRARIAN hands that shaped plantation agriculture also shaped their own countervailing and sometimes competing landscapes, however, because of and by way of the work that they did on the land. 10 Competing landscapes too were important expressions of cultural and espe- cially environmental perceptions and power relations. Plantation landscapes were thoroughly racialised; what used to be called ʻraceʼ bound up or split apart just about everything else in the region as well. American environmental historians discovered race only about a decade ago; southern historians have seldom been able to avoid it, and have created a superb and complex literature about race relations and constructions of both whiteness and blackness. Slavery and racism, as it was articulated by way of plantation agriculture, struc- tured the cultivated landscape in the South, but also drove perceptions and uses of the uncultivated landscape as well. The South has had its own kind of ʻwildernessʼ. Indeed, Muir noticed it, but a much different and much more inhabited one than the realm of alpine glaciers and water ouzels he later explored in the Sierras. About 80 percent of the region in 1860 was uncultivated before the Civil War, and when Muir strolled to the Gulf Coast after the war much more had been added around the edges by way of abandoned fields and destroyed farms. The forests, wetlands, and savannahs of the wild places in the South were uncultivated, but were linked to cultivated ones through a complex of uses – some of them also agricultural. Small farmers and hill folk ranged cattle on wiregrass savannahs and in canebrakes, and hogs in mast-bearing deciduous woods – the enormous canebrakes of the South were vital to the large cattle industry of the region. Hunting and gathering were important components of the subsistence strategies to the more than 80 percent of southerners who did not own slaves – and for some of those who did. Southerners routinely burned the woods in some areas in an early spring ritual to destroy insects and improve understory and savannah browse for their free-ranging cattle. More importantly, this wilderness South was as structured by social and cul- tural categories as the cultivated one; and the cultivated and uncultivated were inhabited and used in tandem by Southerners. If one of the questions American environmental historians have been asking in the last decade is ʻwhat wilderness should we get back to,ʼ the answer for the South is that wild lands were always the terrain of an array of purposes and of social and cultural differences – so much so, that they were hardly ʻwildernessʼ at all. In plantation districts, both the cultivated and uncultivated environments were often better known by slaves than by their masters. The work slaves did accustomed them to a closer view of the cultivated environment. They were aware, from row to row, of the progress of the plants during the growing season. They put seeds in the ground and covered them with their feet, stirred and tilled the earth when hoeing, and bent down over rice stalks or moved slowly down rows of cotton during harvest. The hands experienced crop cultures from the ground up. Masters sometimes even depended on the first-hand – and often more tangible – perceptions of leading slaves to make 144 145 MART A. STEWART IF JOHN MUIR HAD BEEN AN AGRARIAN decisions about crop regimens. At the same time, when a storm came up slaves went in the fields or out on the levees or rice banks to do repairs and salvage crops. They endured suffocating heat – especially in the low country rice swamps or in the damp thickets of Lower Mississippi sugar plantations – while doing the heavy labour of tending and harvesting the crops. Masters and overseers rode or strolled along the borders of the fields and sometimes down the rows, but the slaves who turned the soil, tended the plants, and harvested the crops acquired a first-hand knowledge of the cultivated landscape on the plantation.11 Slaves knew the woods and swamps that were not cultivated, too, and often as intimately. The conduits and seams of significance in slave landscapes were marked out not by the boundaries of the fields they were forced to work, but by the pathways and waterways along which they acquired opportunities for small measures of autonomy beyond the fields. They met in the holler for worship, and many depended in part on the local environments for sustenance, oak or seagrass for baskets, roots and herbs for medicine or other purposes – even quilt patterns.12 Hunting and fishing in the surrounding woods and waterways were an important source of food for slaves. Not all slaves hunted – some plantation surroundings were not rich enough in game to yield much to hunters, and going off the planta- tion without a pass was too risky in some neighbourhoods. But many did, if not with the rare guns they were able to use as hunters for their masters or that they owned themselves, with an ingenious array of snares, set traps and turkey pens. Or whatever else was at their disposal: Georgian Aunt Harriet Miller reported to a WPA interviewer that when she was a slave, she and other slaves used blow guns made out of sugar cane and burned out at the joints to ʻkill squirrels and catch fishʼ. 13 With sometimes nothing more than motivation, opportunity, and a good stick, slaves sought something of their own by way of hunting. Slaves hunted everything, but the most common animals that found their way into pots in the quarters were opossums, raccoons, and rabbits. Rabbits were plentiful and had savoury meat, roasted raccoon was meat with character, and the meat of the opossum, when scalded, rubbed in hot ashes, and roasted, and then eaten with roasted sweet potatoes and coffee, was prized most of all by slaves who hunted.14 But whatever the animal, slaves had to be doubly stealthy and more knowledgeable than common for white hunters: they had to avoid stepping into their mastersʼ landscapes of control and domination at the same time that they had to be closely attentive – especially if they were hunting merely with sticks and smarts and at night – to the nuances of the behaviour and environment of their prey. Hunting put meat in the pot: on the Georgia and South Carolina coasts, for example, slaves may have procured nearly half the meat in their diets from wild sources – a crucial margin that added substantially to nutrition and sustenance.15 At the same time, hunting was one more way that slaves acquired knowledge about the physical environment in their neighbourhoods and annotated their surroundings with meanings that were both subversive of 144 145 MART A. STEWART IF JOHN MUIR HAD BEEN AN AGRARIAN the totality of white power and positive expressions of an African American environmental ethos. Again, what happened in the woods was linked to the interstices of agricultural regimens – and the history of plantation agriculture in the South. Most slaves devised ways to carve out some of their ʻownʼ time to expand their exploita- tion of local resources beyond the fields or apply specialised skills off task to cultivate, hunt, or gather after their work in the fields was done. Slaves were not only able to supplement rations and feed their families and neighbours. The food that slaves procured from the wild environment became imbued with cultural value when slaves developed a cuisine, tastes for certain wild foods, and used gifts of meat and other foods to reinforce community bonds. They also used what they raised and procured in the wild places to trade for goods and property of their own. Cattle and hogs that ranged in the woods were, indeed, capital on the hoof, which increased by way of the browse that could be found there. Like their masters, slaves extracted commodities from the environment in which they lived and worked, and indeed masters often encouraged some property ownership by slaves – they believed it would make them less likely to run away, and sometimes slave property substantially supplemented plantation rations. Whatever property they could acquire had more than pure economic value, however. In a relationship with other humans and larger institutions that defined them as human property, outside civil society and subject to the almost absolute domination of their masters, small bits of property represented considerable increments of independence and autonomy, even when they also served the goals of masters. Property was not simply wealth, but represented a small measure of security and something that was slavesʼ own, and more slaves than not had some.16 At the same time, ʻwildernessʼ resources and the property made from them were not merely used to strengthen individual positions of power, but were important in consolidating family bonds. Wild resources and the process of procuring them did not produce family, but were often the medium of kinship. Cooperative arrangements that freed some slaves to cultivate their own plots, fish, hunt, or gather and then trade or sell, were usually kin arrangements. Slaves worked with relatives to extract resources, relatives took care of property when the owner was absent, and some slaves got their start – a few chickens or a shoat or a calf – by way of a gift or a loan from a relative. When slaves disputed ownership of something, they negotiated a resolution by way of kin- ship networks – relatives or reliable neighbours were witnesses and trusted ones were arbiters. When slaves died, their children inherited what they had. The resources enslaved African Americans were able to gather or the small property they were able to procure because of these arrangements reinforced and further strengthened kinship ties. Property ownership was so interrelated with kinship for slaves that the making of property and the making of family often went hand in hand. Slaves metabolised resources from the fields, forests, and swamps of 146 147 MART A. STEWART IF JOHN MUIR HAD BEEN AN AGRARIAN plantation neighbourhoods in their social arrangements as well as adding to their food supply and nutrition. They crafted expressions of culture and values, and also quite literally claimed family ties with what they extracted – both in the process and the product – from the environment.17 Uncultivated environments had another important social link to cultivated ones among slaves who ran ʻawayʼ from one to the other. Though relatively few African Americans, like Frederick Douglass, ʻstole themselvesʼ to the North and away from slavery altogether, many of them ran away, to visit family on other plantations, or simply to ʻlay outʼ in the local swamps for a spell. For these, the wild places were quite literally havens, or crucial highways to family reunions. Slaves who sought either to escape – even if just for a while – the harsh constraints of plantation life and agricultural regimens, or who travelled to other plantations to visit family, travelled or hid out off the roads. The petit marronage engaged in by slaves who sought either to escape for a while a particularly repressive master or overseer or who wanted to visit with family on other plantations was common on every plantation and was an important form of resistance that was also shaped by close observation of geography and the weather. Slaves made their way from plantation to plantation, usually at night and with both short and extended periods of truancy, to visit kinfolks and to improve the quality of their family relations. When they ʻlayed outʼ to avoid punishment or work, or when they travelled from one plantation to another to visit relatives, they also depended upon the support of slaves who stayed home. The physical environment off the plantation, then, was hardly ʻmarginalʼ to plantation labourers, but an intricate part of the elaborate geography of kinship and social connection.18 Though maroon communities were relatively rare in the South, they were not unknown. Such communities existed, at least, on Georgiaʼs Savannah River in colonial Georgia and in colonial Louisiana between the mouth of the Mississippi River and New Orleans, but also in mountainous, forested, or swampy regions throughout the South. Gwendolyn Hall has explained how groups of runaway creole slaves in Louisiana built huts in the cypress swamps on and behind the estates of French settlers, with secret paths leading to them (sometimes covered with woven mats that were noisy when someone walked on them), grew corn, squash, and rice on small high places in the swamps, gathered berries, dwarf pal- metto roots, China-smilax roots (which they pounded into flour and cooked) and sassafras, hunted and fished, and so on. In other words, they created communities in the swamps, raised their own food – and sometimes sold cypress logs to sawmill owners to procure cash for small commodities they could not make or obtain in the ʻwildʼ. Sometimes entire families fled together – and those who did not run away provided support for those who did. Africans in the swamps had a symbiotic relationship with slaves on the plantation. When Cajuns and Canary Islanders came to these swamps in the late eighteenth century, they learned how to live in them from those who were already there – the debt of these fiercely independent people to maroon communities, Hall explains, is engraved on the language they 146 147 MART A. STEWART IF JOHN MUIR HAD BEEN AN AGRARIAN still speak today – most often by men, when they are fishing and hunting. Hall does not fully enough explain the history of maroons in this region, and the extent of what she credits as a maroon culture in Louisiana has been contested, but the notion that Afro-Creole traditions that had their origins in the maroon communities in the eighteenth century have left cultural tracks in the vernacular of those who move along similar pathways in the swamps even today suggests the strength of this kind of ʻwildernessʼ tradition at the same time that it illuminates its origin in an agricultural one.19 Though more land was brought into cultivation in the South after the Civil War, open land continued to be important to the sustenance of poor whites and blacks – Stephen Hahn and several other scholars have explained the social and political turbulence that occurred when influential Southerners began to expand their control of ʻwildʼ lands through legislation that made it illegal to run hogs and cattle on unenclosed private lands or ʻtrespassʼ to hunt. The struggle between tenants or small farmers and wealthier landholders in the South over access to resources on unenclosed lands differed only on the face of it from kindred agrarian struggles elsewhere. It was a contest over access to lands that in terms of current property law was private property owned by individuals rather than public lands that the state sought to control, conserve, manage, or otherwise make more ʻlegibleʼ as an extension also of state policy initiatives. But the ʻstateʼ – in this case, state and county governments – were a part of the process by which lands were enclosed in the South – local-option stock laws that were passed by state assemblies and then adopted at the country level and which required owners of livestock to fence them in on their own lands were the medium for the enclosure of uncultivated land. Further, the meaning of private property laws was conditioned by long traditions of use that defined unenclosed and uncultivated lands, whatever their legal status, as a kind of ʻcommonsʼ. This commons, once again, was for poor whites and blacks either an outfield where they ranged hogs or cattle, or a hunting ground where they could procure provisions and other necessities to supplement what they could grow closer to home. Traditions for the use of uncultivated lands in the South, in other words, survived the Civil War and began to disappear not because they were absorbed and diminished by a wilderness ethic or because they were subdued by state conservation measures, but because landlords and local officials sought to ex- pand the cotton-producing agricultural landscape that was dominated by large landowners and to extend control over all.20 Simply, the environmental history of the American South has largely been an agrarian one. It has not produced an indigenous notion of ʻwildernessʼ as unoccu- pied or relatively undisturbed nature, nor have historians of the South had to argue against a historiographical tradition that takes such a wilderness for granted. Even the attempt of modern environmentalists to re-create wilderness in protected areas in the South have had to import the idea from outside the region. Margaret Brown, in her study of the Great Smoky Mountains and the Smoky Mountain National Park,