The Cotton Plantation South since the Civil War

Abstract

Tracing the geographical changes in plantation agriculture and the plantation regions after 1865, Aiken shows how the altered landscape of the South has led many to the false conclusion that the plantation has vanished. In fact, he explains, while certain regions of the South have reverted to other uses, the cotton plantation survives in a form that is, in many ways, remarkably similar to that of its antebellum predecessors. Aiken also describes the evolving relationship of African-Americans to the cotton plantation during the 13 decades of economic, social and political changes from Reconstruction through the War on Poverty - including the impact of alterations in plantation agriculture and the mass migration of Southern blacks to the urban North during the 20th century.