Richard G. Lowe and Randolph B. Campbell explore the agricultural economy of antebellum Texas in both a quantitative and narrative manner in Planters and Plain Folk: Agriculture in Antebellum Texas. Expanding on Frank L. Owsley’s 1949 work, Plain Folk of the Old South, Lowe and Campbell conclude that the economy of Texas thrived on the slave based agricultural system but the economic structure was far from equitable for all of the “plain folk” present in Texas.
Lowe and Campbell begin their work with an overview of agriculture in antebellum Texas. They divide Texas into four regions: the eastern uplands in Region I, the coast in Region II, the north central prairies in Region III, and the south central prairies in Region IV. The authors do not include West Texas or the area between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande, stating that those areas “did not constitute an important part of the state’s agricultural economy.” (26) Many families in all four regions were subsistent farmers and grew multiple garden vegetables. Those who did plant crops for market usually grew cotton. The soil in Texas, especially along rivers in southern Texas, generally yielded more cotton than the overworked soil throughout the rest of the South. The authors also note that, though cotton was the principle crop, corn and sugar figured prominently in the area’s economy. Farmers also grew wheat and often combined, particularly in the northeastern prairies, growing crops with herding cattle.
The next section of Lowe and Campbell’s analysis examines agriculture from a quantitative perspective. The authors divide those who participated in agricultural into four classes: slaveholders who owned farms, slaveholders who did not own farms, nonslaveholders who owned land, and nonslaveholding farmers with no land. The first group was in the minority but controlled a great deal of wealth and land. The slaveholders were usually from the Lower South and settled in the older areas of Texas, Region I and II. Nonslaveholders were far from wealthy but typically made a decent living for themselves. Nonslaveholders were typically from the Upper South and lived in Region I or III. According to Lowe and Campbell, only ten percent of Texan farm families fit into the “poor white trash” category. (81)
Lowe and Campbell follow the quantitative examination with six case studies. Two of the men were nonslaveholders, two held a few slaves, and the last two were large planters. Though none of the six individuals left diaries or journals, the authors are able to piece together their economic life through census and probate records. The immense contrast between the first two men, the nonslaveholders and the last two men, the large planters, leads to the next section examining economic inequality. Lowe and Campbell return to quantitative analysis to bolster Owsley’s claim that most farmers, including nonslaveholders, improved their economic status from 1850 to 1860. They note that the gap between planters and “plain folk” was large but contend that small and medium farmers were productive.
The last section of the work looks at four questions: the productivity of slavery, the profitability of slave labor, the self-sufficiency of Texan farmers, and the degree of economic development in Texas between 1850 and 1860. Concerning the first two questions, Lowe and Campbell use several mathematic equations to prove that slavery was both productive and profitable for cotton planters. Productivity increased 110 percent between 1850 and 1860 and, with the exception of small slaveholders, planters enjoyed a six percent or better return. (163,169) The authors contend that Texas’s slave economy did not impede their ability to grow enough meat and grain for both planter and urban consumption. They conclude that the cotton economy in Texas, dominated by slaveholding planters, was thriving and progressing between 1850 and 1860.
Campbell and Lowe’s work is an interesting overview of Texas agriculture in the late antebellum era. Their impressive usage of census, taxation, and probate records provides an excellent example to other scholars. Furthermore, their evidence on the profitability of the slave based cotton economy of Texas provides a good argument against those who contend that the South could not sustain the slave system. Their book shows a Texas that was not prepared to give up slavery willingly in 1860 as inefficient or unprofitable, though they acknowledge that there is no way of knowing if slavery would have died on its own.
While the authors support their argument well, the information becomes repetitive at certain points and the excessive tables and graphs, as well as the complex math equations, detract from the readability of the book. On the other hand, the authors created extremely well organized tables that can provide information at a glance. As a resource for Texan, economic, and antebellum scholars, it is very valuable.
Meredith May Texas Christian University
Planters and Plain Folk: Agriculture in Antebellum Texas. By Richard G. Lowe and Randolph B. Campbell. (Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 1987).
Richard Lowe and Randolph Campbell set out in Planters and Plain Folk to discover exactly how much slavery economically benefited slaveholders in antebellum Texas. They believe Texas proved vital to southern agriculture because it represented expanding the cotton frontier, and therefore should be researched more in-depth. The authors used quantitative research to understand the development of Texas as a slave and agricultural society, from admittance into the Union until the outbreak of the Civil War.
The authors define “Texas” as only the eastern two-fifths of the state, which settlers arrived at before 1861. They chose not to include in their research any data before Texas became part of the United States for several reasons: the agriculture proved underdeveloped, a financial depression, and lack of accurate data. The vast majority of households during the antebellum period relied on farming to sustain themselves, whether small scale or large plantations. Cotton and agriculture drove Texas society; even merchants, lawyers, and wagon drivers, if not directly, relied on the spillover benefits to sustain themselves. With most counties averaging between 1,000 to 1,500 pounds of seed cotton per acre, it makes sense that slavery became a major issue.
The work divides Texas into four regions in order to perform the quantitative analysis: the eastern region, the coastal region, the northern and central prairies, and the hill country. They divided Texas into these regions based on topography, climate, soil type, and vegetation. They also separate farmers into four categories: slaveholders with real estate, slaveholders without real estate, non-slaveholders with land, and non-slaveholders without land. They look at two primary factors, ownership of slaves and land, to determine the profitability of slavery. They supplement these statistics with six case studies, which included two non-slaveholders, two minor slaveholders, and two large plantation owners.
Lowe and Campbell discovered an unequal land distribution in Texas. While a large number of Texans owned slaves, only a small percentage owned more than a few. Slaveholders constituted approximately one-third of the farm population statewide, but controlled roughly two-thirds of property and agricultural production. Farmers with slaves produced about ninety percent of all cotton during the antebellum period. Thus, slaveholders profited much more than non-slaveholders. In the middle class, slaveholders and non-slaveholders represented almost equal populations, but even here slaveholders generally held a larger proportion of wealth. They conclude that Texas contained a large and growing “plain folk” class in conjunction with a dominate minority of wealthy planters.
When comparing Texas with other southern states, the authors reach some interesting conclusions. They find that slavery appeared as important to the agricultural economics in Texas as any other state, except Mississippi. The slaveholding population generally lived in one of the older southern states before moving to Texas, bringing southern culture and slaves with them. Slaves in Texas proved more highly concentrated than in other states. Slavery created profit for the planter class and allowed them to remain in dominance of the plain folk.
Lowe and Campbell employed a large amount of quantitative research in their work, making it unreadable for the general population. For scholars, the work provides new depth into class relations, economics, and slavery in Texas. The authors rely on the U.S. Census materials, Texas periodicals, and unpublished letters to construct their analysis.
Texas Christian University Misty Wilson
Planters and Plain Folk: Agriculture in Antebellum Texas. Richard G.Lowe and Randolph B. Campbell. Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 1987.
Richard G. Lowe and Randolph B. Campbell, colleagues at the University of North Texas, collaborated to create Planters & Plain Folk, a comprehensive study of farmers and farming in antebellum Texas. While several previous publications deal with specific aspects of Texas, these two historians assert that their profession needs a fuller, more general examination of the state from its annexation by the United States in 1845 to the Civil War. They aim to fill the void in literature about Texan farmers and planting in this period. To explain and analyze these planters’ lives, Lowe and Campbell “combine traditional sources and quantitative data to provide a descriptive and analytical history of antebellum Texas agriculture (7).” Planters & Plain Folk delivers an expansive view of antebellum Texas by outlining its major crops, detailing the economic positions of its different types of farmers, and discussing the role of slave labor in farm productivity.
Lowe and Campbell identify antebellum Texas as the eastern two-fifths of the state, or the territory east of the ninety-eighth meridian, which contained the vast majority of Texan settlers and farms. In antebellum Texas, over seventy-five percent of heads of households considered themselves farmers, and even those not directly involved with farming, such as lawyers and merchants, depended on farmers’ patronage. The production of the state’s primary crop, cotton, increased rapidly during this period. Lowe and Campbell divide antebellum Texas into four regions to perform closer analysis. Region I, the eastern uplands, provided homes to over fifty percent of Texas farms. Region II, the coastal plains, contained the urban centers Houston and Galveston and held the largest slaveholding plantations in the state. The northern prairies and plains, Region III, the northern prairies and plains, focused on wheat and foodstuff production. Region IV, the hill country of south-central Texas, farmed mostly grains and raised livestock.
Quantitatively, Lowe and Campbell characterize Texas farmers by separating them into four categories: slaveholders who owned real estate, slaveholders with no land, non-slaveholders with land, and non-slaveholders without property. Slaveholders with land, on average, accounted for around thirty percent of the farming population in antebellum Texas. Usually older than landless farmers, commonly from the deep South, and usually residing in Regions I and II, slaveholding property owners possessed seventy-five percent of all property in the four Regions and controlled over eighty percent of all wealth by the 1860 census. Non-slaveholders, commonly migrants from the upper South who settled in Region III and parts of Region I, controlled considerably less wealth than their slaveholding counterparts did, yet they also increased their economic stature during the 1850s. Combining case studies of six planter families with their broad research data, the authors determine that antebellum Texans experienced unequal land distribution and little economic parity. Slave owners produced ninety percent of all Texas cotton, and every farmer who produced fifty or more bales of cotton owned slaves. Thus, the minority slaveholding farmers received the greatest profits and controlled vast amounts of wealth.
Through intense mathematical equations, Planters & Plain Folk shows that farmers depending on slave labor profited much more than the majority of plain folk, non-slaveholding farmers. Because Texas did not have to depend on Northern foodstuffs, as it produced enough corn and other food products, its agriculture and slave-based planter economy remained strong. The authors also compare wealth concentrations in antebellum Texas with that of other areas of the nation in the 1850s. Texas farmers owned farms comparable to northern ones and had a similar percentage (around thirty percent) of slave owners as other Southern states. Slaveholders flourished during the 1850s, and the state’s slave-dependent, cotton-based agriculture showed no signs of slowing, as Texas had thousands of untouched, fertile acres. Although slaveholders dominated, plain folk farmers also prospered and profited during this time, giving them little reason to resist slavery before or during the Civil War.
Lowe and Campbell present well researched ideas concerning the total agriculture experience in Texas from 1845 to 1860. This 1987 publication studies the demographic and economic characteristics of the farm population, production of crops and livestock, and overall profits of the different types of farmers, especially those who owned land, in antebellum Texas. In addition to several published books, articles, dissertations, and theses, the authors employ data from the U.S. Censuses of 1850 and 1860, cases from the Texas Supreme Court, antebellum Texas periodicals, and unpublished letters and diaries to construct Planters & Plain Folk. They extract much data from these resources, which they convert into several tables. These tables support and strengthen their findings but can also overwhelm even the most interested reader. By including insightful and detailed descriptions of the cotton and sugar farming processes, the book serves as a significant research tool for secondary school teachers or professors preparing presentations over the economic, agricultural history of antebellum Texas.
Heather L. Yeargan
Texas Christian University
Planters and Plain Folk: Agriculture in Antebellum Texas. Richard G.Lowe and Randolph B. Campbell. Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 1987.
In the mid 1980s, Richard Lowe and Randolph Campbell attempted to expand the growing historiography of agricultural history by focusing on Texas in their book, Planters and Plain Folk. Both Lowe and Campbell received their Ph.D. from the University of Virginia and are Regents professor of history at North Texas University, and saw a major void in agricultural history, especially a state-by-state account of the influence it had on society and economy. These historians “attempt to fill this void, discussing cultivation of the state’s major crops, outlining the relative economic positions of planters, yeomen, and poor whites, offering profiles of individual farmers, and detailing the role of slave labor in farm production. (p. xv)” The two authors focused on Texas for two reasons; their interests are in Texas history and the state was the future of cotton farming and slavery in the South.
Immigrants from the South brought their agricultural culture into Texas, which included slavery, raising livestock, and growing cotton, sugar, and grains. Four groups of farmers compose the agriculture culture, which included nonslave holders that owned the land they farmed, landless nonslave holders, slave holders that owned land, and slaveholders without land. Like the rest of the South, slaveholders, predominately large farmers and planters, were the minority and wealthier compared to the rest of the population. In Texas, the economic gap between the wealthy large farm and plantation owners widened as the slave owners prospered and gained wealth at a faster rate than the small nonslave holding farmers. At the same time, the concentration of poorer nonslave owners increased in the state but their position in the economy did not improve at the same rate as the slave owners. Overall, slavery improved the economy in Texas because with slave labor, owners were able to accumulate wealth at a faster rate because the more slaves they owned meant that they could produce more crops per slave. Compared to the rest of the South, Texas’ agricultural economy developed in a manner that would surpass the other states because more people owned land in Texas and the majority of the people farmed.
Throughout the book, the authors wanted to tell the story of people who did not leave many records behind to explain their day-to-day activities such as diaries and journals. To circumvent this problem the authors use extensively the census records of 1850 and 1860. These records allowed Lowe and Campbell to gather detailed numbers of the amount and type of property those farmers owned. With these numbers, the authors produced numerous charts and tables to fully explain, quantitatively, the conclusions they found. Another good aspect of the book is the concluding chapter. Lowe and Campbell compare their examination of agriculture in Texas to the rest of the South, which allows the reader to understand where the state fits in the larger picture of the country.
Overall, the authors provide a clearly organized book. They outlined exactly what every chapter would examine and included a conclusion that reiterated all the points they made in the book. A couple of shortcomings of the book include ignoring the contribution of other ethnic groups and too many complex tables. Though the authors included every social class of white farmer and slaves, there is no statistics or information of free blacks and Hispanics in Texas. In addition, the authors were extremely thorough in their examination of the census records, which produced a plethora of tables. The large numbers of tables do provide some insight into the subject, but the authors included too many in two of the chapters of the book. This distracts the reader and makes the subject difficult to comprehend because of the number of tables the reader has to examine to get the detailed points. These criticisms make the book incomplete and difficult to read, but in the end, the authors clearly provide a strong conclusion and good argument that Texas was the future of the antebellum cotton plantation system and that slavery was profitable in the state.
Charles Grear