The negroes entered into their freedom with several advantages: they were trained to labor; they were occupying the most fertile soil and could purchase land at low prices; the tenant system was most liberal; cotton, sugar, and rice were bringing high prices; and access to markets was easy. In the white districts land was cheap, and prices of commodities were high, but otherwise the negroes seemed to have the better position. Yet as early as 1870, keen observers called attention to the fact that the hill and mountain whites were thriving as compared with their former condition, and that the negroes were no longer their serious competitors. In the white districts better methods were coming into use, labor was steady, fertilizers were used, and conditions of transportation were improving. The whites were also encroaching on the Black Belt; they were opening new lands in the Southwest; and within the border of the Black Belt they were bringing negro labor under some control. In the South Carolina rice lands, crowds of Irish were imported to do the ditching which the negroes refused to do and were carried back North when the job was finished. ¹ President Thach of the Alabama Agricultural College has thus described the situation:
By the use of commercial fertilizers, vast regions once considered barren have been brought into profitable cultivation, and really afford a more reliable and constant crop than the rich alluvial lands of the old slave plantations. In nearly every agricultural county in the South there is to be observed, on the one hand, this section of fertile soils, once the heart of the old civilization, now abandoned by the whites, held in tenantry by a dense negro population, full of dilapidation and ruin; while on the other hand, there is the region of light, thin soils, occupied by the small white freeholder, filled with schools, churches, and good roads, and all the elements of a happy, enlightened country life.
¹ The Census of 1880 gave proof of the superiority of the whites in cotton production. For purposes of comparison the cotton area may be divided into three regions: first, the Black Belt, in which the farmers were black, the soil fertile, the plantations large, the credit evil at its worst, and the yield of cotton per acre the least; second, the white districts, where the soil was the poorest, the farms small, the workers nearly all white, and the yield per acre better than on the fertile Black Belt lands; third, the regions in which the races were nearly equal in numbers or where the whites were in a slight majority, with soil of medium fertility, good methods of agriculture, and, owing to better controlled labor, the best yield. In other words, negroes, fertile soil, and poor crops went together; and on the other hand the whites got better crops on less fertile soil. The Black Belt has never again reached the level of production it had in 1860. But the white district kept improving slowly.