Skip to Main Content

Standing Their Ground: Small Farmers in North Carolina since the Civil War

Online ISBN:
9780199367764
Print ISBN:
9780199938520
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Standing Their Ground: Small Farmers in North Carolina since the Civil War

Adrienne Monteith Petty
Adrienne Monteith Petty

Assistant Professor of History

City College of New York
Find on
Published online:
26 September 2013
Published in print:
24 September 2013
Online ISBN:
9780199367764
Print ISBN:
9780199938520
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

After the Civil War, a reinvigorated group of small farm owners emerged in North Carolina’s Lower Cape Fear region. Former slaves and landless freemen joined the established antebellum yeomanry in accumulating small farms carved out of the exhausted turpentine-producing forests of the region. This book explores their growth and decline between 1880 and 1980, focusing on how the simultaneous rise of the Jim Crow social order destroyed their ability to defend their interests as unified class. Small farm owners reemerged as a class at a particularly dynamic moment. Agrarian protest movements were sweeping the countryside. Thrust into commercial production and relations of debt, these farmers struggled to reconcile their ideological commitment to self-sufficiency with the merchant-driven demand for cash-crop production. Underway since the end of the nineteenth century, the gradual transformation of agriculture and rural society gained traction after World War II, dramatically reshaping the southern countryside and reducing the number of people who could make a living from farming through technological and scientific innovations. By focusing on small farmers in the South, this book recasts a central story in American history that is usually told from the standpoint of midwestern family farmers, or southern sharecroppers and plantation owners. Moreover, it rescues African American and Native American farm owners from a segregated realm of inquiry, analyzing them as part of the larger class of small farm owners.

Contents
Close
This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

Close

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

View Article Abstract & Purchase Options

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

Close