Author Description

In A New Plantation South, Jeannie M. Whayne traces the emergence of a transformed southern plantation system in the Arkansas delta decades after the end of the Civil War. By manipulating laws and federal and state agencies to gain control over land policy, labor recruitment, and financing, Poinsett County planters were able to create a plantation system in the Arkansas delta. The consequences for landless farmers were dire: they came into the malarial swamps hoping for land ownership but found themselves trapped in the tenancy and sharecropping system by the crop lien and commissary. When chemicals and mechanization made these farmers obsolete, they abandoned their dreams and migrated to the cities. Although they were exploited by tenancy and sharecropping, Whayne shows how these farmers fought, albeit unsuccessfully, to maintain their place on the soil.. Whayne also offers an analysis of the forces at work on the local level. She suggests that concerted opposition to modernization existed even before New Deal programs gave power to the planters in the 1930s. She also demonstrates that the Arkansas delta experienced many of the same conflicts based on social class and racial caste that were evident in former slaveholding areas. Her research suggests that scholars may need to revise the prominence given to the heritage of slavery as a determining influence of local trends in the post-Civil War South.