[Footnote 22:  Hammond MSS., Library of Congress.]

Philips, whom a dearth of patients drove early from the practice of medicine, established in the ’thirties a plantation which he named Log Hall, in Hinds County, Mississippi.  After narrowly escaping the loss of his lands and slaves in 1840 through his endorsement of other men’s notes, he launched into experimental farming and agricultural publication.  He procured various fancy breeds of cattle and hogs, only to have most of them die on his hands.  He introduced new sorts of grasses and unfamiliar vegetables and field crops, rarely with success.  Meanwhile, however, he gained wide reputation through his many writings in the periodicals, and in the ’fifties he turned this to some advantage in raising fancy strains of cotton and selling their seed.  His frequent attendance at fairs and conventions and his devotion to his experiments and to his pen caused him to rely too heavily upon overseers in the routine conduct of his plantation.  In consequence one or more slaves occasionally took to the woods; the whole force was frequently in bad health; and his women, though remarkably fecund, lost most of their children in infancy.  In some degree Philips justified the prevalent scorn of planters for “book farming."[23]

[Footnote 23:  M.W.  Phillips, “Diary,” F.L.  Riley, ed., in the Mississippi Historical Society Publications, X, 305-481; letters of Philips in the American Agriculturist, DeBow’s Review, etc., and in J.A.  Turner, ed., The Cotton Planter’s Manual, pp. 98-123.]

The newspapers and farm journals everywhere printed arguments in the ’forties in behalf of crop diversification, and DeBow’s Review, founded in 1846, joined in the campaign; but the force of habit, the dearth of marketable substitutes and the charms of speculation conspired to make all efforts of but temporary avail.  The belt was as much absorbed in cotton in the ’fifties as it had ever been before.

Meanwhile considerable improvement had been achieved in cotton methods.  Mules, mainly bred in Tennessee, Kentucky and Missouri, largely replaced the less effective horses and oxen; the introduction of horizontal plowing with occasional balks and hillside ditches, checked the washing of the Piedmont soils; the use of fertilizers became fairly common; and cotton seed was better selected.  These last items of manures and seed were the subject of special campaigns.  The former was begun as early as 1808 by the Virginian John Taylor of Caroline in his “Arator” essays, and was furthered by the publications of Edmund Ruffin and many others.  But an adequate available source of fertilizers long remained a problem without solution.  Taylor stressed the virtues of dung and rotation; but the dearth of forage hampered the keeping of large stocks of cattle, and soiling crops were thought commonly to yield too little benefit for the expense in labor.  Ruffin had great enthusiasm for the marl or phosphate rock of the Carolina coast; but until the introduction in much later decades of a treatment by sulphuric acid this was too little soluble to be really worth while as a plant food.  Lime was also praised; but there were no local sources of it in the districts where it was most needed.