In 1865 the foundations of the planting system were gone.  It was difficult to get efficient labor to till the vast plantations.  The planters themselves were burdened with debts and handicapped by lack of capital.  Negroes commonly preferred tilling plots of their own, rented or bought under mortgage, to the more irksome wage labor under white supervision.  The land hunger of the white farmer, once checked by the planting system, reasserted itself.  Before these forces the plantation broke up.  The small farm became the unit of cultivation in the South as in the North.  Between 1870 and 1900 the number of farms doubled in every state south of the line of the Potomac and Ohio rivers, except in Arkansas and Louisiana.  From year to year the process of breaking up continued, with all that it implied in the creation of land-owning farmers.

=The Diversification of Crops.=—­No less significant was the concurrent diversification of crops.  Under slavery, tobacco, rice, and sugar were staples and “cotton was king.”  These were standard crops.  The methods of cultivation were simple and easily learned.  They tested neither the skill nor the ingenuity of the slaves.  As the returns were quick, they did not call for long-time investments of capital.  After slavery was abolished, they still remained the staples, but far-sighted agriculturists saw the dangers of depending upon a few crops.  The mild climate all the way around the coast from Virginia to Texas and the character of the alluvial soil invited the exercise of more imagination.  Peaches, oranges, peanuts, and other fruits and vegetables were found to grow luxuriantly.  Refrigeration for steamships and freight cars put the markets of great cities at the doors of Southern fruit and vegetable gardeners.  The South, which in planting days had relied so heavily upon the Northwest for its foodstuffs, began to battle for independence.  Between 1880 and the close of the century the value of its farm crops increased from $660,000,000 to $1,270,000,000.

=The Industrial and Commercial Revolution.=—­On top of the radical changes in agriculture came an industrial and commercial revolution.  The South had long been rich in natural resources, but the slave system had been unfavorable to their development.  Rivers that would have turned millions of spindles tumbled unheeded to the seas.  Coal and iron beds lay unopened.  Timber was largely sacrificed in clearing lands for planting, or fell to earth in decay.  Southern enterprise was consumed in planting.  Slavery kept out the white immigrants who might have supplied the skilled labor for industry.

[Illustration:  Copyright by Underwood and Underwood, N.Y.

STEEL MILLS—­BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA]