The Ecological Refugees of the Cotton Belt: Black Migration from Rural Spaces in the Wake of the U.S. Civil War

• In Event: How the Other Half Drifts: Nature, Violence, and the Character of Migration in the 19th Century

Abstract

At the close of the U.S. Civil War, thousands of freed slaves swelled the class of itinerate southerners who bounced from farm to farm or farm to city. Scholars generally cast ex-slaves as a class of refugees escaping economic or racial conditions. Their explanations for the massive intra-regional migration of African American populations during the postbellum period include freed slaves’ exercise of their newfound mobility and the opening of “public” lands through wartime legislative actions. This paper restores the environmental context of these movements. I argue the geographic instability of freedpeople was, in part, the result of ruinous ecological shifts in the cotton belt both during and after the Civil War. The fundamental reorientation of land use as a result of military operations, combined with a series of natural disasters, rendered many rural spaces unable to support “freedom” amid multi-year droughts, intensifying soil erosion, and the decline of subsistence practices. These ecological crises added momentum to violence against rural blacks, and strengthened social and racial barriers to their economic independence. Thousands of African American ecological refugees fled deteriorating agricultural landscapes of the plantation belt into areas where slaves generally had not lived, connecting environmental degradation in rural spaces to the ecological transformation of industrial ones.

Author

• Erin Stewart Mauldin, Assistant Professor, Samford University