From the Archives: Atlas of Antebellum Southern Agriculture

Sep 22, 2024

Sam Bowers Hilliard understood power—not the kind that flows from political office or great wealth, but the power of the land itself. Born in 1930, in a Georgia hamlet that bore his mother's maiden name, Hilliard grew to recognize how the soil, the crops, and the very food on Southern tables shaped the course of history.

Hilliard joined the Department of Geography and Anthropology at Louisiana State University in 1971, bringing with him a keen understanding of the antebellum South, evidenced by his landmark study, Hog Meat and Hoecake: Food Supply in the Old South, 1800-1860. His contributions to the field were many, from his tenure as Chair of the Department to his work as one of the three principal consultants for the National Geographic Society’s Historical Atlas of the United States.

In retirement (1993), Hilliard returned to his roots to chronicle the tales of Hart County as if closing a circle begun long ago in the red clay and pines. There, he set about chronicling the churches and schools of Hart County, ensuring that his little postage stamp of the world would be remembered for more than just moonshine and mule tracks.1

The Reviews

I believe I’ve read every review in the academic literature, and with the exception of one or two outliers, they all read roughly the same.

Professor Hilliard's Atlas of Antebellum Southern Agriculture published in 1984 by Louisiana State University Press, was a long overdue correction. For far too long, scholars had ignored the spatial realities of the South’s agricultural development, preferring instead to focus on broad narratives about slavery and plantations. What Hilliard did was map the actual land itself—charting the crops, livestock, and human settlement patterns across the antebellum South.

In this atlas, Hilliard does what narrative history often cannot—he shows us the movement of a region in a way that words alone cannot capture. His 111 maps reveal patterns that shaped a region and a nation. He shows us the stark contrast between the densely cultivated black belt and the sparsely settled pinelands, the march of cotton across the Mississippi Delta, and the unexpected predominance of small farms in a land synonymous with plantations.

The Atlas covers six fundamental topics: the land, climate, population, slavery, livestock, and both major and minor field crops, with a particular emphasis on the period from 1810 to 1860. Hilliard's definition of the Old South encompasses the states of the Confederacy plus the border states of Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland, though he omits West Texas and South Florida due to their sparse population. His use of dot, choropleth, and isorithmic maps, primarily based on county census data, allows for a high degree of locational and comparative data concentration.

In terms of crop production, the Atlas illustrates that corn was a mainstay crop for the region as a whole. Among commercial staples, it shows the heavy concentration of cotton production in the river bottom black belts of Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and Mississippi, and the Mississippi River delta lands, while rice, tobacco, and sugar cane were more restricted to specialized areas.

Hilliard observes cattle spread uniformly across the Old South, merging with Mexican herds in Texas. While sheep and swine concentrated in Kentucky and Tennessee, hogs and mules became widespread later on. The mule and oxen, he says, were the real heavy lifters behind it all.

Hilliard's Atlas, while not without its critics, stands as an essential reference alongside Lewis Cecil Gray's History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860.2