Erosion and Erasure: Race and Landscape in South Carolina’s Cotton-to-Pine Transition

The human and political transformation of the American South brought by the Civil War had environmental dimensions that historians are only now beginning to recognize. After all, few landscapes have been more closely related to the racialized labor performed on them than antebellum cotton plantations. A half century after emancipation, however, cotton was in deep decline in much of the region and the land was increasingly covered in a sylvan layer of pine forest. It was a radical transformation, the product of human decision and environmental collapse. Soil erosion in the Piedmont—a vast swath of hilly country stretching from Virginia to Alabama—became so severe that small ditches became monstrous gully systems in a matter of years. Thousands of farmers, white and black, left the land. In their place, the government planted trees and discouraged residents from farming.

My paper takes one site in the region and traces how ideas about race shaped and were shaped by these radical changes in the landscape. Rose Hill Plantation, a massive cotton operation before the Civil War, was home to 150 slaves, hundreds of animals, and South Carolina’s secessionist governor himself. The 3,100-acre tract produced nearly 90,000 pounds of ginned cotton in 1850 alone. By the 1930s, however, most of the land surrounding the house was in disrepair. Sons and daughters of slaves were living in the crumbling house, as pine forest pushed onto the former cotton lands. By the 1970s, the mansion, restored to a semblance of its pre-war glory, was the centerpiece of a state park where visitors picnicked under a pine canopy. Based on research alongside environmental and social scientists, my paper explains how the “greening” of this land allowed for the reemergence of Lost Cause ideas about cotton and the antebellum South.