Disappearing Hogs and Thieving Freedmen: Agricultural Reform and Racial Control in the Post–Civil War Cotton South

Subscription-only journals such as The Southern Planter and The Southern Cultivator were the primary sources of agricultural science and chemistry for farmers in the US South from the 1840s onward. During the antebellum period, these publications opposed the South’s practice of free-range animal husbandry—the fencing of crops, not livestock—in ways that drew from British agricultural reform movements. Penning stock was more “civilized” than allowing them to roam freely across the countryside. But the effort to close the range went nowhere before the social, racial, and biological upheaval of emancipation completely transformed this discourse. In the late 1860s, agricultural publications began to incorporate stereotypes of “thieving freedmen” into their appeals to planters to support the closing of the open range and the penning of livestock. Many Black southerners could only afford to keep livestock if they had access to common lands, and landowners resented the economic independence livestock-raising gave to Black laborers. Over time, agricultural journals harnessed planters’ desire to keep Black laborers dependent in order to further region-wide efforts to close the open range and introduce stock laws. Editors argued that by allowing free-range animal husbandry, planters opened the door for larceny and contributed to vagrancy among freedpeople with “critters on the brain.” Closing the commons would improve the industry of ex-slaves and protect landowners’ bottom line. This paper examines the ways that agricultural publications utilized the social chaos of emancipation to appeal to farmers who could not otherwise be persuaded to abandon free-range animal husbandry, ultimately legitimizing planters’ efforts to deny freedpeople access to vital economic resources during the transition to tenancy and sharecropping.