Question

What was the relationship between the South’s great planters and yeoman farmers

Answer 1

In the last decades of the eighteenth century the yeomanry of the South Carolina backcountry found themselves in a unique role. Since the 1730s, settlers had moved slowly into the backcountry, moving primarily southward from North Carolina or Virginia to South Carolina; however, the area remained sparsely populated for the entire 18th century. Unlike the coastal region, the backcountry farmers in the eighteenth century were much more economically egalitarian than the coastal landholders, where the rice planters dominated the economic sphere, while the backcountry's wealthy planters already coalesced as a class.

The crops grown indoors were much less lucrative than the rice, the low-country sea shelf that provided the primary source of income for the state. Hence, the majority of migrants to the backcountry themselves were poor, settling in the less lucrative upcountry, because the further east was scarce and costly. These poor farmers carved out of the forested area their own property, mostly without legal title to the land on which they lived. As compared to the gigantic plantations found on the coastal islands due to the lack of lucrative crops in the region, African-American slaves, the primary labor force for the wealthy and well positioned, were also scarcer in the backcountry.

A few of the backcountry yeomanry acquired enough capital to enlarge their farms and become prosperous planters in their own right, but most yeoman did not break into the planting class and remained small farmers all their lives, or became landless laborers because of their social aspirations. Around 1790 and 1830 many of the economic changes that lay before the young nation were faced by the Yeomanry, although this engagement was always minimal. While many of them took part in the cotton economy that was emerging across the South, their role in cotton growth was at best marginal. However, their presence in the cotton industry as a whole had been profoundly rooted.

The rise and spread of cotton across the backcountry has produced considerable wealth for the rising class of planters. It had qualified many yeomen to join the ranks of the planters but by no means a majority. The yeoman farmer's ideal, propagated by famous writers like Thomas Jefferson, became the cultural goal for men across the South, but the yeomen desired to become planters themselves. Such farmers recognized the need to acquire slaves and land in order to obtain income, and ultimately, social status.