Freedom, Economic Autonomy, and Ecological Change in the Cotton South, 1865–1880

[...]freedpeople's efforts to reshape working conditions on farms like Walston's altered the land in ways that constricted the possibilities for profitable cotton farming. [...]social and economic concerns often overshadowed these practices' environmental utility, with significant consequences for crop yields.32 Freedmen's Bureau and government agency correspondence indicates that black laborers actively protested slack-time work. In the 1870s, the USDA discovered that the cotton caterpillar could be poisoned using arsenic-based compounds such as Paris green. [...]that point, however, the only moderately effective methods of keeping the worms at bay were crop rotation and ditching; the former removed the worms' host, while the latter acted as a physical brake on the pest's advance.55 It is unclear whether planters were aware of the connection between ditching and the damage of the cotton caterpillar, but the pest proved particularly virulent between 1864 and 1869-years when wartime damage and labor contract disputes converged to cause a decline in ditching. [...]cotton growers had less insulation from the vicissitudes of agriculture and lacked the luxury of spreading economic risk out over multiple harvests.