Soil, slavery and the American Civil War

Declining soil fertility was a prime cause of the US Civil War according to Peter Montgomery.  In his book, Dirt, the erosion of civilizations, Montgomery says: “The economic significance of limiting slavery’s expansion lies in the central role of soil exhaustion in shaping plantation agriculture and the southern economy . . . In the half century leading up to the Civil War southern agriculture’s reliance on slave labour precluded the widespread adoption of soil-conserving... Read More