Agricultural Reform in Print and Practice: Slavery and the Metcalfe Plantation Enterprise

Time: 12pm

Location: Chemical Heritage Foundation

In the decades before the Civil War planters in the American South were anxious about the economic future of their region, despite the incredible expansion of the cotton economy. The agricultural reform movement, which many planters saw as the one way to keep the plantation South from falling behind the industrializing Northern states, laid out many grand ambitions for a complete renewal or overhaul of plantation agriculture. Historians have long dismissed agricultural reform as a complete failure since it did not realize its lofty goal, but this approach obscures the significant changes wrought by agricultural reform. This talk will explore how the intellectual and scientific debates within the reform movement were translated to daily plantation practice, using the case of the Metcalfe family plantation enterprise in Mississippi from the 1840s through the Civil War. The Metcalfe family owned thousands of acres of cotton land and held hundreds and hundreds of slaves on their plantations, all of whom felt the results of the Metcalfe family’s interest in agricultural improvement keenly.

Ian Beamish is currently completing his dissertation “Saving the South: Printing Agricultural Reform in the American South, 1819–1865” in the history department at Johns Hopkins University. He is in residence at the Chemical Heritage Foundation for 2012–2013, completing his dissertation.

Brown Bag Lectures (BBLs) are a series of weekly informal talks on the history of chemistry or related subjects, including the history and social studies of science, technology, and medicine. Based on original research (sometimes still in progress), these talks are given by local scholars for an audience of CHF staff and fellows and interested members of the public.