February 1855
Robert Russell (d. 1871), a British naturalist, read widely in government publications and agricultural journals. The excerpt below reflects his interests in soil conditions, erosion, and exhausted land. The book’s title and first sentences of the excerpt also reveal his interest in climate; not surprisingly, he lectured at the Smithsonian Institution on North American climate.
Robert Russell, North America: Its Agriculture and Climate (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1857), 296–300.
I reached Montgomery, the capital of Alabama, on the night of the 27th February, and started early next morning by the train for the east. The temperature was several degrees below the freezing point, and a thick hoar-frost covered the ground. I got out of the train about six miles to the east of the town; and leaving my portmanteau in the house of one of the plantation overseers, walked about eight miles to the south to visit Dr. Cloud, the editor of the “Cotton Plant.” The soil in this district is far from being rich, and the most of the plantations I passed were small. The usual number of working hands was from six to twelve, but in some cases there were even fewer. Small plantations, as has been already pointed out, are invariably found on the secondary descriptions of land.
The soil in the neighbourhood of Montgomery rests upon the cretaceous formation, which is succeeded by the primary, a few miles to the eastward. While the soils over the immense area of the granitic formations in the New England States and the British Possessions are stony and poor, the larger extent of the same class of rocks in the south are covered by soils of moderate fertility. This arises from the fact that the primary rocks in the Southern States having decomposed in situ, and not having been subjected to denudation, afford an immense depth of clay and sand. The primary and tertiary soils have a considerable resemblance to each other in lithological character. The surface soil on both formations is often somewhat sandy, from a foot to a foot and a half deep, and contains only a small quantity of vegetable matter. It is remarkable, that the subsoil consists of a siliceous clay, which is thus covered by the sandy soil over an area as large as the whole of England. The geological question arises, How could such an immense stretch of country have become covered with this thin stratum of sand, while the subsoil is so opposite, and, at the same time, homogeneous in its character? I remarked to Dr. Cloud that it had apparently arisen from the washing away of the clay out of the surface soil by the rains, the sand, which the clayey subsoil contained in abundance, being left behind. I have since observed, however, that Sir Charles Lyell discusses some interesting phenomena connected with the geology of Alabama and Georgia; and the peculiar features of the soil and subsoil which I have just described may assist in supporting certain views he puts forth respecting the condition of the surface of the country as it was gradually raised above the ocean.
Sir C. Lyell alludes to the singular phenomenon in the neighbourhood of Milledgeville, in Georgia, of gneiss and mica schist decomposed in situ to an immense depth, and also to the surprising extent of some of the modern ravines excavated by the rains since the country has been cleared of timber and cultivated. One of these measured no less than 55 feet in depth, 300 yards in length, and varied in width from 20 to 180 feet; yet, strange to say, twenty years before it had no existence. The walls of this chasm consist of “beds of clay and sand, red, white, yellow, and green, produced by the decomposition in situ of hornblendic gneiss, with layers and veins of quartz, as before mentioned, and of a rock consisting of quartz and felspar, which remain entire, to prove that the whole mass was once crystalline.”
“I infer, from the rapidity of the denudation caused here by running water after the clearing or removal of wood, that this country has always been covered with a dense forest, from the remote time when it first emerged from the sea. However long may have been the period of upheaval required to raise the massive tertiary strata to the height of more than 600 feet, we may conclude that the surface has been protected by more than a mere covering of herbage, from the effects of the sudden flowing off of the rain water.”
“I know it may be contended that, when the granite and gneiss first rose as islands out of the sea, they may have consisted entirely of hard rock which resisted denudation, and therefore we can only affirm that the forest has been continuous from the time of the decomposition and softening of the upper portion of these rocks. But I may reply that similar effects are observable, even on a grander scale, in recently excavated ravines, seventy or eighty feet deep, in some newly cleared parts of the tertiary regions of Alabama, as in Clarke county, for example, and also in some of the cretaceous strata of loose gravel, sand, and clay, in the same state at Tuscaloeza. These are at a much greater height above the sea, and must, from the first, have been as destructible as they are now.”
This, it appears to me, is sound reasoning. In fact, as these tertiary beds were gradually raised above the sea, they were quickly covered by land plants, which protected their soft surface from denudation by rains, a process which is now found, in many regions, to take place to a great extent where the land is brought under the plough. Might not the sandy surface soil which covers such an immense area have formed the beach as the waters retired, the clayey particles being then washed out by the tides and waves of the sea?
Pines are the chief trees in the forests where the sandy soil prevails; but when it approaches more to a loam, oak and hickory also make their appearance. In all cases in which the soil has been washed and exhausted, the hard-wood trees, as under the same circumstances in the Natchez uplands, cease to spring up; but pines occupy the ground. This fact furnishes another instance of the influence of the physical condition of soils on the growth of different kinds of trees. Betwixt Montgomery and Atlanta, in Georgia, oak and hickory predominate in many places in the natural forest; but none of the land seemed to be at all equal in natural fertility to the uplands of Natchez.
Dr. Cloud’s plantation is about 800 feet above the level of the sea. He was sanguine that the soil in his neighbourhood admitted of great improvement by ploughing deep and bringing up a portion of the clayey subsoil to the surface; and the cotton plant is said to be productive on such land when well manured. But the radical defect of the soils, in this district as well as throughout the cotton region in Georgia and the Carolinas, is their unfitness for growing good grasses. This renders the raising of stock of all kinds expensive; and when the fields are allowed to lie waste for some years to recruit their productive powers, they are, during the time, in a great measure worthless. On some of the waste lands here the grasses were from two to three feet in height; but their hard siliceous stems had been untouched by cattle in summer, and, being now dry and withered, imparted a most thriftless aspect to the country.
Agricultural information is well diffused among cultivators in the United States. All of them, both in the North and South, read agricultural papers, and the matter of one journal is commonly transferred to the others. A great uniformity of management thus prevails, where the soil and climate are similar. Horizontal cultivation is as universal in Alabama as it is in the uplands of Natchez, where it was first adopted. The compact subsoils here cause washing, and the rapid deterioration of the natural capabilities of the land ensues, unless it is naturally level or laid carefully off in level ridges. I was well pleased at the skilful manner in which a negro, with one mule in his plough, was drawing horizontal ridges, of about four feet in width, on a slightly undulating field. Little wheat is yet raised at this elevation above the sea; one small field, of about an acre, was on the plantation; the frosts at night were keeping it in check; but it was about six inches in length, and would be ready for harvest by the end of May, and a crop of Indian corn might be afterwards got.
Having spent an agreeable and instructive day with Dr. Cloud, I left early next morning for the railway, and making a signal for the train to stop, got into the cars for Washington, a distance of upwards of 900 miles. This journey occupied three days and three nights. The appearance of the country was most monotonous.