"What Nature Suffers to Groe": Life, Labor and Landscape on the Georgia Coast, 1680-1920.

By Mart A. Stewart (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1996. xix plus 370pp.).

In a welcome addition to the growing field of environmental history, Mart A. Stewart examines the interaction between people and their environment along the Georgia coast from the colonial era through the nineteenth century. The theme is one of struggle for dominance, as human beings continually sought to impose their own demands upon the land, sometimes successfully (at least temporarily).

In contrast to the effective adaption to the environment achieved by local Native Americans, the investors of the Georgia colony planned their settlement from afar and with an highly idealized vision. In their search for commodities, they focused on wine and silk production. They ignored the realities of the place and paid the price. But not as much as the settlers, however, who died in droves during "seasoning" (the period of adjustment following migration to the swampy, humid, disease-ridden locale), were exhausted by arduous forest clearing, and usually failed at farming because of their own lack of experience and knowledge.

The colony began to succeed only after the Trustees gave it up in the 1750s. A more liberal land tenure policy was applied and the prohibition on slavery lifted. Georgia then began to develop along the lines of the Carolinas - plantation agriculture centered on rice, and to a lesser extent, sea island cotton and sugar production. Rice culture required an immense and unending manipulation of the landscape, and Stewart's scientific and technical descriptions are clear and effective, especially in demonstrating the domino effect wrought by innovation: each new technique solved one problem and created another. Even more intriguing, though, are the social and cultural practices that developed, especially the manipulation of the system by masters (or rather overseers, as absentee ownership was typical of this region) and slaves, each for their own gains. Stewart depicts a complicated dance of assumptions, negotiations, and threats that sometimes degenerated into open conflict. As he aptly sums it up, "Slaves won some of the battles, but masters won the war."

It is probably equally true to say that humans won some of the battles, but nature won the war. Southern soil was rapidly depleted by mono-crop agriculture and even by the antebellum period was showing signs of severe stress. After the Civil War, this, in addition to slaves gaining their freedom, brought an end to the rice economy. Residents of the region turned to lumbering, and by the end of the nineteenth century had essentially depleted the pine barrens. The islands, most notably Jekyll, were developed as private resorts for the rich.

This work serves as a good reminder that American history, at least until the twentieth century, must of necessity be environmental history - throughout most of our past, people were very close to nature, intimately intertwined with the soil and rivers and climate in which they lived.

And worked. Stewart keeps labor at the center of his study, arguing that it was the immense physical efforts of white colonists, slaves, and immigrants, more than analysis or strategy, that brought about changes in the land. And this conjunction of land and labor was also inextricably linked to the culture. In the colonial period, this was epitomized by the Trustees' belief that owning and working small farms would make virtuous citizens out of London's poor. Later, the development of plantation agriculture and large-scale slavery produced a curious tension in the relationship between masters who held power and slaves who held knowledge of the land. After emancipation, freedmen and women used this knowledge to negotiate wage agreements and working conditions, even purchasing their own land (on average, faring better than their counterparts throughout the South).

Although human efforts produced some amazing results and, especially in the early nineteenth century, seemed to have gained the upper hand, ultimately nature won out, most obviously in the form of flooding caused by hurricanes and simple depletion of the already poor soil. Well-documented and effectively written, "What Nature Suffers to Groe" provides a new perspective on the nexus of land and labor that comprised the southern plantation.

Carol Wilson Washington College