It has been seen that ever since the war he had been interested
in the redemption of the agricultural life of the South,
that this was the subject of his first important poem.
Since the writing of "Corn" and of the earlier dialect poems,
he had frequently commented on the future of the South
as to be determined largely by an improved agricultural system.
To him the best evidence of the enduring character of the new civilization
was a democracy, growing out of a vital revolution in
the farming economy of the South. "The great rise of the small farmer
in the Southern States during the last twenty years," he says,
"becomes the notable circumstance of the period, in comparison with which
noisier events signify nothing." The hero of the sketch is a small farmer
"who commenced work after the war with his own hands,
not a dollar in his pocket, and now owns his plantation, has it well stocked,
no mortgage or debt of any kind on it, and a little money to lend."
Lanier clips from his newspaper files passages indicating
the constantly increasing diversity of crops. The reader is carried
into the country fairs and along the roads and through plantations
by a man who had a realistic sense of what was going on
in the whole State of Georgia. "The last few years," he says,
"have witnessed a very decided improvement in Georgia farming:
moon-planting and other vulgar superstitions are exploding,
the intelligent farmer is deriving more assistance from the philosopher,
the naturalist, and the chemist, and he who is succeeding best is he who has
thirty or forty cattle, sheep, hogs, and poultry of his own raising,
together with good-sized barns and meat-houses, filled from his own fields,
instead of from the West.
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