28 February 2025
Baylor University geoscience Ph.D. candidate Jordan Chapman (top left) and Associate Professor in the Department of Geosciences Dr. Bill Hockaday (bottom right) at the Levi Jordan Plantation in Brazoria, TX collecting soil cores. Credit: Vinothan Sivapalan.
In 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, approximately 46,200 plantations were using enslaved labor across the United States. At least 45% of plantations had twenty enslaved workers, and 5% had at least 100 (Vlach, 1993). With such widespread activity, what was the impact on Earth’s systems, and how do we measure it? These questions are at the center of my graduate research at Baylor University.
Historians have documented the lasting marks of plantations on people, society and culture. They’ve also highlighted the observations of widespread deforestation, clearing of the land, soil degradation and erosion.
But the deeper marks on Earth’s processes have not been explored, even though they reflect land degradation concerns we have today. For example, soil degradation and erosion lead to the loss of organic matter, which is the largest terrestrial carbon pool, as well as the loss of nutrients critical to soil fertility. While previous Native American agricultural activity impacted the land as well, enslaved labor became the dominant influence in the southern United States as the country began to industrialize.
A few researchers have begun to examine the effects of enslaved labor on Earth processes. Hanks et al. (2021) used lidar to study enslaved rice agriculture in South Carolina and identified 52% more rice fields than previously known. Wells et al. (2018) examined the sedimentation rate from a sediment core extracted from an estuary on the island of Antigua. They reported a 460% increase in sedimentation rate from 1655-1835, when sugarcane plantations began to dominate the landscape. Suzanne Pierre, an environmental geochemist at the Critical Ecology Lab, is using oral and archival records in addition to physical, chemical, and biological analyses to examine enslaved impacts on the U.S. Virgin Islands.
My work adds to this growing field of research by measuring the intensity of enslaved agriculture on plantations as recorded in soil. I collect soil cores on plantations in the southern United States and measure differences in organic matter fractions. Larger, less dense fractions are broken down on shorter time scales than smaller, more dense fractions. In soils with less organic matter, especially less of the denser material relative to the chunkier bits this may indicate how degraded the soils have become. By comparing soil organic matter on different plantations and studying other metrics such as the amount of carbon dioxide respired by the soil, I can learn how severely enslaved agriculture degraded the South’s soils and whether the soil recovered.
The Transatlantic Slave Trade was the largest forced migration event in human history. Enslaved plantations are sites where human-environmental interactions like deforestation, soil degradation, erosion and modification to waterways paved the way for global interconnectedness. As research continues, it will improve our understanding of historical anthropogenic impacts and how the legacy of enslaved agriculture still shapes the modern world.
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Contributed by Jordan Chapman, Baylor University