Dickson, David

David Dickson, (born July 6, 1809, Hancock county, Georgia, U.S.—died February 18, 1885, Hancock county), American farmer and writer on agriculture. A prosperous and respected cotton farmer both before and after the American Civil War, he became known throughout his home state for his progressive farming methods and for his enlightened use of slave and (after Emancipation) tenant labour. Upon his death he shocked plantation society by leaving most of his estate to his daughter, born to him before the Civil War by a slave girl.

Dickson’s father, Thomas, moved from Virginia to Georgia soon after the American Revolution. As a young man, David Dickson received a patrimony, which he used to establish himself as a trader. He and a partner opened a store in Sparta, the seat of Hancock county, in 1835. Eleven years later he sold his business and purchased land, equipment, livestock, and slaves and began to farm. His emphasis on efficiency in organization and labour were remarkable, and some of his methods of farming were original; he was the first to introduce to the South the use of guano as a fertilizer. Dickson’s private correspondence as well as his careful records and his letters to farming journals were a great influence on agricultural practices in the cotton-growing states. He wrote on a variety of subjects from seed selection to the advisability of mixed (rather than single-crop) farming.

After the Civil War began, Dickson used his land to grow provisions for the Confederate army. Though he lost much of his land in Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s “March to the Sea,” Dickson prospered once more after the war. He is noted for having bred a variety of cotton called “Dickson’s Select.” In 1870 his writings were published as A Practical Treatise on Agriculture: to Which is Added the Author’s Published Letters.

On his death he scandalized Hancock county society by bequeathing the vast bulk of his estate (a share with a value estimated at more than $300,000) to his only child, Amanda America Dickson (1849–1893). Her mother, a slave belonging to his mother, had been raped at age 12 or 13 by David Dickson. Amanda Dickson’s white relatives contested the will, but she successfully defended her inheritance all the way to the state Supreme Court, which ruled that the legal rights of inheritance applied equally to each race. Amanda Dickson lived the rest of her life in a sumptuous home in Augusta, Georgia. Her story and that of her father are studied today as an example of both the close bonds and deep divisions that existed between blacks and whites in the antebellum and Reconstruction-era South.