The Black Belt represents the area of the South where the slave economy was at its most intense. The reason for this pervasiveness ultimately comes down to geology. The soils of the Black Belt are so fertile because of deposits of chalk, chalk laid down in shallow seas in the Cretaceous period. Which means that every four years, voters trace the coastline of North America as it looked in the days when Tyrannosauruses roamed the earth. Of course, they do so unwittingly: Few people consciously vote according to what’s in the local bedrock. But that doesn’t mean that geology isn’t meaningful in other ways. Indeed, as the historian Caroline Winterer shows in her new book How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution in America (Princeton University Press), it can shape how an entire nation sees itself.
Winterer’s book tells the story of the gradual discovery, spanning the early 19th century, that the Earth was millions, and even billions, of years older than the Bible would suggest. The move away from Biblical chronology was a slow process, taking the better part of a century to become fully rooted in the American consciousness. Once the idea of deep time fully sunk in though, it transformed the way Americans perceived their country and their continent. (That said, none of Winterer’s protagonists ever used the term “deep time,” a term only coined in 1981 by the journalist John McPhee, whose Annals of the Former World series remains one of the only popular books to attempt for geology what Tolstoy did for the Napoleonic War.)
Deep time, Winterer argues, helped establish America’s place in the international pecking order. In the late 18th century, learned Europeans regarded the New World as literally new. Not just late in being discovered by Europeans, America was thought to have been the last continent to emerge out of the primordial seas. The discovery of fossils of various ages, including trilobites every bit as primitive as their European equivalents, helped convince geologists on both sides of the Atlantic that the New World was equal in antiquity to the Old. Later work by glaciologists, notably by Harvard’s Louis Agassiz, went even further, suggesting that America was in fact the oldest continent of all.
This newfound geological status gave a boost to Americans who had long been shamed by Europeans over their nation’s lack of pyramids, cathedrals, castles or other signs of antiquity. Fossils were one arena in which they could credibly compete with the Old World. The Philadelphia naturalist Jacob Green exulted that “even the remains of Babylon and Egypt” were “infants” compared to his lovingly prepared trilobite specimens. But the real change brought about by the advent of deep time concerned the way Americans regarded the different regions of the United States. As tensions between the North and South rose across the first half of the 19th century, geology provided contrasting visions of the destiny nature intended for each part of the country.