Primary Sources: The American South: Agriculture

Dickens produced various publications related to studies of food, farm and agriculture in the south, mostly Mississippi, for the Mississippi State University Agricultural Experiment Station.

"Interested in the slave economy, he was commissioned by the New York Daily Times (now The New York Times) to embark on an extensive research journey through the American South and Texas from 1852 to 1857. His dispatches to the Times were collected into three volumes (A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (1856), A Journey Through Texas (1857), A Journey in the Back Country in the Winter of 1853-4 (1860).
These are considered vivid first-person accounts of the antebellum South." Description from Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Law_Olmsted