Following this lavish and disastrous period came the era of small farms. Led into the market by the low prices to which the best lands had fallen, came a host of small buyers, to accommodate whom the plantations were subdivided, and offered in lots to suit purchasers. Never perhaps was there a rural movement, accomplished without revolution or exodus, that equalled in extent and swiftness the partition of the plantations of the ex-slave-holders into small farms. As remarkable as was the eagerness of the negroes—who bought in Georgia alone 6850 farms in three years—the earth-hunger of the poorer class of the whites, who had been unable under the slave-holding oligarchy to own land, was even more striking. In Mississippi there were in 1867 but 412 farms of less than ten acres, and in 1870, 11,003; only 2314 of over ten and less than twenty acres, and 1870, 8981; only 16,024 between twenty and one hundred acres, and in 1870, 38,015. There was thus in this one State a gain of nearly forty thousand small farms of less than one hundred acres in about three years. In Georgia the number of small farms sliced off of the big plantations from 1868 to 1873 was 32,824. In Liberty County there were in 1866 only three farms of less than ten acres; in 1870 there were 616, and 749 farms between ten and twenty acres. This splitting of the old plantations into farms went on with equal rapidity all over the South, and was hailed with lively expressions of satisfaction. A population pinned down to the soil on which it lived, made conservative and prudent by land-ownership, forced to abandon the lavish method of the old time as it had nothing to spare, and to cultivate closely and intelligently as it had no acres to waste, living on cost as it had no credit, and raising its own supplies as it could not afford to buy—this the South boasted it had in 1873, and this many believe it has to-day. The small farmer—who was to retrieve the disasters of the South, and wipe out the last vestige of the planting aristocracy, between which and the people there was always a lack of sympathy, by keeping his own acres under his own supervision, and using hired labor only as a supplement to his own—is still held to be the typical cotton-raiser.