Alsey Bradford was only four years old when in 1826 his father, Hiram, decided to move his family from their home in Louisiana to the Forked Deer region of West Tennessee. A merchant, the elder Bradford was drawn northward by the economic potential of the lands newly acquired from the Chickasaw Indian Nation, lands only then beginning to open to white settlement. Hiram Bradford settled his wife and two sons in the recently organized county of Haywood and soon thereafter opened one of the first general stores in the county seat of Brownsville, a small village advantageously situated between the Big Hatchie and Forked Deer rivers. Growing up with the country, the younger Bradford followed in his father's footsteps, describing himself in 1851 (at age twenty-nine) as a “sort of merchant”. Within a few short years, however, Alsey Bradford had adopted, as his father had before him, a different vocation. “I enjoy”, he recorded in his journal in 1855, “the estimable privilege of tilling the soil as a planter”.

In turning to the land, Bradford turned to a way of life shared by most Tennesseans in the 1850s. Citizens of the Volunteer State, as in every southern state before the Civil War, were predominantly farmers. From the alluvial cotton lands along the banks of the Mississippi River to the mountain valleys of the Appalachians, an average of three out of four rural households earned their livelihood directly from the soil (see Table 1.1).