Cotton plantation

“ Cotton plantations are not to be judged according to the same estimate. A cotton plantation may now be established by means of a capital of 10,000 dollars. 3000 dollars for the purchase of 1500 or 2000 acres of land, on the banks of the Mississippi, from Baton Rouge up to the Walnut-hills, on both sides of the river; or what is still preferable, on the banks of the Red-river. Ten slaves at 5000 dollars, leaves 2000 for the first year’s current expenses. The beginner will not find it difficult to clear fifty acres in the first twelve months ”

“ In the early days this great cotton plantation, as the South might almost be called, suffered greatly from careless and improvident cultivation in which the rich soil lost much that might have been kept in it. The great thing now is to reclaim and build up and at the same time produce cotton for the steadily increasing demand, which is more as each year goes by. ”

“ The self-interest of the planter in the efficiency of his labor does not necessarily lead him to see the highest interests either of the negro race or of the South, under the present industrial system, which makes a plantation a workshop rather than a farm. The ownership of rich cotton lands only means wealth if you can find negro laborers and keep them at work. ”

“ In slavery times plantation owners got into the habit of spending their crop before it was grown, and that is still the practice of by far the greater number of cotton planters and farmers, large and small. In flush times agents of large cotton brokers and wholesale establishments literally press check books into the hands of planters and invite them to use credit or cash to their hearts’ content. There is some justification in the system as applied to cotton culture, which over large areas is the only sale crop ”

“ A “one-mule farm” is about thirty acres. He settles what crop shall be grown; some insist that part of the acreage be planted in corn, others raise all the corn for the estate on land worked by day hands. The secret of success is unceasing watchfulness of all the details, and especially of the labor of the hands.
Outside of the administrative force and their families there are commonly no white people on a cotton plantation. The occasional white hands make the same kind of contracts, live in the same houses, and accept the same conditions as the Negroes ”

“ At the present prices of cotton the large grower has such advantages over the small, that the owner of a plantation of fifty slaves, favourably situated, unless he lives very recklessly, will increase in wealth so rapidly and possess such a credit that he may very soon establish or purchase other plantations, so that at his death his children may be provided for without reducing the effective force of negroes on any division of his landed estate. ”

“ The management of a cotton plantation is by no means difficult, as it differs but little from that bestowed upon Indian corn, and requires only a strict superintendence over the negroes.
The cultivation of indigo has latterly been neglected, though 200,000 acres of land in the state of Louisiana are well adapted for it. This neglect was occasioned by the injurious effects produced upon the labourer by the watering of the plants, and the exhalations from them.
The cultivation of rice is more extensive. There are 200,000 acres unoccupied. ”

“ As the nation developed this slave labor became confined more and more to the raising of cotton, although sugar continued to be the chief crop in the West Indies and Louisiana, and rice on the southeast coast and tobacco in Virginia. This world importance of cotton brought an economic crisis: Rich land in America, adapted to slave methods of culture, was becoming limited, and must either be increased or slavery would die an economic death. On the other hand, beside the plantation hands, there had grown up a large class of Negro servants and laborers who were distributed both north and south. ”

“ The affairs of the plantation now went on quietly, until after the cotton had been ploughed, and hoed the first time, after replanting. The working of the cotton crop is not disagreeable labour-—no more so than the culture of corn—but we were called upon to perform a kind of labour, than which none can be more toilsome to the body, or dangerous to the health.
I have elsewhere informed the reader, that my master was a cultivator of rice, as well as of cotton. Whilst I was at the fishery in the spring, thirty acres of swamp land had been cleared off, ploughed, and planted in rice. ”

“ At a short distance beyond the garden of the overseer stood a large building, constituting the principal feature in the landscape of every great cotton plantation. This was the house containing the cotton-gin, and the sheds to contain the cotton, when brought from the field in the seed ”

“ And the prospect for immigration for the South has taken its rise from the Civil War.
It was slavery that made plantation self-sufficiency in primitive needs universal, that made isolation and physical barriers to intercourse. The credit system in its hey-day rested in large degree upon supply by the factor of all industrial products, which needs must be sustained so long as every local energy was foredoomed for absorption into cotton growing. ”

“ Presently the negroes led up horses, and we started for a gallop over the plantation. It was its third year of profitable culture by free labor. The stock of cane had nearly run out during the first and second years of the war, and, from necessity, cotton had been largely planted; although no one knew better than the proprietor that sugar land was unfit for successful cotton culture. ”

“ The all-cotton, old plantation system is extinct. A mere fraction of the present cotton crop is growing in the old way; almost the whole comes from the small farmers, black as well as white. The tenant system was almost universally adopted in the process of reconstruction; improvement in agriculture is slow but sure. The dream of the freedman was forty acres and a mule, and in fact great numbers are attaining that end.
For many years after the end of the Civil War the cotton States still depended upon the North for hay and upon the West for corn and meat. ”

“ Rice and indigo, said he, had offered the poorer whites, except the few employed as overseers, no livelihood "without the degradation of working with slaves"; but cotton, stimulating and elevating these people into the rank of substantial farmers, tended "to fill the country with an independent industrious yeomanry." [31] True as this was, it did not mean that producers on a plantation scale were at a disadvantage. Settlers of every type, in fact, adopted the crop as rapidly as they could get seed and ginning facilities, and newcomers poured in apace to share the prosperity. ”

“ It is a season of unusual industry on the cotton plantations, and woe to the planter who is outstripped in his labors, and finds himself "overtaken by the grass." The plow tears up the surplus vegetation, and the hoe tops it off in its luxuriance. The race is a hard one, but industry conquers; and when the third working-over of the crop takes place, the cotton-plant, so much cherished and favored, begins to overtop its rivals in the fields--begins to cast a chilling shade of superiority over its now intimidated groundlings, and commences to reign supreme. ”

“ I have known many in the rich planting portion of Mississippi especially, and others elsewhere, who, acting on the policy of the boy in the fable, who ‘killed the goose for the golden egg,’ accumulated property, yet among those who have relied solely on their product in land and negroes, I doubt if this be the true policy of plantation economy. With the former everything has to bend, give way to large crops of cotton, land has to be cultivated wet or dry, negroes to work, cold or hot. Large crops planted, and they must be cultivated, or done so after a manner. ”

“ I would rather drudge out my life on a cotton plantation, till the grave opened to give me rest, than to live with an unprincipled master and a jealous mistress. ”

“ There is as much sameness amongst the various cotton plantations, in Georgia, as there is amongst the various farms in New-York, or New-Jersey. He who has seen one cotton field, has seen all other cotton fields, bating the difference that naturally results from good and bad soils, or good and bad culture; but the contrast that prevails in the treatment of the slaves, on different plantations, is very remarkable. ”

“ The negroes do not enjoy as good health on rice plantations as elsewhere; and the greater difficulty with which their lives are preserved, through infancy especially, shows that the subtle poison of the miasma is not innocuous to them; but Mr. X. boasts a steady increase of his negro stock, of five per cent, per annum, which is better than is averaged on the plantations of the interior.
The plantation which contains Mr. X.’s winter residence has but a small extent of rice land, the greater part of it being reclaimed upland swamp soil, suitable for the culture of Sea Island cotton. ”

“ On my way home I traveled for several days, by a road different from that which we had pursued in coming down; and at the distance of fifty or sixty miles from Savannah, I passed by the largest plantation that I had ever seen. I think I saw at least a thousand acres of cotton in one field, which was all as level as a bowling-green. There were, as I was told, three hundred [Pg 288] and fifty hands at work in this field, picking the last of the cotton from the burs; and these were the most miserable looking slaves that I had seen in all my travels. ”

“ That kind of elaborate place was rare; in most cases the ante-bellum planter’s house was a modest building, and nowadays very few large planters live regularly on the plantation. If the place is profitable enough, the family lives in the nearest town or city; if it is unprofitable, sooner or later the banks get it and the family goes down; even where the old house is preserved, it is likely to be turned over to the manager, or becomes a nest for the colored people. Inasmuch as cotton raising is an industrial enterprise, plantations are apt to change hands, or the owners may put in new managers ”

“ It would be crazy to let them plant any cotton themselves, as some of them wanted to do; and it would be better if there were any way to prohibit their culture of any grain or other product not needed for their own consumption, in their gardens. If they had a crop of ten bushels, you might be sure they would sell fifty, and you would need better locks than any on this plantation to keep them from getting the other forty 274out of your corn-cribs. If they raised no corn, anybody to whom they offered to sell corn would know it was stolen ”

“ Near this was another plantation, abandoned by its Rebel owners, and occupied by lessees from the United States. The absence of responsible proprietors could be everywhere read in the dilapidated buildings and the general air of neglect. Still there was a fair crop of cane and cotton, and the negroes seemed to be working tolerably well for their Northern employers. ”

“ There is a far higher remuneration than has ever been given by cotton yet in store for the laborer, the manufacturer, the South and the entire country. In the midst of the cotton plantations themselves there is a career for manufacturing development such as the world has not yet seen. With coal, iron and timber in perfection and inexhaustible, and water power everywhere, by what rule of political economy should the Southern people send their cotton, at an expense always deducted from its price, to distant sections and foreign countries to be spun and woven? ”

“ One negro, who was quite successful in planting on his own account, proposed to take a small plantation in 1864, and employ twenty or more colored laborers. How he succeeded I was not able to ascertain.
The commissioners in charge of the freedmen gave the negroes every encouragement to plant on their own account. In 1864 there were thirty colored lessees near Milliken's Bend, and about the same number at Helena. Ten of these persons at Helena realized $31,000 for their year's labor. Two of them planted forty acres in cotton; their expenses were about $1,200; they sold their crop for $8,000. ”

“ And again, "By the influence of the negro the South lost its manufactures and largely its commerce, and became practically a purely agricultural section of the nation." [66] Speaking of the effect of the cotton gin and the cultivation of the staple by slave labor, he said: "The shops which had been productive of trading were closed to the public, and were utilized only for what was needed on the plantation.... ”

“ It cannot be allowed to run out but must be plowed up, fertilized, and the crop tended like any other farm product. Before cotton growers realized this, not much attention was paid to these laws and in consequence the crop of many a southern plantation suffered. Now cotton-raising is done far more scientifically. The old stalks are gathered and destroyed; the land is plowed and fertilized, and afterward seed-planting machines go up and down the rows, scattering five or six seeds into each hole, with a space of not more than a foot between the holes. ”

“ If the country or the climate has been cursed in our appearance as planters here, it has been in the wasting system, that we introduced and continue to practice.'
Gov. Wise, in an address upon the agriculture of Virginia, condenses the whole case in an epigram,—' The negroes skin the land, and the white men skin the negroes.'
The limit to the production of cotton is in the capacity of the plantation force to pick the amount cultivated by the field hands; but the whole available force is insufficient, and large quantities are lost. ”