Planter (social class)

“ The plan of sending off refractory laborers to work on government plantations is worse than useless. A planter always plants as much land as he believes he has labor to cultivate efficiently, neither more nor less. If less, a portion of his laborers are idle a part of their time; if more, his crops must suffer from the want of proper cultivation. ”

“ I know that the poor people and small cultivators look up to them with respect and affection. They find in them ready and sympathizing friends, able and willing to shield them from the exactions of their own more powerful and uncharitable fellow-countrymen. Half, nay nine-tenths, of the stories against planters, are got up by the money-lenders, the petty Zemindars, and wealthy villagers, who find the planter competing with them for land and labour, and raising the price of both. ”

“ Society will then be something not wholly unlike a cotton plantation in the old days; with cheerful, careless, demoralised slaves, with elected overseers, and, instead of the planter, a chaotic popular assembly. If the blood be purposeful and the soil strong, such a plantation may succeed, and be, indeed, a busy ant-heap, with full granaries and long hours of leisure. ”

“ When the plantations are out of proportion to the strength of the labour which can be counted on, all the work becomes slowly and badly done, and these faults most sensibly prejudice both the yield and the quality of the crop, and consequently the interest of the planter. ”

“ As his slaves increased in number, he was forced to increase his acreage or sell them, and he usually preferred the former, especially in the Far South. Still another element favored the large estate. Slave labor quickly exhausted the soil and of its own force compelled the cutting of the forests and the extension of the area under cultivation. Finally, the planter took a natural pride in his great estate; it was a sign of his prowess and his social prestige.
In 1865 the foundations of the planting system were gone. It was difficult to get efficient labor to till the vast plantations. ”

“ It is rare that a plantation of this class can have a dozen intelligent families residing within a day’s ride of it. Any society that a planter enjoys on his estate must, therefore, consist in a great degree of permanent guests. Hence the name for hospitality of wealthy planters. A large plantation is necessarily a retreat from general society, and is used by its owner, I am inclined to think, in the majority of cases, in winter, as Berkshire villas and farms are in summer by rich people of New York and Boston. ”

“ Over and over again it had been denied by men who professed to know all about the subject and to be authorities upon it that any such cruelties were practised on a well-regulated plantation belonging to a {191} civilized owner. It was constantly argued, with self-complacency, that the planter's own interests would not allow him thus to mar the efficiency of the human animals who had to do his work, and that even if the planter had no pity for them, he was sure to have a wholesome and restraining consideration for the physical value of his own living property. ”

“ Their morality is far superior to that of the free negroes of the North; the planters encourage marriage, and thus endeavor to develop among them a sense of the family relation, with a view of attaching them to the domestic hearth, consequently to the family of the master. It will be then observed that in such a state of things the interests of the planter, in default of any other motive, promotes the advancement and well-being of the slave. ”

“ The planters deal with them from necessity, as they must have such things as they need, and must obtain them somewhere, and from somebody. The store-keeper lives as well, dresses as well, and often lives in as good a house as the planter—perhaps in one that is better than that of the planter; but his wealth is not so material, his means of subsistence do not strike the eye so powerfully as a hundred field hands, and three hundred acres of cotton. The country has no hold on him, and he has no hold on the country. ”

“ Yet for all that, and though in many cases the planters have withdrawn the watchmen who used to protect them, and have left them entirely exposed to thieves and cattle, they are generally well cultivated--on the whole, better than during slavery. When there is inattention to them, it is caused either by some planters hiring them during their own time, or because their master permits his cattle to trespass on them, and the people feel an insecurity. When you find a kind planter, in whom the apprentices have confidence, there you will find beautiful gardens. ”

“ Other planters in that region equally successful in making money say that they have little or no trouble with negro families moving, and there seems no good reason to believe that they are more restless than any other laborers. It is, of course, highly discouraging for a planter who has made every effort by improved houses, just treatment and clear accounts, to satisfy his people, to see them slipping away to neighbors who are notoriously hard, unjust, and shifty. ”

“ Planters, particularly native planters, have a kind of affection for their negroes, incredible to those who have not observed its effects. If rebellious they punish them—if well behaved they not unfrequently reward them. In health they treat them with uniform kindness, in sickness with attention and sympathy. I once called on a native planter—a young bachelor, like many of his class, who had graduated at Cambridge and travelled in Europe—yet northern education and foreign habits did not destroy the Mississippian. ”

“ Owing to a slight rise in the price of rubber, tapping has been resumed by some of the [Pg 104] planters, and there is a more hopeful feeling. The small planter has probably a better chance than the large company; his working expenses are less, he can often obtain local labour cheaply or get time-expired hands without paying recruiting fees; and, in addition, he can keep his men under more personal control. ”

“ 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 ”

“ The remaining vitality of the system no longer resides in the interests, but in the pride and prejudices of the planters. Their soil and climate are alike favourable to the labours of a white peasantry: the slave cultivation has had time to prove itself there the destructive pest which, in time, it will prove itself wherever it prevails. ”

“ As long as he is under the guidance and care of the proprietor of the plantation he prospers, the planter, as we express it in that country, "loaning him our aid"; we make it very expressive to the negro, we loan him our aid, that is, he must follow our advice, and he has learned to do that, and by doing that he accumulates ”

“ Because the present occupiers of the land—employing no hired labour, but only directing the industry of the farmer and that of his family, to the small patch on which they were born, and, of course, have some affection for—are certain to expend far more labour on their own land, and to bring it to a much higher degree of cultivation, than it would suit the purpose of a large planter to do ”

“ There, a much greater number of laborers is required at one season of the year than at another, and the farmer may enlarge or diminish the quantity of labor he employs, as circumstances may require. Here, about the same quantity of labor is required at every season, and the planter suffers no inconvenience from retaining his laborers throughout the year. Imagine an extensive rice or cotton plantation cultivated by free laborers, who might perhaps strike for an increase of wages, at a season when the neglect of a few days would insure the destruction of the whole crop. ”

“ None are ever sold, the "picknies" who swarm around [pg 124] every cabin growing up to stock the plantations bought for each child as he or she "comes of age or is married," and work has to be made for them to do.
"What shall I put the hands at to-day, sir?" asked an overseer of an old planter when the last bale of cotton had been packed. ”

“ Some of these planter-fellows must find the life a little dreary I fancy, living isolated on their plantations at a considerable distance from European neighbors, with very small choice of society at the best, and prevented no doubt by their position from associating too closely with the only folk who are near them—their own employees. ”

“ Every one of these items is a concession to the slave-holding policy. If the public lands are taken from the nation, and given to the States in which the soil lies, who will get the largest share? That best part of the population called planters. ”

“ It was urged, too, with some show of reason, that the planters were not themselves responsible for the existence of slave labor, that generations of planters had grown up under the system and had made a profit by it during the days when civilization had not, anywhere, set its face against slavery, and that it was hard, therefore, to make them suffer in pocket for the recent development in the feelings of humanity. ”

“ Speculation in land has been creating a class of non-resident agricultural capitalists and tenant cultivators, and has been transforming the type of agricultural population over large sections of country. Soil exhaustion is leading to abandonment of the poorest land and is compelling methods of scientific agriculture on the remainder. These conditions are producing their own social problems for the rural community. ”

“ Q. Do you think a plantation is more productive where, under a general supervision by the planter or the owner, it is let out in small sections to the negroes to cultivate, or is it better to cultivate the plantation as a whole? ”

“ There are also some proprietors of considerable property and pretension [Pg 189] to being planters, who give their overseer a proportion of the crop for his wages; thus bribing him by the strongest inducements of self-interest, to overstrain and work down everything committed to his charge.
“No planter, who attends to his own business, can dispense with agents and sub-agents. It is impossible, on a plantation of any size, for the proprietor to attend to all the details, many of which are irksome and laborious, and he requires more intelligence to assist him than slaves usually possess. ”

“ M‘Call’s plantation, which we reached just as the [412] sun was sinking into the clouds of another thunderstorm.
The more one sees of a planter’s life the greater is the conviction that its charms come from a particular turn of mind, which is separated by a wide interval from modern ideas in Europe. The planter is a de-nomadised Arab;—he has fixed himself with horses and slaves in a fertile spot, where he guards his women with Oriental care, exercises patriarchal sway, and is at once fierce, tender, and hospitable. ”

“ The average carpenter, blacksmith, and stone mason is simply a laborer on the land with added skill in a special line. Even the fisherman cultivates the soil. The village schoolmaster is a son of the farmer of the better class. There are groups of population-office-holders and their retainers and hangers-on, shopkeepers and traders, butchers, porters, miners, junk-sailors, and innkeepers, sorcerers, gamblers, and fortune-tellers, but, all told, the number of men who do not live on the soil form but a decimal fraction in the national household. ”

“ On the large plantations, where perhaps as many as a thousand people are busied on the crop, the manager looks upon the laborer simply as an element of production; you must have seed, rain, and the niggers in order to get a crop. Even the most kind-hearted and conscientious plantation owner cannot avoid this feeling that the laborers are, like the live-stock, a part of the implements; he houses them, and if humane and far-sighted, he houses them better than the mules ”

“ But even from self-interest alone, a planter has greater reason for caring for the health and comfort of his slaves than an English farmer has in caring for the comfort of his laborers. Slaves are valuable property, and if they are overworked or badly cared for they decrease in value. Whereas if the laborer falls sick or is unable to do his work the farmer has simply to hire another hand. It is as much the interest of a planter to keep his slaves in good health and spirits as it is for a farmer to feed and attend to his horses properly. ”

“ Instead of the wealthy planter who surrounded himself with scores of servants and slaves, investigation reveals hundreds of little farmers, many of them trusting entirely to their own exertions for the cultivation of the soil, others having but one or two servants, and a bare handful of well-to-do men each having from five to ten, or in rare cases twenty or thirty, servants and slaves. ”

“ The bank of the river below the large plantation was occupied by a set of small Creole planters, whose poor houses were close together, indicating very limited farms, which had been subdivided from time to time, according to the French fashion; so that the owners have at last approached pauperism; but they are tenacious of their rights, and will not yield to the tempting price offered by the large planters. They cling to the soil without enterprise and without care. ”