Rice plantation

“ Some have rented a large rice plantation in the vicinity—contrary to the currently-received theory that no human being, white or black, will work on rice grounds except when driven to it—and they are doing exceedingly well. Others could go further into the interior and do the same, if they were sure of protection; but till some understanding with the planters is reached, and the status of the Rebel planters themselves is defined, this is almost impracticable. Something, however, must be done to disperse this unwholesome gathering at Newbern, or the tumor, thus neglected, may do serious injury. ”

“ Annie's is the remotest on the whole plantation, and I found there the wretchedest huts, and most miserably squalid, filthy and forlorn creatures I had yet seen here—certainly the condition of the slaves on this estate is infinitely more neglected and deplorable than that on the rice plantation. Perhaps it may be that the extremely unhealthy nature of the rice cultivation makes it absolutely necessary that the physical condition of the labourers should be maintained at its best to enable them to abide it ”

“ On most of the rice plantations in these pestilential regions, no white man can pass the night at certain seasons of the year without running the risk of his life; and during the day, the master and overseer are as much alone and irresponsible in their dominion over their black cattle, as Robinson Crusoe was over his small family of animals on his desert habitation. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The rice is planted in drills, or rows, and grows more like oats than any of the other grain known in the north.
The water is sometimes let in to the rice fields, and drawn off again, several times, according to the state of the weather. Watering and weeding the rice is considered one of the most unhealthy occupations on a southern plantation, as the people are obliged to live for several weeks in the mud and water, subject to all the unwholesome vapors that arise from stagnant pools, under the rays of a summer sun, as well as the chilly autumnal dews of night. ”

“ Fanny Kemble's "Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation," 1838-39, gives an interesting though somewhat sombre picture of the conditions prevailing on the rice plantations near Darien, Georgia. [Pg 240]
Slavery, as an industrial institution, has flourished only in countries with great natural resources, easy of access and affording ready means of sustenance. The crops cultivated must be simple, such as tobacco, rice or cotton, and hence admitting of easy mastery by the slave as well as the efficient organization and direction of gangs of laborers. ”

“ The utter inaptitude of Europeans for the labour requisite in such a climate and soil, is obvious to every one possessed of the smallest degree of knowledge respecting the country; white servants would have exhausted their strength in clearing a spot of land for digging their own graves, and every rice plantation would have served no other purpose than a burying ground to its European cultivators. ”

“ I have sent for a tug to tow the two flats up on the flood-tide this evening—just now it is dead low water, and the flats are aground, which always scares me; for, if by any chance they get on a log or any inequality, they get badly strained and often leak and ruin the rice. Flats are one of the heavy expenses on a rice plantation—large, flat-bottomed boats from twenty to eighty feet long and from ten to twelve feet wide, propelled in the most primitive way by poles and steered by one huge oar at the stern. They can be loaded up very high if the rice is properly stowed. ”

“ Fences should all be in order, and every gap filled up by the time the rice harvest is over, when the natives either never herd their cattle at all, or so carelessly that they are liable to be frequently in the plantation. ”

“ On this account only one-third of a plantation is devoted to its culture at any one time, the remaining two-thirds being planted with rice, for the sustenance of the natives that work on that plantation. These crops are kept rotating so that the same fields are liable to an extra drain from sugar-cane only once in three years. On each plantation is a village of Javanese, and several of these villages are under the immediate management of a controleur. ”

“ Two pairs of the stoutest oxen on the plantation are harnessed to the rice-drills, and they lumber along slowly but surely, and by twelve o'clock the field of fourteen acres is nearly planted.
It is literally casting one's bread on the waters, for as soon as the seed is in the ground the trunk door is lifted and the water creeps slowly up and up until it is about three inches deep on the land. That is why the claying is necessary; it makes the grain adhere to the earth, otherwise it would float. ”

“ Yet in the face of it, rice-planters were raising the price of their lands from fifty dollars an acre, for which they could be bought before the war, to one hundred dollars.
As the rice plantations are confined to the tide-water region, where the fields can be flooded after sowing, their present prospects were more or less embarrassed by the knotty Sea-Island question. “If our people this year make one sixth of an average rice-crop,” said Governor Orr, “they will be fortunate, and they will be doing well. ”

“ It is impossible to go on planting rice if it is to sell at 40 cents per bushel. It is an expensive crop, and if one borrows money, as I did last year, at a high rate of interest, and puts a mortgage on the plantation, it very soon means ruin. ”

“ Ignorant, or malicious overseer may, and often do, misapply it, as was the case with our overseer, when he compelled poor Lydia to take a draught of its solution. After the restoration of my health, I resumed my accustomed labor in the field, and continued it without intermission, until I left this plantation.
We had this year, as a part of our crop, ten acres of indigo. This plant is worked nearly after the manner of rice, except that it is planted on high and dry [Pg 244] ground, whilst the rice is always cultivated in low swamps, where the ground may be inundated with water ”

“ 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. ”

“ This plantation contains 275 acres, 250 of which are cleared, and 25 are river swamp lands. There is also an upland settlement attached, with a dwelling-house, all necessary outhouses, comfortable quarters for fifty laborers, and an excellent well of water.
“The rice lands, with the exception of about 20 acres, are of a clay soil, of unsurpassed and inexhaustible fertility, and capable of producing rice, corn, wheat, oats, peas and hay.
“It is every way susceptible of being also made a good stock farm, for cattle and hogs, and an excellent market garden. ”

“ Simon's are far less solid, comfortable, and habitable than those at the rice-island. I do not know whether the labourer's habitation bespeaks the alteration in the present relative importance of the crops, but certainly the cultivators of the once far-famed long staple sea-island cotton of St. Simon's are far more miserably housed than the rice-raisers of the other plantation. These ruinous shielings, that hardly keep out wind or weather, are deplorable homes for young or aged people, and poor shelters for the hardworking men and women who cultivate the fields in which they stand. ”

“ I, for instance, have 500 acres of pine land, and the family estate and my brothers' together make 3000 acres of the finest pasture land. Where my father had herds of splendid cattle I have to keep my cows in a very poor pasture of twenty acres, fenced in, and in consequence have only five or six cows and one pair of oxen on the same plantation where my father used to stable sixty pair of oxen during the winter. They worked the rice land in the spring and roamed the woods and grew fat in summer. ”

“ Of this woman's life on the plantation, I subsequently learned the following circumstances:—She was the wife of head-man Frank, the most intelligent and trustworthy of Mr. ——'s slaves; the head driver—second in command to the overseer, and indeed second to none during the pestilential season, when the rice swamps cannot with impunity be inhabited by any white man, and when, therefore, the whole force employed in its cultivation on the island remains entirely under his authority and control. ”

“ Simon's is generally considered peculiarly mild and favourable, and so less protection of clothes and shelter is thought necessary here for the poor residents; perhaps, too, it may be because the cotton crop is now, I believe, hardly as valuable as the rice crop, and the plantation here, which was once the chief source of its owner's wealth, is becoming a secondary one, and so not worth so much care or expense in repairing and constructing negro huts and feeding and clothing the slaves. ”

“ Along the coast lay the great rice-plantations, containing thousands of acres and worked by hundreds of slaves; their proprietors constituting the landed aristocracy of the State. In the interior, the plantations were 92smaller, there were fewer slaves, and their owners were “farmers” rather than “planters,” devoting themselves to the cultivation of a variety of crops instead of confining their efforts to the exclusive production of a single staple. ”

“ While the place was being slowly reset in cane, it would doubtless be profitable to grow rice; but the negroes were unwilling to undertake it. Here, as in the rice lands of South Carolina and Georgia, there was every prospect that free labor would prove absolutely fatal to the culture. Men would not work in rice swamps except under compulsion. There is a species of rice, which grows like wheat, on uplands; but it only yields about one-fourth of a crop. On good rice lands the yield per acre varies from thirty-five to fifty bushels. Exceptional crops have run up as high as ninety bushels. ”

“ The time is here when there should he undertaken a systematic diversion of a large part of this fertile soil over the swamp areas, building them into well drained, cultivable, fertile fields provided with waterways to serve for drainage, irrigation, fertilization and transportation. These great areas of swamp land may thus be converted into the most productive rice and sugar plantations to be found anywhere in the world, and the area made capable of maintaining many millions of people as long as the Mississippi endures, bearing its burden of fertile sediment. ”

“ Sometimes on the top of a hill there would be seen one of the old plantations surrounded by walls built to imprison the slaves, or coffee-gardens, now abandoned because the soil was worn out for want of dressing, or long stretches of pale green denoting young rice crops, watercourses dashing over rocks and gliding through brushwood—the last resort of the birds,—vestiges of calcined forests where the new growth of vegetation eager to reach the sun was ever cut back and repressed ”

“ The land is composed of a mass of muck, often ten feet deep and inexhaustible, and never suffers from drought. This land is very valuable, one hundred dollars often being paid per acre for large plantations. Much rice land, however, remains uncleared for want of the enterprise and perseverance necessary to its improvement.
Farther in the interior the land is principally of a sandy formation, most of it underlaid with clay. Very little effort is, however, made by planters to cultivate it, although it is very easily worked, and with a little manuring yields fair crops of corn and sweet potatoes. ”

“ In addition to the people so gaining a livelihood by their industry, there are scattered throughout the islands many Indians, without any occupation, and apparently altogether dependent on the fruit of the plaintain-tree for subsistence, and indulging all their natural laziness and indolence of disposition by its aid, preferring to subsist on the fruit of this most productive plant, which they can do, from its being always procurable and at all times of the year in season, without an effort towards its cultivation, to undertaking the labour and attention necessary to grow rice. ”

“ The soil is in general very fertile, the principal products being rice, maize and pulse (kachang) in the lower grounds, and cinchona, coffee and tea, as well as cocoa, tobacco and fibrous plants in the hills. The coffee cultivation has, however, considerably diminished. Forest culture, mat-making, weaving and fish-breeding are also practised, the last-named in the marshes after the rice harvest. The plantations are almost entirely owned by the government and Europeans, but the rice mills are in the hands of Chinese. ”

“ It is this: the serious injury which our interests must inevitably suffer by the removal of our colored population. Their labor is indispensably necessary and extremely valuable. By whom shall the plantations at the south be cultivated but by them? It is universally conceded that they can resist the intensity of a southern sun, and endure the fatigues attendant on the cultivation of rice, cotton, tobacco and sugar-cane, better than white laborers: at least, their bodies are now inured to this employment. ”