he is willing to take in cash just enough to pay the expenses of suit, with the balance in instalments spread over three or four years. Every one of them states in private that he has even more lands on his lists for sale than he advertises. Nor is this all. The State of Virginia has appointed a board of emigration whose sole object is to guide and assist, by every kindly office, persons from abroad wishing to invest a little capital and settle on the soil of Virginia. I might fill pages with a description of farms and plantations and lots, large and small, of land that are thus on the market. .

To understand the avalanche of land bargains at present in Virginia, one has to remember that before the War the land was owned chiefly by slaveholders, who had large estates which they never fully cultivated, but on which they shifted their crops about from one place to another, and who, finding themselves with plenty of money and little trouble under this system, allowed their overseers and slave-dealers to settle all the hard matters between them. At the close of the war, when the slaves became free, it is easy to perceive that with no means left to cultivate such large tracts of land under the new conditions, it became a necessity, as well as the best thing that the owners could do, to sell large portions of their estates, and to retain just as much as they had capital and labour to cultivate; and this they have done and are doing to some extent. In some cases, proprietors, not rich save in land before the war, have since become embarrassed, and, falling into debt and arrears of taxes, have had decrees passed against them in the courts, under which sales were ordered to proceed. There have been instances also of gentlemen "slain in battle," or driven from the country, or flying from it in despair, and of every form of vicissitude and ruin that follows in the train of war and social revolution. The consequence is that a large proportion of the landed property of a great and long-settled State is literally going a-begging for people to come and take it. The like has seldom been seen before.

5. CONDITIONS IN THE BLACK BELT AND IN

THE WHITE DISTRICTS

"Enjoying Freedom to its Fullest Extent"

Mrs. V. V. Clayton, White and Black under the Old Regime, p. 172. Copyright 1899. Used by permission of Mrs. Clayton. Such experiences were so common as almost to be the rule after 1865. [1865]

AFTER Emancipation, Lewis remained with us many years. His home was only a short distance from our home. He cultivated a farm successfully, and soon had acquired not only the necessaries of life, but some luxuries. He had a pair of nice horses, a buggy and wagon, and other things, and lived well; but he had never known freedom entirely without Mars' Henry's supervision. One day he came to the conclusion that he would move away and enjoy freedom to its fullest extent. He came to see Mr. Clayton in the fall to say something about it. He seemed embarrassed when Mr. Clayton addressed him: "Lewis, what is it you want?" "Well, Mars' Henry, I want to move away and feel ontirely free and see whut I cen do by mysef. You has been kind to me and I has done well, but I want to go anyhow." Mr. Clayton said, "Very well, Lewis, that is all right, move when you please; but when you leave, nail up the door of your house and leave it until you want to come back. No one shall go into it."

Lewis and his brother, Ned, rented a farm some miles beyond Clayton, moved, and we heard no more of them until the next fall, when Lewis made his appearance, very much dejected. Mr. Clayton said, "How are you, Lewis? How are you getting on?" "Bad, Mars' Henry. I have come to ask ef I cen go into my house again."

Lewis and Ned had hired hands, gotten a merchant to furnish them, and lost almost everything they had started out with. Lewis moved back, and has been loth to leave the Claytons since, and is now with us, an old man. Ned died very soon after with pneumonia. His wife, Betsy, soon followed him to the grave. She had consumption, something almost

unheard of with the colored people when slavery existed, but which is now a common disorder with them.

Conditions in 1870

Transactions Alabama Historical Society, vol. iv. Letter of William F. Samford.

We are to-day

[1870]

poorer than we were on the day of the surrender of the Southern armies. Our carpetbaggers and nigger scalawags have imposed intolerable taxation upon people already crushed to the earth. A deep and sullen gloom is settling upon the Southern heart. Twelve cents for cotton and twenty-five cents for bacon and one hundred and fifty dollars and rations for a negro idler;- for laborer he will not be winds up the plantation business. Why don't we raise hogs and make our own bacon? Why a hog has no more chance to live among these thieving negro farmers than a juney bug in a gang of puddle ducks. . . All this great staple producing region is essentially upon the sheriff's block.

Negro Opposition to Immigration

J. S. Pike, Prostrate State, p. 55. South Carolina in 1871. [1871] AND so in the matter of immigration. The material interests of the State clearly demand it. But the blacks are against it, as they fear its political consequences. A late debate in the Senate illustrated this. A bill was up to exempt new railroad enterprises and various enumerated kinds of manufactures from taxation. A black leader debated it, and in the course of his remarks took occasion to say he had heard, or overheard, a good deal from the class of people whom this legislation was designed to benefit; that it was intended to overslaugh and crowd out the blacks by foreign immigrants, to be introduced into the State by wholesale. Now, he wanted everybody to understand that the blacks did not intend to be crowded out, but that they proposed to stand their ground and, “fight this thing out to the bitter end." He said they might bring on their immigrants, and they would find the blacks ready for them.

The Emancipation of White Labor

Somers, The Southern States, pp. 117, 272.

[1871]

ACRE for acre under cultivation, the Valley of the Tennessee yields now [1871] a smaller quantity of cotton than in slavery times, while there are obviously large tracts once cultivated now wild and in a state of rest and neglect. . . The hilly districts have long been occupied by a poor white population, who have always produced more or less cotton. But the high value to which cotton was raised by the war, and the "labour difficulty" of the large plantations, have inspired them with new hope, life, and industry; and this class of growers have swelled considerably of late years the deliveries of cotton at the railway depots. . The extent to which they raise their own crop by the labour of their own families renders the per contra of cost less distinct to them than to the large planters. They gin and bale their produce at common 1 gin-houses; they spin and weave their own cloth; nourish their cows and hogs; and, when the seasons are favorable, succeed in raising a fair stand of cotton. There never have been better or larger crops of cotton in the hill districts than in this season. These small hill farmers come down occasionally into the plain, looking for land to rent or buy; and it is not improbable that many of the better and more industrious class of families in "the mountains," as the gently swelling uplands are called, will eventually come down altogether, and help to renovate the waste places, and build up the agricultural prosperity of the valley.

I hold it, from observation as well as testimony, to be certain that the larger proportion of the annual expansions of the cotton crop since the war is due to the energy, on small farms, in gardens, and on crops taken on waste and unoccupied plantations, of white labour. Some few of the negroes no doubt contribute independently to this small-farm movement; but the ad captandum mode of arguing the superior efficiency of free negro labour viz. that so many negroes perished in

1. Community or public gin-house as distinguished from a plantation or private ginnery.

the war, that negro women do not now work in the field, that negro children are now put to school, and that nevertheless the crop being all but equal to what it was under slavery, it follows that the negroes free must produce greatly better than when slaves is superficial, and does not touch the substantial merits of the question. . . It does not embrace the fact that scarcely any of the plantations on which cotton was grown under slavery are nearly up to the mark of production before the war; and it leaves out of view the great number of small white farmers who, under the disability of the former growers, have begun for the first time to raise cotton, the numerous bands of white labourers who have availed themselves of the abundant opportunities of renting and cropping from year to year, the white villagers who have thrown their sickles into the common harvest. . and the cloud of white planters and their families, reduced to poverty, who have been the foremost to go down into the Western bottoms, and there and elsewhere have bent with noble fortitude and ardour to labour in the fields. It would be a misapprehension to take the cotton crop now as the product of negro labour in the same sense as it was before the war. The intermixture of white labour in the cotton culture of the South is already large, and though the forms under which the lands are cultivated are various yet the general distinction betwixt large plantations wrought by negroes under white employers, and small farms wrought chiefly by white people, remains a prominent feature of the new state of things, the practical force of which is felt more year by year.

An Englishman's Estimate of Free Negro Labor

Somers, The Southern States, p. 128.

[1871]

THE emancipation of the slaves is accepted with remarkable equanimity when one considers the overturn of personal fortune, and all the bitterness of the war with which it was associated; and an expression of gladness to have now done with slavery, and to have touched some common ground of civilization, is often heard. But what the planters are disposed to complain of is that, while they have lost their slaves, they