. have not got free labourers in any sense common either in the Northern States or in Europe; and, looking around here at Jonesboro [Alabama, Tennessee Valley], after a calm and wide survey, one cannot but think that the New England manufacturer and the Old England farmer must be equally astonished at a recital of the relations of land, capital, and labour as they existed on the cotton plantations of the Southern States. The wages of the negroes, if such a term can be applied to a mode of remuneration so unusual and anomalous, consist, . . of one half the corn and cotton, the only crops in reality produced. This system of share and share alike betwixt the planter and the negro I have found to prevail so generally that any other form of contract is but the exception. The negro, on the semi-communistic basis thus established, finds his own rations; but as these are supplied to him by the planter, or by the planter's notes of credit on the merchants and as much more sometimes as he thinks he needs by the merchants on his own credit, from the 1st. of January onward through the year, in anticipation of crops which are not marketable till the end of December, he can lose nothing by the failure or deficient outcome of the crops, and is always sure of his subsistence. As a permanent economic relation this would be startling anywhere between any classes of men brought together in the business of life. Applied to agriculture any other part of the world, it would be deemed outrageously absurd. But this is only a part of the "privileges" (a much more accurate term than "wages") of the negro field-hand. In addition to half of the crops, he has a free cottage of the kind he seems to like, and the windows of which he or his wife persistently nail up; he has abundance of wood from the planter's estate for fuel and for building his corn-cribs and other outhouses, with teams to draw it from the forest; he is allowed to keep hogs, and milch cows, and young cattle, which roam and feed with the same right of pasture as the hogs and cattle of the planter, free of all charge; he has the same right of hunting and shooting, with quite as many facilities for exercising the right as anybody else and he has his in dogs and guns, though, as far as I have discovered, he provides himself with these by purchase or some other form of conquest. Though entitled to one-half the crops, yet he is not required to contribute any portion of the seed, nor is he called upon to pay any part of the taxes of the plantation. The only direct tax on the negro is the poll-tax, which is wholly set apart for the education of his children, and which I find to be everywhere in arrears, and in some places in a hopeless chaos of non-payment. . The negro field-hand, with his right of half-crop and privileges as described, who works with ordinary diligence, looking only to his own pocket, and gets his crops forward and gathered in due time, is at liberty to go to other plantations to pick cotton, in doing which he may make from two to two and a half dollars a day. For every piece of work outside the crop he does even on his own plantation he must be paid a dollar a day. It may be clearing ditches or splitting rails, or any thing that is just as essential to the crops as the two-inch plowing and hoeing in which he shambles away his time, but for all this kind of work he must be paid a dollar a day. While the landowner is busy keeping accounts betwixt himself and his negro hands, ginning their cotton for them, doing all the marketing of produce and supplies of which they have the lion's share, and has hardly a day to call his own, the “hands" may be earning a dollar a day from him for work which is quite as much theirs as his. Yet the negroes, with all their superabounding privilege on the cotton field make little of it. A ploughman or a herd in the old country would not exchange his lot for theirs, as it stands and as it appears in all external circumstances. They are almost all in debt; few are able at the end of the year to square accounts with "the Merchant;" and it is rarely the planter can point with pride, and with the conscious joy of recording his own profit, to a freedman, who, as a result of the year's toil, will have a hundred or two dollars to the good. The soul is often crushed out of labour by penury and oppression. Here a soul cannot begin to be infused into it through the sheer excess of privilege and license with which it is surrounded. Cities and Varied Industries Nordhoff, Cotton States in 1875, pp. 23, 103. [1875] ALMOST everywhere, except in Louisiana, Mississippi, and perhaps, Arkansas, I noticed an increase of the towns. I saw many new buildings, and others going up; and observant Southern men remarked upon this to me also. Wherever the people have been moderately prosperous, these improvements begin to make a show. The reason for this growth of towns was pointed out to me by Mr. Goodloe, a North Carolinian, and an Abolitionist before the war, whose essay 1 touching this question seemed to me both curious and valuable. Under the slavesystem, whenever a man had saved a thousand dollars he bought a slave; and the accumulated wealth of the South was almost entirely invested in this species of property. Hence there was no money to build dwellings in the towns, to carry on retail shops, to make all those improvements which mark our Northern civilization. "But," as Mr. Goodloe remarks, "the money paid for slaves was substantially wasted, because the negro will work in freedom." A horse, a cow, or a sheep must be owned in order to be of service to man. Not so a man, a negro man. It was not necessary to enslave him in order to make him industrious and useful to the community of which he forms a part. Experience since the war shows that he will work without being owned. It is true, therefore, that the money invested in slaves was wasted, so far as the general community was concerned; it was a misapplication of capital. With the extinction of slavery, this waste of the savings of the Southern people stopped. As wealth once more begins to accumulate, some other and sound forms of investment are, and will be, sought for it. It will be turned into houses, town improvements, and, above all, I believe, into factories of various kinds. Of course the accumulations of the community will no 1. In the Report of the Bureau of Agriculture for 1865. longer be in so few hands as before; but this also is found to be a great advantage in the South, where employments are becom ing more varied, and there is more work for mechanics of dif ferent kinds. It is among the factory workers and the small farmers of Georgia that one finds the chief prosperity of the State. Here there is little or no debt; money circulates rapidly; improvements are seen; and there are patient, hopeful labor, thrift, and enterprise, which affect, as it seems to me, the whole population. I heard here and there of instances of poor young mechanics working steadily and earnestly, in a New England way, at their trades, making labor respectable, accumulating property, and making honorably places in their communities; and some such men talked to me of their past and their future, of the hopeful change which the extinction of slavery had produced in the prospects of their class, in language which showed me that there is a new born hope of better things in the poor white people of the State. Cotton and Rice Plantations [1868-1870] Leigh, Ten Years on a Georgia Plantation, pp. 116, 223, 263. From letters of Mrs. Leigh and Rev. J. W. Leigh. MR. G, another rich New York man, who figured it all out on paper there, came here two years ago to make his for tune, and he told me the other day that he was perfectly convinced that Sea Island cotton never would pay again. . . The labour is too uncertain, and anyone who knows, as I do, that after all my hard work the crop may be lost at any moment by the negroes going off or refusing to work, knows how useless it is to count on any returns with certainty. Wherever white labour can be introduced, other crops will be cultivated, and wherever it can't, the land will remain uncultivated. Rice lands now rent at ten dollars an acre, and cotton from two to three, so you can judge what the people here think about it. . . Since the war, owing to want of capital and labour, much of the country in the Southern States has returned to its normal [wild] condition, and that whereas formerly, in six of the Southern States, 186,000,000 bushels of rice were sent to market, in 1870 only 72,000,000 were raised. The original planters having been completely ruined by the war, the planting in many cases has been carried on by negroes on their own account in small patches. As the Agricultural Commissioner, in his report, has lately stated "The rice-planters were driven from the Carolina and Georgia shores during the war, labour was in a disorganized and chaotic state, production had almost ceased, and at its close, dams, flood-gates, canals, mills, and houses were either dilapidated or destroyed, and the power to compel the labourers to go into the rice-swamps utterly broken. The labourers had scattered, gone into other businesses, and those obtainable would only work for themselves on a share Many of the proprietors were dead, and more [were] absentees, and inexperienced men from the North or elsewhere assumed their places. The rice-fields had grown up in weeds or tangled shrubbery, the labour of separation was discouraging, and the work of cultivation greatly increased, giving unexpected gravity to the accidents and contingencies of the season." contract. This picture is by no means overdrawn, and even now, in our own neighbourhood, there is scarcely a planter whose plantation is not mortgaged, and whose crop is not the property of his factor, who has advanced him money to plant with. They plant on sufferance, and live from hand to mouth as best they can. The Credit System Straker, The New South Investigated, p. 87. The credit or supply system had fully developed before the close of Reconstruction. [1870-1880] At the close of the war, added to the renting of small farms to the colored man by whites, to be paid in certain proportions of the crop, was the system of making advances to this class of farmers of such necessary farming utensils and necessities for food and clothing. . . This system in its incipiency had nothing in its intent discommendable, but it afterwards grew into the strongest engine of power, political and civil, as turned against |