COTTON HANDS
So far cotton cultivation has been considered as though it were a crop
which came of itself, like the rubber of the Brazilian forests, but during
a whole century the cultivation of cotton has had a direct influence on
the labor system and the whole social organization of the South. Such
close relations sometimes exist in other commodities; for instance, the
election of President McKinley, in 1896, seems to have been determined by
a sudden rise in the price of wheat; but cotton is socially and
politically important every year, because upon it the greater part of the
negro labor is employed, and to it a large portion of the white management
and capital is devoted.
Furthermore, the conditions of the old slavery times are more nearly
reproduced in the cotton field than anywhere else in the South. The old
idea that the normal function of the African race is field labor is still
vital; and the crude and unskilled mass of Negroes still find employment
in which they succeed tolerably well. As in slavery times, the cotton
hands are more fixed in their locality than in other pursuits; they are
less ambitious to move about, and find their way more close hedged in if
they try to go elsewhere. The relation of the white man as task-master to
the Negro as a deferential class is still distinctly maintained; while the
system of advances to laborers resembles the old methods of feeding the
hands.
The Negro is not the sole cotton maker; fully one third of the cotton in
the South is never touched by a black hand, being raised by small white
farmers both in the lowlands and in the hill regions, who produce one,
two, or more bales a year and depend upon that crop to pay their store
bills. Something like one sixth of the crop is raised by independent negro
land owners or renters working for themselves; this leaves nearly or quite
one half the crop to negro labor under the superintendence of white owners
or managers.
Even where the Negro is employed on wages, he looks on himself as part of
the concern and expects due consideration in return for what Stone calls
the "proprietary interest he feels in the plantation at large, his sense
of being part and parcel of a large plantation. Then, too, there is his
never-failing assurance of ability to pay his account, no matter how
large, by his labor, when it is not too wet or too cold, his respect, and
his implicit and generally cheerful obedience."
Inasmuch as more than half the Negroes are raising cotton, and most of the
others are working on farms, it is important to know what kind of laborers
they make. It is the opinion of their greatest leader, Booker Washington,
that the best place for the Negro is in the rural South, and that he is
not fitted for the strife of the great cities South or North. Is he
perfectly fitted for any service? Is it true, as one of the employers of
Negroes alleges, that "their actions have no logical or reasonable basis,
that they are notional and whimsical, and that they are controlled far
more by their fancies than by their common sense?"
In cotton culture there is little to elevate a man. One of the numerous
errors flying about is that the slave in the cotton fields was a skilled
laborer, and that there is intellectual training in planting, weeding, and
picking. The owner or renter must of course accustom his mind to consider
the important questions of the times of plowing and seeding, and he must
submit to the anxiety which besets the farmer all over the world; but
cotton culture is a monotonous thing, the handling of the few tools is at
best a matter of dexterity, and the only man who gets an intellectual
training out of it is the manager. When cotton is high, a plantation is a
more or less speculative investment, and many people who save money put it
into land and hire a manager. Cotton broking and banking firms sometimes
carry on plantations of their own. City bankers and heavy men get
plantations on mortgage, or by purchase; and banks sometimes own too much
of this kind of property.
Of course many planters run their own plantations; but on all large
estates, and many small ones, there is a manager who is virtually the old
overseer over again. Commonly he is a good specimen of the lower class of
the white population; in a very few cases he is a Negro. Successful
managers command a salary as high as $3,000 a year or more, and have some
opportunity to plant on their own account; business sense such a man must
have, but above all he must be able to "handle niggers," an art in which,
by common consent, most Northern owners of cotton land are wanting. On a
large plantation there will also be one or more assistant managers,
commonly called "riders"; a bookkeeper, who may be an important
functionary; a plantation doctor, sometimes on contract, sometimes times
taking patients as they come and charging their bills on the books of the
plantation. On one plantation employing a hundred and thirty Italian
families there is even a plantation priest.
The manager subdivides the estate into plots, or "plows"--you hear the
expression "he has a fifteen-plow farm"--of from ten to thirty-five acres,
according to the number of working hands in the squad that takes it. 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; but their number is small and they are likely
to drift out either into cotton mills or into sawmill and timber work. The
foreign agricultural laborers, as has been shown in the chapter on
immigration, are few in number. The Germans, the so-called Austrians, the
few Bulgarians, Greeks, Syrians, and Italians, all taken together, are
probably less than 10,000, and there seems little reason to suppose that
their number will soon increase. The main source of plantation labor has
always been the Negroes who furnish about two million workers on other
people's land, and with their families make up more than half of all the
Negroes in the United States.
With their families--for the unit on the plantation is not a hand, but a
family, or where three or four unmarried men or unmarried women work
together, a gang. This practice, combined with the child labor in cotton
mills, accounts for the large number of persons under fifteen years
old--more than half the boys in some states--who are employed in gainful
occupations. This is one of the most striking divergences from any kind of
Northern farming where plenty of farmers' wives ride the mowing machine,
and farmers' sisters pick fruit, and farmers' children drop potatoes,
where foreign women often work in garden patches, but where people do not
habitually employ women and children at heavy field labor.
The best Negroes, unless they own land of their own, seek the form of
contract most advantageous to themselves, paying either a money rent of
two dollars to eight dollars an acre, or an equivalent cotton rent. It is
generally believed that the renters are the people most likely to save
money and buy property for themselves. In Dunleith, Mississippi, a crew of
seven people came in with a hundred dollars' worth of property, and three
years later went away with more than a thousand dollars' worth of
accumulated stock, tools and personal property. A renter must have animals
of his own, and is obliged to feed them and to keep up his tools. Some
planters find that renters leave them just as they are doing well, and
that the land is skinned by them. In general, however, a Negro who has the
necessary mules can always find a chance to rent land.
The share hand or cropper is next in point of thrift; the planter
furnishes him house, wood, seed, animals, and implements; and at the end
of the year the value of the crop is divided between owner and tenant,
either half and half or "three fifths and four fifths," which means that
the Negro gets three fifths of the cotton and four fifths of the corn.
A third class is the wage hands, who in general have not the ability to
rent land on any terms; they receive a house and fuel, and wages, from
fifteen dollars a month up to a dollar a day. Where steady wage hands can
be found, this is considered the best arrangement for the planter.
Renters and croppers may be supplemented by extra work, paid for by them,
or charged to them. If they get into a tight place with their cotton, the
manager sends wage hands to their aid, and at picking time all available
help of all ages is scraped together and sent out according to the needs
of the plantation. Of course, a renter or a "cropper" may allow members of
his family to work for others, if he cannot keep them busy. On some
plantations tenants pay on an average nearly a hundred dollars a year for
this extra help.
During the five years from 1903 to 1907 there was a phenomenal demand for
cotton hands, and planters were eager to get anybody that looked like
work; hence the Negro had the agreeable sensation of seeing people compete
for him. Of course, if, at the "change of the year" (January 1st), the
Negro moves to one planter, he moves away from another, and the man thus
left behind has gloomy view of the fickleness and instability of the negro
race. One of the best managed plantations in the Delta of Mississippi,
supposed to be very profitable, has seen such a shift that at the end of
five years hardly one of the original hands was on the place. 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. While he remains on a plantation,
the Negro feels, says a planter, "the certainty, in his own mind, that he
himself is necessary to its success."
It is this dissatisfaction with the negro laborer which has led to the
efforts, described above, to bring in foreigners, efforts which have been
so far quite unsuccessful, first, because the number of people that could
be induced to come is too small to affect the South, and secondly, because
few of them mean to remain as permanent day laborers. Since the South
seems better fitted than any other part of the earth for the cultivation
of cotton, since at any price above six cents a pound there is some profit
in the business, and at the prices prevailing during the last five years a
large profit, it seems certain that the Negro will be steadily desired as
a cotton hand; and the question comes down to that suggested by Nicholas
Worth: "There ought to be a thousand schools, it seemed to me, that should
have the aim of Hampton. Else how could the negroes--even a small
percentage of them--ever be touched by any training at all? And if they
were not to be trained in a way that would make the cotton fields cleaner
and more productive, how should our upbuilding go on? For it must never be
forgotten that the very basis of civilization here is always to be found
in cotton."
If the master sometimes is dissatisfied with the laborer, the Negro in his
turn has his own complaints, which Booker Washington has summed up as
follows: "Poor dwelling-houses, loss of earnings each year because of
unscrupulous employers, high-priced provisions, poor schoolhouses, short
school terms, poor school-teachers, bad treatment generally, lynchings and
whitecapping, fear of the practice of peonage, a general lack of police
protection, and want of encouragement." In this list several of the items
refer to the plantation system of accounts, which cannot be understood
without some explanation of the advance system.
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; and under which (for the same system runs down to the very
bottom) the planters themselves are in the habit of making advances to
their tenants and hands. The white and negro land owner commonly make
arrangements "to be furnished" by the nearest country storekeeper; or by a
store or bank, or white friend in the nearest city. On the plantation, the
planter himself commonly furnishes his own hands, and has a store or
"commissary" for that purpose. Neither banker nor planter expects to lose
money; both are subject to heavy deductions by the failure of planters and
the departure of hands, and hence they recoup themselves from those who
will pay. The effect is, of course, that when the cotton is sold and
accounted for, the planter and his hand alike may not have any surplus to
show, and begin the new year in debt. And the same round may be gone over
again year by year during a lifetime.
The system is enforced by lien loans, through which the crop is the
security for the loan, and in addition it is customary for the small
farmer to mortgage mules, tools, and whatever else he may have. As Stone
explains: "The factor's method of self-protection is to take a deed of
trust on the live stock and prospective crop, and is the same whether the
applicant be a two-mule Negro renter, or the white owner of a thousand
acres of land, wanting ten thousand dollars of advances.... There is,
however, this difference: the white man gets his advances in cash,
available at stated intervals, while the Negro gets the most of his in the
shape of supplies." Many people believe that the whole crop lien system is
an incentive to debt, that if it were abolished people would have to
depend upon their character and credit; and hence a determined effort was
made in South Carolina in 1908 to repeal the lien law outright.
The obvious defects of this system, the tendency to extravagance, the not
knowing where you stand, the prevention of saving habits, are aggravated
for the Negro because the white man keeps the books. The Negro is
accustomed to be charged prices which in many cases are a half higher than
the cash price of the same article in the nearby stores; he knows that
there will be an interest charge at the rate of from ten per cent to forty
per cent on his running account, and he suspects (sometimes with reason)
that the bookkeeping is careless or fraudulent. Some planters make a
practice of ending the settlement of every account with a row, and the
consequent frame of mind of the Negro is illustrated by a stock story. A
Negro has been trading with a local merchant and goes to a new store
because they offer twelve pounds of sugar for a dollar instead of ten. On
his way back he passes the old place, where they ask him in, weigh up his
sugar, and show him that he has actually only nine pounds instead of
twelve. "Yes, boss, dat's so, but after all, perhaps he didn't get the
best of it; while he was weighing out that sugar, I slips dis yere pair of
shoes into my basket."
The story precisely illustrates the futility of cheating the Negro; for
whenever he thinks his accounts are juggled, he will see to it that his
labor is no more conscientious than the bookkeeper's. Many of the really
long-headed planters see that the less the relations of employer and hand
are matters of favor, and the more they become affairs of business, the
easier it will be to get on with their hands. Many of them have a fixed
basis for advances, not more than about fifteen dollars a month for a
family, and that in provisions only; others keep no book accounts for such
advances, but issue coupon books of say fifteen dollars every month. A few
pay their wage hands and give out the advances in cash, allowing people to
buy where they will. A very few decline to have anything to do with
advances in any form; but inasmuch as the Negroes must eat, in such cases
the hands usually get somebody else to furnish them. Some planters close
up their accounts at the end of the year, compelling the Negroes to turn
in whatever they have in property to close out their accounts, and then
start in afresh.
All these are only palliatives; the net effect of the system of advances
to hands is to accentuate the industrial character of the cotton
plantation. A big plantation in central Alabama or the Delta of
Mississippi cannot be compared with any Northern farms, nor even with the
great ranches of California; it is very like a coal mine back in a cove of
the mountains of Pennsylvania; the same forlorn houses, the same company
store, the same system of store orders and charges; only the coal mine
sells its product from day to day and pays any differences in cash at the
end of the month, while the cotton hand must wait till his particular bale
is sold at the end of the season, before he can draw his profit. The Negro
is therefore less likely than the miner to lay tip money, and is even
more at the mercy of the company's bookkeeper.
Here is an actual annual account of a plantation family in the Delta of
Mississippi, two adults and one child, poor workers:
--------------------------------------------
| Debit | | Credit
------------|--------|-------------|--------
Doctor | $24.45 | Cotton | $498.57
Mule | 33.00 | Cotton seed | 91.00
Clothing | 53.40 | |
Rations | 60.00 | |--------
Feed | 11.25 | | $589.57
Rent | 130.50 | |
Extra labor | 179.45 | |--------
Seed | 11.90 | |
Ginning | 43.50 | |
Cash down | 53.50 | Debit. | $11.38
|--------| |
| 600.95 | | $600.95
--------------------------------------------
These people got their living and sixty-six dollars in cash and credit
during the year; but the charge for extra labor shows that they were
shiftless and did not work out their own crop. On the same plantation an
industrious family of three adults and one child earned in a year $974, of
which $450 was net cash.
An examination of various plantation accounts reveals the fact that the
actual earnings of the negro hands, if industrious, are considerably
greater than the average for the Pennsylvania miners, but of course the
whole family works in the fields. The renters could do still better if
they had money enough to carry them through the year; on a prosperous
plantation in Arkansas, only about one fortieth of all the negro gangs
kept off the books of the company and drew their earnings in cash at the
end of the year, while two thirds of the Italians employed on the same
plantation had no store accounts. In fact there is some complaint that the
Italians club together and buy their provisions at wholesale.
The advance system is complicated by a system of "Christmas Money." You
hear planters bitterly cursing the Negroes who have demanded $25, $50, or
$100 to spend at Christmas time, as though the money were not charged
against the Negro to be deducted at the end of the year; and as though it
were not so advanced in order to induce the Negro to make a contract with
them. Many planters refuse to give Christmas money and yet fill up their
plantation houses. It is all part of a vicious system; the wage hands have
to be paid somehow, though often not completely paid up till the end of
the year; the share hands and renters are carried by the planter because
they always have been carried; and because bad planters can take advantage
of this opportunity to squeeze their hands. The difficulty is one known in
other lands; in Ceylon, for instance, the laborers on tea and rubber
estates draw advances, carry debts which have to be assumed by a new
employer, trade at a "caddy," which is the same thing as a commissary, and
complain of the accounts.
The system is just as vicious for the small land owners both negro and
white. Most Southern states under their crop lien law allow the growing
crop to be mortgaged for cash or advances, and hence any farmer has credit
for supplies or loans up to the probable value of the crop when marketed.
That value is variable, the advances are clogged with interest and
overcharges, and the whole system is a heavy draft on the country. There
are money sharks in the Southern country as well as in the Northern
cities, and many scandalous transactions. One man in Alabama has 2,500
Negroes on his books for loans, in some cases for a loan of $5 with
interest charges of $1.50 a month. Cases have been known where a Negro
brought to a plantation his mules and stock, worked a season, and at the
end saw all his crop of cotton taken, and his property swept up, including
the mules, which are exempt by law. Many back plantations take the seed
for the ginning--that is, they exact more than twice what the service is
worth. A Negro has been known to borrow say $200; when it was not paid,
the white lender seized on all his possessions, and without going through
any legal formality gave him credit for $100, leaving the balance of the
debt hanging over his head. A peddler has been known to insist on leaving
a clock at the house of a poor colored woman who protested that she did
not want a clock, could not afford a clock and would not take a clock. The
man drove off, returned some months later, demanded payment for the clock
which was just where he left it, never having been started, and when the
money was not forthcoming proceeded to take away the woman's chickens--her
poor little livelihood. She ran to a white neighbor, who came back with
her and turned the scoundrel out. There is first and last much of this
advantage taken of the ignorance and poverty of the Negro; a certain type
of planter declares that he can make more money out of an ignorant black
than out of an educated one. As one of the white friends of the colored
race in the South says, the Negroes must receive at least sufficient
education to enable them to protect themselves against such exaction.
Considering the immense importance of cotton to the South, it is amazing
how wasteful is its culture and its distribution. Experts say that a great
part of the cost of fertilizers could be saved by cultivating the cow
pea. About six per cent of the value of the fiber--a trifle of forty
million dollars--is seriously injured by ginning. Comparatively few
farmers or planters select their seed, though several of the Southern
agricultural colleges have set up cotton schools, and the president of the
Mississippi Agricultural and Mechanical College has actually begun to hold
farmers' institutes for the negro farmers. The cotton bale is probably the
most careless package used for a valuable product. It sometimes literally
drops to pieces before it reaches the consumer; and of course the grower,
in the long run, loses by the poor quality or the poor packing of his
product. The grading of cotton requires that a large quantity be brought
together in one place, and the small grower gets little advantage out of
improvement in his staple.
What the South most needs in cotton is the improvement of the labor. As
President Hardy, of the Mississippi Agricultural College, says: "So many
of our negroes are directing their own work that their efficiency must be
preserved and increased or great injury will result to our whole economic
system. The prosperity of our section as a whole is affected by the
productive capacity of every individual in our midst. The negro's
inefficiency is a great financial drain on the South, and I believe this
farmers' institute work for the negro is the beginning of a permanent
policy that will be very far-reaching in its results. There is no doubt
that this is one of the ways of increasing the cotton production of the
country that has heretofore received very little attention."
It remains to consider the relation of the race question to cotton
manufacture. Long before the Civil War it was seen that the Southern
staple was being sent to foreign countries and to the North to be
manufactured, and that the South was buying back its own material in
cotton goods; therefore some cotton mills were constructed in the South.
The labor in these mills seems to have been entirely white, but their
product, which was of the coarser qualities, was never large enough to
control the market. About 1880 came a new era of cotton manufacture, aided
first by the extension of the railway system, second by the development of
water power, and third by the discovery that the poor whites make a
tolerable mill population. Hence grew up a chain of flourishing factory
towns, most of them on or near the "fall line," so as to take advantage of
the water powers, and there has been a steady growth of Southern
manufactures. In 1887 the Southern mills worked up only 400,000 bales,
which was one fifth of the staple used for manufactures in the United
States. Twenty years later they were making up 2,400,000 bales, which was
one half the consumption. The state of South Carolina alone in 1905
produced manufactures to the amount of $79,000,000.
The first thing to notice in this manufacture is that the mill hands are
still exclusively white. Several efforts have been made in Columbia,
Charleston, and elsewhere to carry on cotton mills with negro labor, and a
few negro capitalists have built mills in which they expected to employ
people of their own race; but every one of these experiments seems to have
been a failure, partly because of the ignorance of the average Negro who
could be drawn into the industry, and partly because of his irregularity.
The Poor Whites do not make by any means the best mill help, and their
output of yards per hand is considerably less than that in the Northern
states. The supply of white labor also shows signs of depletion, though
Mountain Whites are being brought down; it is still a question whether
they will settle in the new places, or whether after they have saved
money they will return to their mountains. Hence the frantic efforts to
bring in mill hands from outside the South. Northern hands will not accept
a lower wage scale and do not like the social conditions. It is plain that
the Southern cotton manufacture is entirely dependent upon the supply of
native white labor.
Notwithstanding the great growth of cotton manufacture in the South, the
fine qualities are still made elsewhere; and the capital employed, the
total wages paid, and the value of output are much greater in the North.
The value of the product in South Carolina rose between 1890 and 1905 from
$10,000,000 to $50,000,000, but in the same period the value in
Massachusetts rose from $100,000,000 to $130,000,000. The output of cotton
goods in Columbia, $5,000,000 is less than half the output of Nashua, New
Hampshire. The New England states still furnish nearly one half the output
of cotton manufactures, measured by value. The Northern states as a whole
pay $65,000,000 a year for wages against $27,000,000 in the South; and
their product is $270,000,000 against $268,000,000 in the South. It is
evident, therefore, that the scepter for cotton manufacture has not yet
passed into the hands of the South.
The discussion of the economic forces and tendencies of the South in the
last three chapters may now be briefly recapitulated. The South is a
prosperous and advancing region on the highway to wealth, but advancing
rather more slowly than other agricultural sections of the country, and in
material wealth far behind the West and farther behind the Middle states
and New England. It will be several decades before the South can possibly
have as much accumulation as that now in possession of the region which
most resembles it in the United States, the Middle West and Far West. Of
its sources of wealth, the timber is temporary, mining and iron making
limited in area. The chief employment must always be agriculture, and
particularly cotton. Cotton culture on a large scale, as now carried on,
is an industrial enterprise in which the laborer is likely to be
exploited. The advance system is a curse to the South, inciting to
extravagance and leading to dreams of wealth not yet created; it is
especially bad for the Negro, who is at his best as a renter, or still
more as the owner of land. Economically the progress of the negro laborer
is very slow, but he is absolutely necessary to the welfare of the South,
for no substitute can be discerned.