myself in the magic garden of Cherry and Fair Star, so incessant and
multifarious were the carols of the birds, which were the only happy
colored people I saw in my Southern tour, notwithstanding the assurances
of the many ingenious and candid gentlemen who attempted to prove to me
that the palm of terrestrial felicity must be awarded to their negroes.
As I stepped through my window upon the verandah, a sharp chirp called
my attention to a mocking-bird perched upon a rose-bush beneath, whom my
presence seemed to annoy to such a degree that I retreated behind my
curtain, whence I observed her flight to a nest cunningly hid in a
creeping rose trailed around a neighboring column of the house, where
she imparted a breakfast of spiders and grasshoppers to her gaping and
clamorous offspring. While I was admiring the motherly grace of this
melodious flycatcher, a servant brought coffee, and announced that the
horses were ready, and that I might have a three-hours’ ride before
breakfast. At Houmas _les jours se suivent et se ressemblent_, and an
epitome of the first will serve as a type for all, with the exception of
such variations in the kitchen and cellar produce as the ingenuity and
exhaustless hospitality of my host were never tired of framing.
If I regretted the absence of our English agriculturist when I beheld
the 6,000 acres of cane and 1,600 of maize unfolded from the Belvedere
the day previous, I longed for his presence still more, when I saw those
evidences of luxuriant fertility attained without the aid of phosphates
or guano. The rich Mississippi bottoms need no manure, a rotation of
maize with cane affords them the necessary recuperative action. The cane
of last year’s plant is left in stubble, and renews its growth this
spring under the title of _ratoons_. When the maize is in tassel,
cow-peas are dropped between the rows, and when the lordly stalk, of
which I measured many twelve and even fifteen feet in height--bearing
three and sometimes four ears--is topped to admit the ripening sun, the
pea vine twines itself around the trunk, with a profusion of leaf and
tendril that supplies the planter with the most desirable fodder for his
mules in “rolling time,” which is their season of trial. Besides this,
the corn blades are culled and cured. These are the best meals of the
Southern race-horse, and constitute nutritious hay without dust. The
cow-pea is said to strengthen the system of the earth for the digestion
of a new crop of sugar-cane. A sufficient quantity of the cane of last
season is reserved from the mill and laid in pits, where the ends of the
stalk are carefully closed with earth until spring. After the ground has
been ploughed into ridges these canes are laid in the endless tumuli,
and not long after their interment a fresh sprout springs at each joint
of these interminable flutes.
As we ride through the wagon roads, of which there are not less than
thirty miles in this confederation of four plantations, held together by
the purse and the life of our host, the unwavering exactitude of the
rows of cane, which run without deviation at right angles with the river
down to the cane-brake, two miles off, proves that the negro would be a
formidable rival in a plowing match. The cane has been “laid by”--that
is, it requires no more labor--and will “lap,” or close up, though the
rows are seven feet apart. It feathers like a palm top; a stalk which
was cut measured six feet, although from the ridges it was but waist
high. On dissecting it near the root, we find five nascent joints, not a
quarter of an inch apart. In a few weeks more these will shoot up like a
spy-glass pulled out to its focus.
There are four lordly sugar-houses, as the grinding mills and boiling
and crystalizing buildings are called, and near each is to be found the
negro village, or “quarter,” of that section of the plantation. A wide
avenue, generally lined with trees, runs through these hamlets, which
consist of twenty or thirty white cottages, single storied and divided
into four rooms. They are whitewashed, and at no great distance might be
mistaken for New England villages, with a town-hall which often serves
in the latter for a “meeting-house,” with, occasionally, a row of stores
on the ground floor.
The people, or “hands,” are in the field, and the only inhabitants of
the settlements are scores of “picaninnies,” who seem a jolly
congregation, under the care of crones, who here, as in an Indian
village, act as nurses to the rising generation destined from their
births to the limits of a social Procrustean bed. The increase of
property on the estate is about 5 per cent. per annum by the birth of
children.
We ride an hour before coming upon any “hands” at work in the fields.
There is an air of fertile desolation that prevails in no other
cultivated land. The regularity of the cane, its garden-like freedom
from grass or weeds, and the _ad unguem_ finish and evenness of the
furrows would seem the work of nocturnal fairies, did we not realize the
system of “gang-labor” exemplified in a field we at length reach, where
some thirty men and women were giving with the hoe the last polish to
the earth around the cane, which would not be molested again until
gathered for the autumnal banquet of the rolling-mills.
Small drains and larger ditches occur at almost every step. All these
flow into a channel, some fifteen feet wide, which runs between the
plantations and the uncleared forest, and carries off the water to a
“bayou” still more remote. There are twenty miles of deep ditching
before the plantation, exclusive of the canal, and as this is the
contract work of “Irish navvies,” the sigh with which our host alluded
to this heavy item in plantation expenses, was expressive. The work is
too severe for African thews, and experience has shown it a bad economy
to overtask the slave. The sugar-planter lives in apprehension of four
enemies. These are the river when rising, drought, too much or
unseasonable rain, and frost. The last calls into play all his energies,
and tasks his utmost composure. In Louisiana the cane never ripens as it
does in Cuba, and they begin to grind as early in October as the amount
of juices will permit. The question of a crop is one of early or late
frost. With two months’ exemption they rely, in a fair season, upon a
hogshead of 1,200 pounds to the acre, and if they can run their mills
until January, the increase is more than proportionate, each of its
latter days in the earth adding saccharine virtue to the cane.
At an average of a hogshead to the acre, each working hand is good for
seven hogsheads a year, which, at last year’s prices, 8 cents per pound
for ordinary qualities, would be a yield of £140 per annum for each full
field hand.
Two hogsheads to the acre are not unfrequently, and even three have
been, produced upon rich lands in a good season. Estimating the sugar at
70 per cent., and the refuse, _bagasse_, at 30 per cent., the latter
would give us two tuns and a quarter to the acre, which open one’s eyes
to the tireless activity of nature in this semi-tropical region.
From the records of Houmas I find that, in 1857, the year of its
purchase at about £300,000, it yielded a gross of $304,000, say £63,000,
upon the investment.
In the rear of this great plantation there are 18,000 additional acres
of cane-brake which are being slowly reclaimed, like the fields now
rejoicing in crops, as fast as the furnace of the sugar-house calls for
fuel. Were it desirable to accelerate the preparation of this reserve
for planting, it might be put in tolerable order in three years at a
cost of £15 per acre. We extended our ride into this jungle on the
borders of which, in the unfinished clearing, I saw plantations of
“negro corn,” the sable cultivators of which seem to have disregarded
the symmetry practised in the fields of their master, who allows them
from Saturday noon until Monday’s cockcrow for the care of their private
interests, and in addition to this, whatever hours in the week they can
economize by the brisk fulfilment of their allotted tasks. Some of these
patches are sown broadcast, and the corn has sprung up like Zouave
_tirailleurs_ in their most fantastic vagaries, rather than like the
steady regimental drill of the cane and maize we have been traversing.
Corn, chickens, and eggs, are from time immemorial the perquisites of
the negro, who has the monopoly of the two last named articles in all
well ordered Louisiana plantations. Indeed, the white man cannot compete
with them in raising poultry, and our host was evidently delighted when
one of his negroes, who had brought a dozen Muscovy ducks to the
mansion, refused to sell them to him except for cash. “But Louis, won’t
you trust me? Am I not good for three dollars?" “Good enough, Massa; but
dis nigger want de money to buy flour and coffee for him young family.
Folks at Donaldsonville will trust Massa--won’t trust nigger.” The money
was paid, and, as the negro left us, his master observed, with a sly,
humorous twinkle, “That fellow sold forty dollars worth of corn last
year, and all of them feed their chickens with my corn, and sell their
own.”
There are three overseers at Houmas, one of whom superintends the whole
plantation, and likewise looks after another estate of 8,000 acres, some
twelve miles down the river, which our host added to his possession two
years since, at a cost of £150,000. In any part of the world, and in any
calling, Mr. S---- (I do not know if he would like to see his name in
print) would be considered an able man. Mr. S. attends to most of the
practice requiring immediate attention. We visited one of those
hospitals, and found half a dozen patients ill of fever, rheumatism, and
indigestion, and apparently well cared for by a couple of stout nurses.
The truckle bedsteads were garnished with mosquito bars, and I was told
that the hospital is a favorite resort, which its inmates leave with
reluctance. The pharmaceutical department was largely supplied with a
variety of medicines, quinine and preparations of sulphites of iron.
“Poor drugs,” said Mr. S., “are a poor economy.”
I have mentioned engineering as one of the requisites of a competent
overseer. To explain this I must observe that Houmas is esteemed very
high land, and that in its cultivated breadth there is only a fall of
eight feet to carry off its surplus water. In the plantation of Governor
Manning, which adjoins it, an expensive steam draining machine is
employed to relieve his fields of this encumbrance, which is effected by
the revolutions of a fan-wheel some twenty feet in diameter, which laps
up the water from a narrow trough into which all the drainage flows, and
tosses it into an adjoining bayou.
On Governor Manning’s plantation we saw the process of clearing the
primitive forest, of which 150 acres were sown in corn and cotton
beneath the tall girdled trees that awaited the axe, while an equal
breadth on the other side of a broad and deep canal was reluctantly
yielding its tufted and fibrous soil, from which the jungle had just
been removed, to the ploughs of some fifty negroes, drawn by two mules
each. Another season of lustration by maize or cotton, and the rank soil
will be ready for the cane.
The cultivation of sugar differs from that of cotton in requiring a much
larger outlay of capital. There is little required for the latter
besides negroes and land, which may be bought on credit, and a year’s
clothing and provisions. There is a gambling spice in the chances of a
season which may bring wealth or ruin--a bale to the acre, which may
produce 7_d._ per pound. In a fair year the cotton planter reckons upon
ten or twelve bales to the hand, in which case the annual yield of a
negro varies from £90 to £120. His enemies are drought, excessive rains,
the ball worm, and the army worm; his best friend “a long picking
season.”
There is more steadiness in the price of sugar, and a greater certainty
of an average crop. But the cost of a sugar-house, with its mill,
boilers, vacuum pans, centrifugal and drying apparatus, cannot be less
than £10,000, and the consumption of fuel--thousands of cords of which
are cut by the “hands”--is enormous. There were cases of large fortunes
earned by planting sugar with large beginnings, but these had chiefly
occurred among early settlers, who had obtained their lands for a song.
A Creole, who recently died at the age of fifty-five, in the
neighborhood, and who began with only a few thousand dollars, had
amassed more than $1,000,000 in twenty-five years, and two of his
sons--skilful planters--were likely to die each richer than his father.
This year the prospects of sugar are dreary enough, at least while the
civil war lasts, and my host, with a certainty of 6,500 hogsheads upon
his various plantations, has none of a market. In this respect cotton
has the advantage of keeping longer than sugar. At last year’s prices,
and with the United States protective tariff of 20 per cent to shield
him from foreign competition, his crop would have yielded him over
£100,000. But all the sweet teeth of the Confederate States army can
hardly “make a hole” in the 450,000 hogsheads which this year is
expected to yield in Louisiana and Texas. Under the new tariff of the
Seceding States the loss of protection to Louisiana alone may be stated,
within bounds, at $8,000,000 per annum--which is making the planters pay
pretty dear for their Secession whistle.
When I arrived at Houmas there was the greatest anxiety for rain, and
over the vast, level plateau every cloud was scanned with avidity. Now,
a shower seemed bearing right down upon us, when it would break, like a
flying soap-bubble, and scatter its treasures short of the parched
fields in which we felt interested. The wind shifted and hopes were
raised that the next thunder-cloud would prove less illusory. But no!
“Kenner” has got it all. On the fifth day, however, the hearts of all
the planters and their parched fields were gladdened by half a day of
general and generous rain, beneath which our host’s cane fairly reeled
and reveled. It was now safe for the season, and so was the corn. But
“one man’s meat is another’s poison,” and we heard more than one
“Jeremiad” from those whose fields had not been placed in the condition
which enabled those of our friend to carry off a potation of twelve
hours of tropical rain with the ease of an alderman or a Lord Chancellor
made happier or wiser by his three bottles of port.
What is termed _hacienda_ in Cuba, _rancho_ in Mexico, and “plantation”
elsewhere, is styled “habitation” by the Creoles of Louisiana, whose
ancestors began more than a century ago to reclaim its jungles.
At last “_venit summa dies et inetuctabile tempus_.” I had seen as much
as might be of the best phase of the great institution--less than I
could desire of a most exemplary, kind-hearted, clear-headed, honest
man. In the calm of a glorious summer evening, arrayed in all the
splendor of scenery that belongs to dramas in Cloudland, where mountains
of snow, peopled by “gorgons, and hydras, and chimæras dire,” rise from
seas of fire that bear black barks, freighted with thunder, before the
breeze of battle, we crossed the Father of Waters, waving an adieu to
the good friend who stood on the shore, and turning our back to the home
we had left behind us.
It was dark when the boat reached Donaldsonville, on the opposite
“coast.” I should not be surprised to hear that the founder of this
remarkable city, which once contained the archives of the State, now
transferred to Baton Rouge, was a North Briton. There is a simplicity
and economy in the plan of the place not unfavorable to that view, but
the motives which induced the Donaldson to found his Rome on the west of
Bayou La Fourche from Mississippi must be a secret to all time. Much
must the worthy Scot have been perplexed by his neighbors, a
long-reaching colony of Spanish Creoles, who toil not and spin nothing
but fishing-nets, and who live better than Solomon, and are probably as
well dressed, _minus_ the barbaric pearl and gold of the Hebrew
potentate. Take the odd little, retiring, modest houses which grow in
the hollows of Scarborough, add to them the least imposing mansions in
the natural town of Folkestone, cast them broadsown over the surface of
the Essex marshes, plant a few trees in front of them, then open a few
“Café billiards” of the camp sort along the main street, and you have
done a very good Donaldsonville. A policeman welcomes us on landing, and
does the honors of the market, which has a beggarly account of empty
benches, the Texan bull done into beef, and a coffee-shop. The policeman
is a tall, lean, west country man; his story is simple, and he has it to
tell. He was one of Dan Rice’s company--a traveling Astley. He came to
Donaldsonville, saw, and was conquered by one of the Spanish beauties,
married her, became tavern keeper, failed, learned French, and was now
constable of the parish. There was, however, a weight on his mind. He
had studied the matter profoundly, but he was not near the bottom. How
did the friends, relatives, and tribe of his wife live? No one could
say. They reared chickens, and they caught fish; when there was a
pressure on the planters, they turned out to work for 6_s._ 6_d._ a day,
but those were rare occasions. The policeman had become quite gray with
excogitating the matter, and he had “nary notion of how they did it.”
Donaldsonville has done one fine thing. It has furnished two companies
of soldiers--all Irishmen--to the wars, and a third is in the course of
formation. Not much hedging, ditching, or hard work these times for
Paddy? The blacksmith, a huge tower of muscle, claims exemption on the
ground that “the divil a bit of him comes from Oireland; he nivir hird
av it, barrin’ from the buks he rid,” and is doing his best to remain
behind, but popular opinion is against him. As the steamer would not be
up till toward dawn, or later, it was a relief to saunter through
Donaldsonville to see society, which consisted of several gentlemen and
various Jews playing games unknown to Hoyle, in oaken bar-rooms flanked
by billiard tables. My good friend the doctor, whom I had met at Houmas,
who had crossed the river to see patients suffering from an attack of
Euchre, took us round to a little club, where I was introduced to a
number of gentlemen, who expressed great pleasure at seeing me, shook
hands violently, and walked away; and finally we melted off into a cloud
of mosquitoes by the river bank, in a box prepared for them, which was
called a bedroom. These rooms were built in wood on the stage close to
the river. “Why can’t I have one of these rooms?" asked I, pointing to a
larger mosquito-box. “It’s engaged by ladies.” “How do you know?”
“_Parceque elles ont envoyes leur butin._” It was delicious to meet the
French “plunder” for baggage--an old phrase so nicely rendered in the
mouth of the Mississippi boatman. Having passed a night of extreme
discomfiture with the winged demons of the box, I was aroused toward
dawn by the booming of the steam drum of the boat, dipped my head in
water among drowned mosquitoes, and went forth upon the landing. The
policeman had just arrived. His eagle eye lighted on a large flat, on
the stern of which was inscribed, “Pork, corn, butter, beef,” &c.
Several spry citizens were also on the platform. After salutations and
compliments, policeman speaks: “When did _she_ come in?” (meaning flat).
First Citizen--“In the night, I guess.” Second Citizen--“There’s a lot
of whiskey aboard, too.” Policeman (with pleased surprise)--“You never
mean it?” First Citizen--“Yes, Sir; one hundred and twenty gallons!”
Policeman (inspired by a bright aspiration of patriotism)--“It’s a West
country boat; why _don’t_ the citizens seize it? And whiskey rising from
17 cents to 35 cents a gallon!" Citizens murmur approval, and I feel the
whiskey part of the cargo is not safe. “Yes, Sir,” says Citizen Three,
“they seize all our property at Cairey (Cairo), and I’m for making an
example of this cargo.” Further reasons for the seizure of the article
were adduced, and it is probable they were as strong as the whiskey,
which has, no doubt, been drunk long ago on the very purest principles.
In course of conversation with the Committee of Taste which had
assembled, it was revealed to me that there was a strict watch kept over
those boats which are freighted with whiskey forbidden to the slaves,
and with principles, when they come from the West country, equally
objectionable. “Did you hear, Sir, of the chap over at Duncan Kenner’s
as was caught the other day?" “No, Sir, what was it?” “Well, Sir, he was
a man that came here and went over among the niggers at Kenner’s to buy
their chickens from them. He was took up, and they found he’d a lot of
money about him.” “Well, of course, he had money to buy the chickens.”
“Yes, Sir, but it looked suspic-ious. He was a West country fellow, tew,
and he might have meant tamperin’ with ’em. Lucky he was not taken in
the arternoon.” “Why so?” “Because if the citizens had been drunk they’d
have hung him on the spot.” The Acadia was now alongside, and in the
early morning Donaldsonville receded rapidly into trees and clouds. To
bed, and make amends for mosquito visits. On awaking, find that I am in
the same place I started from; at least, the river looks just the same.
It is difficult to believe that we have been going eleven miles an hour
against the turbid river, which is of the same appearance as it was
below, the same banks, bends, driftwood and trees.
Beyond the levees there were occasionally large clearings and
plantations of corn and cane, of which the former predominated. The
houses of the planters were not so large or so good as those on the
lower banks. Large timber rafts, navigated by a couple of men, who stood
in the shade of a couple of upright boards, were encountered at long
intervals. The river was otherwise dead. White egrets and blue herons
rose from the marshes where the banks had been bored through by
crayfish, or crevasses had been formed by the waters. The fields were
not much more lively, but at every landing the whites who came down were
in some sort of uniform, and a few negroes were in attendance to take in
or deliver goods. There were two blacks on board in irons--captured
runaways--and very miserable they looked at the thought of being
restored to the bosom of the patriarchal family from which they had, no
doubt, so prodigally eloped. I feared the fatted calf-skin would not be
applied to their backs. The river is about half a mile wide here and is
upward of one hundred feet deep. The planters’ houses in groves of pecan
and magnolias, with verandah and belvedere, became more frequent as the
steamer approached Baton Rouge, already visible in the distance over a
high bank or bluff on the right-hand side.