NORTH AND SOUTH
"Where do you and the _Charlotte_ go when you leave here, Frederick?"
his sister inquired as the family sat at breakfast the next morning.
"New Orleans, I suppose; we touch there for a cargo of cotton," was the
reply.
"Then you'll see the crop gathered, won't you, Uncle Frederick?" Mary
put in.
"Hardly that, lassie," replied her uncle kindly. "All the work will be
done before I arrive. However, I shall not mind that for I have seen
southern cotton fields in their prime before now."
"It grows everywhere in the South, doesn't it?" Mary ventured.
"One could hardly say that, my dear," Captain Dillingham responded with
a mild shake of his head. "On the contrary the cotton belt of the
United States is comparatively small considering the vast crops it
yields."
"Why don't they make it bigger and plant more cotton?" questioned Tim.
"Cotton, as I told you, sonny, has its own ideas as to where it will
grow. Let it be planted farther north than forty-five degrees and it
will only thrive under glass; or try to cultivate it farther south than
the thirty-five degree line and it will also balk. This, you see,
leaves a rather narrow zone that answers its demands in the way of
temperature and soil. For the kind of soil cotton likes has to be
considered also. If the land is too sandy the moisture will soon dry up
and the plants shrivel; or if there is an undue proportion of clay the
excess moisture will not drain off and the plants will run to wood and
leaves. Therefore you have the problem of getting the right proportions
of clay, loam and sand in a climate where the temperature holds
practically even."
"Why, I shouldn't think any spot on earth would fill that bill,"
grinned Carl.
"We do succeed in getting just such areas, however," returned Captain
Dillingham. "North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana,
Texas, Arkansas, Florida, Tennessee, Indian Territory, Missouri,
Virginia, Kentucky, Kansas, and Oklahoma all contrive to answer the
requirements to a greater or less degree. These States boast soils that
are blends of clay, sand, and loam in the desired proportions; and
while some of them are better than others both soil and temperature are
such that cotton can be grown in them. Given these two assets the rest
of the conundrum is up to the planter."
"I should think most of it was answered for him when he has these two
important factors," Mrs. McGregor asserted.
"But to have climate and land is not enough," protested her brother.
"Once he possesses the land the owner must take care of it. It cannot
be allowed to run out but must be plowed up, fertilized, and the crop
tended like any other farm product. Before cotton growers realized
this, not much attention was paid to these laws and in consequence the
crop of many a southern plantation suffered. Now cotton-raising is done
far more scientifically. The old stalks are gathered and destroyed; the
land is plowed and fertilized, and afterward seed-planting machines go
up and down the rows, scattering five or six seeds into each hole, with
a space of not more than a foot between the holes. Then the seeds are
covered over lightly and left to sprout."
"How long is it before they come up?" interrogated Carl.
"About ten or twelve days," was the reply. "A couple of days later the
first leaf appears and then trouble begins. April sees the Carolina
planters thinning their shoots in order to have sturdy plants from
which to select the ones eventually allowed to grow. States farther
south get at the task earlier. After the thinning process is over the
plants are hilled up like potatoes and the spaces between the rows,
where the last season's crop previously grew, is plowed to keep the
soil open and free for drainage. Men afterward travel through the open
rows hoeing up the loose soil and heaping it around the young plants to
strengthen and protect them; then, since nothing more can be done
immediately everybody takes a rest and waits."
"Then what happens?" piped Tim.
"Oh, after a time the same process is repeated. The earth by this time
has become crusted over and must be opened up again; the hauling, too,
takes place once more. Hauling is the name given to bedding up the
plants with loose earth. Often there are four or five _haulings_. By
July the plants have grown sufficiently to show which one in each hill
is to be the most thrifty and this one is left to grow while the other
shoots are pulled up. After that, given sunny days and occasional light
showers, the crop should prosper. Should there, however, be too much
heat, or too great a quantity of rain, things will not move so
successfully."
"How long does cotton have to grow before it is ready for picking?"
asked Carl.
"The plants bloom approximately the middle of June--sometimes earlier,
sometimes later, according to the climates of the various States. Two
months after that the crop is ready to be gathered. You must not,
however, run away with the notion that cotton-picking is a hurried
process. Often it goes on from the end of August until into November or
December. It is a long-drawn-out, tedious, monotonous task. Whole
families join in the harvesting for since there is always some low and
some tall cotton (some annual and some perennial varieties) the
children can share with their elders in the work and thus earn quite a
sum of money. In fact, in the old days before child labor laws
protected the kiddies, and while cotton-picking was done by slaves,
many a poor little mite toiled cruelly long in the fields. Even the
older negroes were driven with whips and compelled to keep at work
until utterly exhausted."
His audience gasped.
"Yes," nodded their uncle, "I am afraid that urged forward by the
desire to garner a big crop before rain should fall and spoil it, the
cotton growers practiced much cruelty. No doubt, too, the same tyranny
reigned in India. Wherever work must be done by hand and labor is cheap
and plentiful, human beings come to be classed to a great extent as
machines. Plantation owners become so interested in the money they are
to make that they forget everything else. Of course labor was never as
cheap in our Southern States even during slave days as in India and
therefore until the advent of the cotton gin cotton was not one of our
valuable crops."
"You mean because the seeds had to be picked out by hand?" Carl said.
"Yes. There was, to be sure, the primitive kind of gin resorted to in
India for cleaning certain black-seed varieties. Two kinds of this
black-seed, or long-stapled cotton, grew in the Sea Islands and along
the coast from Delaware to Georgia; but it could not be made to thrive
away from the moist ocean climate. Hence on inland plantations a
different and more vigorous variety of plant (one having green seeds
and short staples) was propagated. This kind was known as Upland
cotton. It was a troublesome product for the planters, I assure you,
for its many seeds clung so tightly to the lint that it was almost out
of the question to remove them. The simple little gin copied from India
and successfully used on the black seed variety was entirely
impracticable on this Upland growth since it tore the fibers all to
bits."
"They did need a cotton gin, didn't they!" Carl ejaculated.
"Very badly, indeed," agreed Captain Dillingham. "Well, the only
substitute for machinery was fingers; and when I tell you that it often
took an entire day to get out of a three-pound batch of cotton a pound
or so that was clear of seeds you will understand what a slow process
it was."
"At that rate I shouldn't think it would have paid anybody to raise
cotton," sniffed Carl.
"It didn't," returned his uncle. "Moreover it rendered the product very
expensive, for it required a great number of slaves to clean any
considerable quantity of cotton. I often think of the toil and misery
that went into the cotton-growing of those slavery days. After working
for a long stretch of hours in the blazing sun the negroes came in at
night worn out. But were they allowed to rest? Perhaps some of them who
had considerate owners were; but many, many others less fortunate were
set to picking out seeds and lest they fall asleep at their task
overseers prodded them with whips."
"Gee!"
"That was slavery, son," declared Captain Dillingham. "Do you wonder
that Abraham Lincoln thought it would be worth even a war to rid this
country of such an evil? Understand, I am not condemning all slave
owners. Undoubtedly there were kind and humane ones just as there are
to this day employers who are fair with their help. But urged on by
commercial greed the temptation of the planters was to force the slaves
to do more than was right, and as a result a great deal of cruelty was
practiced. Had the primitive method of picking cotton by hand continued
it is probable that slavery might have died a natural death without
recourse to war, for many of the Southerners were reaching a point
where the returns from cotton and tobacco were not sufficient to feed
the army of slaves that swarmed over the plantations. To use a common
phrase the slaves were eating their heads off. It was just at this
juncture, however, that Eli Whitney came along with his cotton gin and
in a twinkling the South became revolutionized and the problem of the
legion of idle, profitless slaves was settled. They would now be idle
and profitless no longer. Vast quantities of cotton could henceforth be
planted and the negroes could cultivate and gather it. With Eli
Whitney's gin to do the slow and hindering part of the process
cotton-raising could be made a paying industry."
"Mr. Whitney bobbed up in the very nick of time, didn't he?" smiled
Mary.
"For the financial prosperity of the South he did," her uncle
responded. "But to the welfare of the negroes his advent was a fatal
stroke. Slaves immediately were more in demand than they ever had been
before. No mechanical device could take their place. Cotton must be
planted, cultivated, and harvested by hand and the larger the cotton
fields became, the harder the slaves were worked. The cotton crop
became the staple product of the South. Many a Southerner who took up
arms against the Union did so because he honestly believed that to free
the slaves would mean the economic ruin of his section of the country."
"I never thought of that side of the question before," Mrs. McGregor
murmured thoughtfully.
"Nor I," rejoined Carl.
"Nevertheless it is a fact none of us here in the North should forget,"
continued Captain Dillingham. "To the southern planter our point of
view appeared unfair and grossly one-sided. It was easy enough for the
North to say the slaves should be freed. They had no cotton fields and
their prosperity was not dependent on the negroes. But to let the
slaves go meant ruin for the South. It was not alone, you see, that
their owners wished the profit derived from buying and selling them;
they needed them to work. Never had the South had such an opportunity
to coin wealth as that now opening. What wonder its residents were
angry at having this dazzling prospect for fortune-making snatched
away? Remember and take these facts into consideration when you think
harshly of those who took up arms to defend slavery."
There was an instant's pause.
"Of course, however, none of this justifies slavery or makes it more
right. The entire principle of it was wrong; it was un-Christian,
unjust, and cruel, and the only honorable thing to do was to bring it
to an end in this country. But that is another story altogether. What
we are talking about now is the cotton itself; and to get a big view of
this subject it is well to consider what was happening in the world
just at this time, and why cotton was such a desirable commodity.
"Over across the ocean James Watts's steam engine, combined with the
flying shuttle of John Kay, the spinning jenny of Hargreaves, the
water-frame of Arkwright, and the self-acting loom of Crompton, was
working as great a revolution in England's cloth-making industry as Eli
Whitney's cotton gin had done in the South. In other words the hand
loom had been supplanted by the more modern device of the steam-driven
spinning mill. This meant that in future cloth would no longer be made
in small quantities in the homes, women of the families spinning the
thread and weaving it whenever they could steal a bit of time from
other household duties. No! Cloth was to be made in factories on a much
larger scale, and sold to the public."
"No wonder the fact set everybody to raising cotton!" declared Mrs.
McGregor.
"No wonder indeed!" nodded her brother. "From a vintage so small that
even President Jefferson scarcely knew America had a cotton crop at all
this product of the South leaped forward by bounds. The year preceding
Eli Whitney's invention the United States exported less than one
hundred and forty thousand bales; but the year afterward the shipment
had soared to nearly half a million. The following year it was a
million and a half; the year after that six million."
"Gee whizz!" commented Carl. "That was some record, wasn't it?"
"Rather!" agreed his uncle.
"How much do we export now, Uncle Frederick?" Mary asked.
"From nine to twelve million bales of five-hundred pounds each are
raised annually in the South," returned Captain Dillingham. "Of this
about ninety per cent. is Upland cotton, the green seeds of which have
to be taken out by a gin similar to the one Eli Whitney invented.
Approximately about half this vast crop is exported."
"I had no idea we raised so much cotton," mused Carl.
"We raise quantities of it, son," Uncle Frederick said. "Now you can
understand better why the South was so resentful at being compelled to
free the slaves. With cotton so much in demand the prices of slaves had
greatly increased. The planters had untold wealth almost within their
grasp. It was all very well for the North to assert that slavery was a
barbarous practise. Who was to tend the cotton fields when the slaves
were gone?"
"The South did have something on its side, didn't it?" Mary ventured.
"A great deal, when once you put yourself in the Southerner's place. We
in the North are liable to emphasize only the cruelty of slavery and
are often unable to understand how enlightened and Christian men could
keep slaves and fight to keep them. You see there were reasons."
Mary nodded.
"Of course, as I said before, all the cotton-raising in the world could
not make the thing right. It was wrong from start to finish.
Nevertheless it does explain why some of our people felt the freeing of
the slaves so unjust and such a blow to their prosperity that they
threatened secession from the Union."
"And it was because Abraham Lincoln would not allow them to secede that
the war was fought!" announced Carl triumphantly.
"Precisely! You cannot allow part of a country to rise up and walk out
any more than you can let some of the wheels of a watch announce they
are not going to turn any more," laughed his uncle. "It requires every
part to make the watch go; and it takes the united strength of a people
to make a nation. North and South were all beloved children of one
land, and Abraham Lincoln, like the father of a big family, was not
going to let any of the household break away from the organization to
which it belonged. It meant a struggle to do the two things
necessary--free the slaves and preserve the Union; but quarrels are
sometimes necessary in families. After they are over there is a more
perfect understanding. So it has been with this one. Both sides paid a
fearful price but as a result we now have _one nation, indivisible,
with liberty and justice for all_."
"That's the oath of allegiance!" cried Carl, Mary, and Tim in chorus,
as they leaped to their feet and stood at salute.
"We say it at school every morning," continued Tim, "but I never knew
before what it meant."
"You will know better now, won't you?" Captain Dillingham replied.
"Every time you say those words remember the brave men of the South who
really believed they had a right to establish a government of their own
and protect the prosperity of their part of this great land. If you do
this you will learn to honor both sides alike, each of which fought so
devotedly for the cause he cherished. And now that the war is over the
entire country has the South to thank for one of its greatest sources
of wealth--cotton. The South raises it; the North, with its many mills,
transforms the raw product into a finished commodity. How is that for
team work? Could there be better proof of how vitally each section
needs the other?"