A Free-labor Sugar Plantation.
At last came the inevitable hour which forever clouds our pleasantest
experiences of travel—the hour for parting. It was once or twice
postponed, but the advancing summer admonished us to make no more
delays. Mr. May insisted that we should not cease to be his guests till
he had shown us his sugar plantation, and so a pleasant party was made
up to accompany us.
Among them was Mr. B. F. Flanders, a gentleman who, as the candidate of
the Radical Free-State men for Governor against the Banks ticket, had
been generally called the leader of that party. He is a man of fine
presence, with clear, handsome Grecian face. As Special Agent of the
Treasury Department, he has had control of millions, yet, I think, no
one ever accused him of corruption, though many have pronounced his
rulings unjust, and even Secretary McCulloch once went so far as to call
him “a very mischievous officer.” Like a large proportion of the
prominent men in the South, he has been there so long as to be generally
considered a native, although he originally came from the North. A
quarter of a century ago he was a young school-teacher, attracted
Southward by the larger salaries common in that region. Before the
outbreak of the war he was Treasurer of the New Orleans and Opelousas
Railroad. Some time after the establishment of the Confederacy, New
Orleans became too hot to hold him, and, in common with Cuthbert
Bullitt, who persisted in hoisting the United States flag on Jeff.
Davis’s day of thanksgiving, and a number of other more or less
prominent politicians, he had to make his escape to the North. Mr.
Denison, a young Texas planter before the war (and during Mr. Lincoln’s
administration, and a part of Mr. Johnson’s, Collector of the Port of
New Orleans), was another of the party. He, too, had been compelled to
abandon everything, and escape North, by a painful and tedious journey
through the mountains of East Tennessee. He lost sixty or seventy slaves
by the war. “Several of them were preachers, too; none of your common
negro preachers, but orthodox fellows, sound in doctrine, and good
members of the Baptist Church.” “Yes,” explained another, “Denison owned
six Baptist preachers, two blacksmiths, and a first-rate carpenter among
his gang.” The expression was almost equal to that in Sherman’s famous
dispatch from Savannah, about the “mules, negroes, and horses” he had
brought out with him in his march to the sea.
* * * * *
Early in the morning the Wayanda landed us at the noted “Dick Taylor
plantation,” owned, before the war, by the son of President Taylor, and
now occupied by negroes, under authority from the United States. The
work here did not seem to be progressing so well as on the little farms
of the Sea Islanders, and the sugar-planters of the party shook their
heads ominously at the prospect. The negroes seemed to have no one to
give unity and direction to their efforts. Their old master was gone,
and each one now wanted to be master, not only to himself, but, also, to
several of the rest. A couple of their head men even fell into a quarrel
about the truthfulness of their respective statements to the Chief
Justice, while still in his presence. The quarters were not clean; the
fences had in some places been taken for fire-wood, and the general
aspect of the place suggested neglect and decay.[35]
Near this was another plantation, abandoned by its Rebel owners, and
occupied by lessees from the United States. The absence of responsible
proprietors could be everywhere read in the dilapidated buildings and
the general air of neglect. Still there was a fair crop of cane and
cotton, and the negroes seemed to be working tolerably well for their
Northern employers.
* * * * *
A sharp thunder-storm preceded us a few moments in our visit to Mr.
May’s plantation, and we found everything in mud. The Rebels had carried
off his carriages, and there was nothing for it but to walk up the bank,
and through the sticky alluvial soil, to the beautiful orange grove, in
the midst of which we found the wide, rambling, many-porched, one-story
house, flanked by the negro cabins and the sugar-house. The guerrillas
had repeatedly ravaged the place, and whatever furniture they could not
carry off, they took good care to break. Still enough had been gathered
together to make half a dozen rooms quite comfortable. In the first we
entered, a sofa stood in the middle of the floor, with slippers and
dressing-gown lying beside it, hastily abandoned at our approach. A
little stand, holding a lamp and a book about cotton culture, stood at
its head, and above both was hung a voluminous musquito-bar. It was the
overseer’s place of retreat when he wanted to read or write. Before we
had been in the house many minutes, we began to appreciate the necessity
for such fortifications.
Presently the negroes led up horses, and we started for a gallop over
the plantation. It was its third year of profitable culture by free
labor. The stock of cane had nearly run out during the first and second
years of the war, and, from necessity, cotton had been largely planted;
although no one knew better than the proprietor that sugar land was
unfit for successful cotton culture.
Coming out behind the negro quarters, we struck the beaten road that ran
beside the main ditch, down the middle of the plantation, to the swamp
at its further side. On either hand ran off the lateral ditches, and
before us stretched a thousand acres of cultivated land, without a tree
or a fence, as level as a billiard-table, and almost as green. The corn,
of which only enough was planted to furnish the “mules and negroes” with
food, was beginning to tassel, and, since the rain, one almost fancied
the low, crackling sounds proceeding from it to arise from its lusty
growth. Most of it waved over the backs of our horses as we rode among
it.
Separated by only a shallow ditch from the corn was the cotton, which,
for lack of “plant-cane,” was being grown on a part of the land. It grew
in cleanly-worked beds, that were not unlike a Northern sweet-potato
ridge, and was already ten to fifteen inches high. Here and there were a
few “blooms”—the first of the season. They had expanded during the
night, were now of a delicate, creamy white, would next day be a dull
red, and by evening would fall, leaving the germ of the boll, the tiny
throne of the coming king.
Crossing other ditches, we came to the waving expanse of sugar, now
nearly three feet high, and growing luxuriantly. A few negroes had come
out with their plows, since the rain, and were throwing up the rich,
fresh earth against the roots. No time was to be lost, for other things
grew as rapidly, in the steaming moisture and under the genial heat, as
the cane or cotton, and woe to the planter if, by a day or two of delay,
he should be “caught in the grass.” The negroes drove their mules along
rapidly, but, save when speaking to the animals, in perfect silence.
There was no conversation among themselves, as they passed or walked
side by side on adjacent rows. A few yards away, one would scarcely know
the “plow-gang” was in the field. Cross a ditch, and you were in a
solitude of boundless wealth, without a trace or sound of the men that
made it, and might ride back and forth over the plantation for miles,
without finding them again.
Nearly all the negroes had formerly been Mr. May’s slaves. “Did you
belong to Mr. May before the war?” I said to one stalwart fellow.
“Bress ye, yes. Who’d ye s’pose I b’long to? I b’longed to Mass’r May,
of co’se, and to his father afore him.”
“Wouldn’t you rather belong to him now?”
“B’long to him now! I’s free, sah.”
“Yes, but don’t you think you would rather belong to him still, and not
have to take care of yourself?”
“No, sah. I’s free.”
“But now you have all the trouble of supporting yourself, buying your
own clothes, making your bargains, getting your provisions, and the
like. Don’t you think you would get along better if you still had Mr.
May to do all this for you?”
“No, sah. We’s git along heap better dis way. We’s free.”
Wherein he was better off the man did not seem clearly to understand,
but this he knew, “We’s free.” He and all the rest spoke warmly of Mr.
May, and whenever he appeared among them, the lifting of ragged hats and
brightening of black faces told that here, at least, the old kindliness
said to have existed between master and slave had been genuine. But not
one of them could be got to say that he would rather be a slave again.
Nearly all the people had remained on the place. Several times the
guerrillas had driven them away, but they always returned and took up
their quarters in the old cabins. They knew they were perfectly free to
go away if they wished; steamboats could be hailed at almost any hour,
and all had money to pay their passage; elsewhere higher wages were
reported. But they looked upon “May Lawn” as their home, and Mr. May as
the man for whom they ought to work, and no persuasion could change
their minds.
The overseer was well enough satisfied with the new order of things. You
couldn’t drive a nigger quite so hard, but, on the whole, they worked
very well. But the rascals were, if possible, greater thieves than ever.
It would be crazy to let them plant any cotton themselves, as some of
them wanted to do; and it would be better if there were any way to
prohibit their culture of any grain or other product not needed for
their own consumption, in their gardens. If they had a crop of ten
bushels, you might be sure they would sell fifty, and you would need
better locks than any on this plantation to keep them from getting the
other forty out of your corn-cribs. If they raised no corn, anybody to
whom they offered to sell corn would know it was stolen; but if they
raised only a single bushel, there was no check on them, and they would
keep selling your property whenever they got half a chance. He had even
heard of their stealing corn from the troughs where the mules were
eating, to sell it.
Mr. May promised a “bowl of mush and milk” for dinner. When it was
announced, it was found to consist of a round of plantation delicacies,
cooked by the late slaves. Beef and mutton were not to be had on the
coast, and fish were not to be procured short of Lake Pontchartrain; but
turkeys, ducks, and chickens were abundant, and these, with a profusion
of vegetables, showed that planters might live well if they would. That
in general they did not, before the war, has been the common testimony
of travelers, from Fred. Law Olmsted down.
At sunset the Wayanda fired her parting salute for the Chief Justice,
and shortly afterward a blank shot from her bow-gun brought too the W.
R. Carter,[36] which had been selected by General Canby for our trip up
the Mississippi. There were hurried good-byes, and as the steamer pushed
off again, the flaring torch gave us a last glimpse of the faces of our
New Orleans friends, and revealed behind them a dusky group of the late
slaves, watching the departure of Mass’r May’s guests.
* * * * *
This was the first sugar plantation in the United States cultivated by
free labor by its old owner; and the free-labor experiment—if, as the
planters insist, it is to be regarded as an experiment—has been tried on
it for a longer consecutive period than on any other. Its results may,
therefore, be profitably studied, as a fair index to the probable value
of the system.
No man would be more apt to be a severer judge of the experiment than
the one who had lost the slaves whom he now hired. I accordingly asked
Mr. May to give me in writing a statement of the workings of his
plantation, and of his opinions as to the possibility of cultivating
sugar by free labor. This was duly forwarded, and I make some extracts
from it here:
“The transcripts from my plantation books, which I send you
herewith, do not, in my judgment, give a fair idea of the workings
of the free-labor system. I had to contend not only with the
complete disorganization of the State, socially as well as
politically, but I was subjected, at various periods, to guerrilla
raids. These interrupted labor on the estate for days and weeks at a
time, and carried off quantities of provisions, live stock, plows,
etc., all of which had to be immediately replaced at great cost. The
expenses were thus largely increased, while the delays and neglect
proportionately diminished the value of the crop. Then, too, it is a
sugar plantation, and is not at all adapted to the culture of
cotton, being too near the mouth of the river, and being likewise
much more liable than ordinary cotton plantations to the ravages of
the army-worm. But, during the war the stock of seed-cane ran out,
and I had to put the greater part of the land in cotton. In spite of
these difficulties and interruptions, and enormous outlay, the
estate has never failed to return a handsome revenue. I feel certain
that within the next three years I shall reduce the expenses of the
free-labor system fully one-third, and, at the same time, increase
the returns in an equally large proportion.
“I pay my laborers what I think, even at the North, you would call
good wages for that sort of farm work. They get an average, men and
women, boys and girls, of twelve dollars a month each, besides their
lodging, food, and medical attendance. One-half of these wages I pay
them quarterly, the remainder at the end of the year. Each laborer
is paid according to his merits. Some of my hands receive as much as
twenty-five dollars a month; others as little as six dollars. This
causes great emulation, and consequently more work is performed; all
of which results in favor of both employer and employee. I think it
wise policy for the planter to give high wages, as he thus secures a
better class of laborers, who work not only industriously but
cheerfully.
“I am satisfied, in my own mind, that one able-bodied American negro
of ordinary intelligence is worth at least two white emigrants. He
understands the business, and he has the advantage of being
acclimated. I am willing, therefore, to pay the negroes one-third
higher wages than any white laborers accessible to us. You may think
this extravagant; but during the unsettled state of affairs for the
last two years, I have had to try both, and I base my opinion not on
my prejudices, but on my experience.”
The statements in the last paragraph are widely at variance with the
ideas current among the late slaveholders. Scarcely any believe that the
negro can be depended on for labor except in a state of slavery; and the
most, therefore, throughout the whole season following the surrender,
looked upon the sugar and cotton culture as ruined, unless white
laborers could be brought in.
The following are the exhibits of the operation of Mr. May’s plantation
for the years 1863 and 1864, as taken from his books. One thousand acres
only of the plantation were cultivated. One hundred and twenty hands
were engaged to do it, at an average of $144 per year, with lodgings and
food:
1863.
Plantation supply account $20,315 00
Amount paid to field hands 18,472 25
Amount paid to physician 300 00
Amount paid to engineer 625 00
Amount paid to sugar-maker 600 00
Amount paid to carpenter 1,160 00
Amount paid to manager 1,800 00
Amount paid to sub-overseer 600 00
———————————
Total expenses $43,872 25
Receipts from sale of 360 hogsheads sugar $51,480 00
Receipts from sale of 740 barrels molasses 17,020 00
Receipts from sale of 204 bales cotton 81,600 00
Receipts from sale of corn 2,743 00
———————————
Total receipts $152,843 00
43,872 25
———————————
Net revenue $108,970 75
1864
Plantation supply account $18,475 00
Amount paid to field hands 17,265 10
Amount paid to physician 300 00
Amount paid to white workmen 1,785 20
Amount paid to manager 1,800 00
Amount paid to sub-overseer 600 00
Amount paid for repairing 1,420 00
———————————
Total expenses $41,645 30
Receipts from sale of 190 hogsheads sugar $28,500 00
Receipts from sale of 345 barrels molasses 7,590 00
Receipts from sale of 69 bales cotton 40,792 00
Receipts from sale of corn 822 00
Total receipts $77,704 00
41,645 30
———————————
Net revenue $36,058 70
Add net revenue of 1863 108,970 75
———————————
Profit for two years $145,029 45
In the two years, during which all his neighbors allowed their
plantations to lie idle, because they knew “free niggers never would
make sugar or cotton,” Mr. May thus realized a net profit of nearly one
hundred and fifty thousand dollars. But for the ravages of the army-worm
on his cotton in 1864, the profits for the two years would have run well
up toward a quarter of a million.
Much of this success was due, of course, to the high prices produced by
the war. But if the prices for the products were high, so were those for
every item of the expenditures. It will be observed that the negroes
were fed and lodged, but not clothed. Mr. May estimated the cost of food
and lodging to be at least six dollars a month. Add this to the monthly
wages, and we have two hundred and sixteen dollars as the actual annual
cost of each field-hand to the planter, under the free-labor system.
Before the war able-bodied negroes were commanding from fifteen hundred
to three thousand dollars in the New Orleans market. Counting only ten
per cent. interest on the investment, we find it nearly as cheap to hire
the negroes, as it was in the old days to own them and get their labor
for nothing. But, as yet, slaveholders will reply to all such
calculations, “Free niggers can never be depended on to grow cotton.”
-----
Footnote 35:
These negroes came out at the end of the year with enough cotton and
sugar—after paying for their own support—to divide only a few dollars
to each first-class hand. Even this result was better than one would
have anticipated in June.
Footnote 36:
Since lost, by explosion of her boilers, with fearful sacrifice of
life.