The “Jeff. Davis Cotton Plantation.”
A few negro soldiers were standing guard on the river bank, one day, as
our steamer touched to land our party at the lower side of the great
bend below Vicksburg, for a visit to the adjacent cotton plantations.
The officers sent off for ambulances for us. While we were awaiting
their arrival, the relief guard came up, marching with a precision and
erect, soldierly bearing that spoke well for their drill sergeants, and
proved no small source of astonishment to the party of paroled rebels we
had on board.
“A nigger’s just like a monkey,” growled one; “whatever he sees a white
man do he’ll imitate; and he’ll study over it a cussed sight harder’n he
will over his work. But how one o’ them black devils with muskets ’d run
ef a white man was to start after him with a whip!” And with this he
walked up to one of the soldiers, saying, rather harshly: “Boy, le’ me
see your gun,” and offering to take hold of it. The soldier stepped
hastily back, and brought his weapon into position for immediate use.
“How the war _has_ demoralized the cussed brutes!” muttered the
discomfited scion of the master race, as he retired.
It was our first experience on the plantation of Mr. Jefferson Davis.
Nearly all the nine thousand acres included in the bend of the river
here had formerly belonged to Joseph Davis, brother to the President of
the late Confederacy. Jefferson was a soldier and a politician, but no
planter. He brought reputation and social position to the family, but no
money. His brother balanced the account by giving him, from his own
large estate, a plantation of a thousand acres. Here, down to the
outbreak of the war, Mr. Davis was accustomed to spend a portion of his
time, his brother and the late General Quitman being his only neighbors.
Negro soldiers were now doing duty on the landing whence his cotton had
been shipped, and “runaway niggers” were tilling his fertile fields on
their own account.
* * * * *
The outer levee was damaged by the unusually high floods which had
brought destruction to so many enterprising planters from the North; and
for some hundreds of yards our ambulances cut deep into the rich mud
over which the Mississippi had been depositing fresh alluvial soil. An
inner levee had been hastily heightened, and when we passed this, the
sodden, desolate aspect of the country changed. A few cabins, surrounded
by small inclosures, seemed to have been used in the old times for
trusty negroes sent to work or watch at the landing. Beyond these, the
road led us through a broad field of cotton, unbroken by hill or valley,
fence or tree, save here and there a single cotton-wood, whose position
by the roadside had saved it. The whole face of the country, almost as
far as the eye could reach, was plowed into what a Northern farmer would
have taken for low sweet-potato ridges. On the tops of these ridges, in
separate hills, grew the soft and still tender cotton-stalks, beginning
to be well covered with the white and red flowers; for even cotton wore
the Rebel colors. The petals were soft and flabby, and the flower was
like a miniature hollyhock. For these “earliest blooms” planters keep
eager watch, and to have the first in a neighborhood is a distinction,
prized as a Northern farmer would prize a premium for the best crop of
wheat in a county.
Occasionally a few rows were found carefully tilled and free from weeds;
but in very many more, weeds and cotton were struggling for the mastery,
with the emancipated negroes reveling in their first taste of liberty,
spectators rather than participants in the contest on which their
support depended. Doubtless the plantation had looked better under Mr.
Davis’ control, indifferent planter as he was.
Presently a double row of common negro quarters came in sight, and at
their end a white frame house, by no means palatial, but still
considerably larger than most of the residences to be found even on the
premises of wealthy planters. The road led us up to the back door.
“Massa allus meant to turn de road, and bring it roun’ in front, under
dem trees,” explained an old negro. Entering at the back gate, and
coming “roun’ in front,” we found a little lawn, on which a partially
abortive attempt had been made to grow shade-trees and shrubbery. The
house was a narrow one, having but a single story, with a hall running
through the middle, and a couple of medium-sized rooms opening into it
on either side. Beyond these, on each hand, was a wing, containing
smaller rooms. In front was a veranda, or, as Southerners all call it, a
gallery, with pretentious wooden columns; and at either wing was another
gallery, with more columns. Above the central piazza was wrought, in
sprigs of cedar, a soldier’s inscription, drawn from nursery
recollections: “The house that Jeff. built;” and over the main door a
few more sprigs of evergreen, prettily arranged, spelled out the last
word the master of the house would have uttered to any of its recent
visitors: “Welcome.” A couple of Yankee school-mistresses were within,
and they were the teachers of the boys and girls of Mr. Davis’ slaves,
and of the runaways from plantations in the interior, to whom the
welcome was given. A beautiful little quadroon girl, with clustering
ringlets and wondering face, stood in the doorway. She was one of the
children of the place, and was the offspring of no Northern
“miscegenation.”[37]
All the furniture belonging to the house had long ago been carried off.
Respect for the rights of absent property owners has nowhere been a very
marked characteristic of the movements of the Northern armies; and
articles from the “house of Jeff. Davis hisself,” as one of the soldiers
phrased it, were too tempting to be long left unappropriated. Odd pieces
of furniture of the most incongruous styles had been gathered up from
adjacent plantations, completing as motley an establishment as ever
vexed the eye of Yankee housekeeper. A few books lay scattered over the
shelves; tactics for Northern soldiers and spelling-books for slaves
lying among defenses of the divine right of slavery and constitutional
arguments in favor of repudiation and secession.
To the right of the house was a garden full of neglected shrubbery, from
which, as we left, we plucked a bouquet of June flowers. Swarms of
woolly-headed children lay about the doors and under the little
projecting roofs of the quarters; and old men and women filled up the
door-ways, to stare at us as we passed. Some of them had “b’longed to
Mass’r Jeff.,” others to “Mass’r Joe;” others came from the interior.
The jail was pointed out, where “Mass’r Joe” used to confine refractory
slaves, and at which he used, on Sunday mornings, to hold a court of
plenary and summary jurisdiction for the trial of prisoners. A band of
iron, four inches wide and half an inch thick, with a heavy chain
attached, was one of the relics found in the house. It had been used for
the most troublesome slaves. During the day they had to wear it in the
fields; at night a padlock secured it to a staple in the wall of the
jail.
* * * * *
From the quarters we drove to the dilapidated old cotton-gin. The floors
were partially torn up; boards hung by single nails on the walls; doors
were off their hinges or gone. By one of the gin-stands were piled up
boxes marked “Enfield cartridges;” and in the lint-room were stacks of
muskets. Looking from its window over the cotton-press, we saw in the
adjacent cotton-field a regiment of the faithful and affectionate
creatures, clad in the “blue on black,” at which Rebel newspapers used
to laugh, and presenting arms to a former Senatorial colleague of the
late proprietor. They had for months protected the freedmen of this
entire region from the hostility of their old masters; and but for their
presence, the extensive mission schools carried on at another part of
the estates inclosed by the bend, must have been abandoned.
Over a thousand scholars, mostly children, have been enrolled at these
schools, but the attendance was very irregular. The teachers reported,
with an enthusiasm that may, perhaps, have warped their judgments a
little, that, wherever the attendance was regular, the progress was as
rapid as the average progress of white children in the Northern public
schools. This, however, referred only to the primary branches. Too
little advancement had been made beyond these to warrant any general
opinion as to the average capacity likely to be displayed.
The good missionaries, sent down by Northern Churches, had been
zealously laboring at the moral condition of the negroes whom slavery
had Christianized. They made encouraging reports, but the facts they
mentioned scarcely warranted so cheerful a view of the results of their
labors. In the great collections of negroes sent here in 1864, they
found marriage practically unknown. The grossest immorality universally
prevailed. They had duly married the couples who were living together,
which some of them thought a very valuable performance; but it did not
appear that the ceremony had yet produced much effect on the habits of
the people. They had preached to them and prayed with them, and, as one
of them said:
“Their interest in religious instructions is very encouraging. As a
people, they are much more easy of access on the subject of religion
than white people. When asked if they are pious, they will readily
give an answer of yes or no. All professors of religion are free to
tell their religious experience. There is no part of religious
worship they enjoy so much, and in which they spend so much time, as
in singing. In prayer they are generally very earnest, often using
expressions that indicate a deep sense of unworthiness. One will
often hear such expressions as these: ‘Heavenly Master, wilt thou be
pleased to hear us?’ ‘O Jesus, Master, if thou be pleased, do come
along dis way by thy Holy Spirit;’ ‘We know we are not heard for our
much speaking.’ The gratitude which they have often manifested to me
for reading and expounding to them the Scriptures has been a rich
reward for my labors.”
But the good man was compelled to admit that, when these “professors of
religion” came out of the prayer-meetings, they had no hesitation in
stealing whatever little delicacies they could find for next morning’s
breakfast, or in appropriating somebody’s mule, and making off before
daylight for some other locality. They would very humbly confess their
sins on bended knees, and straightway rise to tell some outrageous lie,
by which they hoped to get a little money. What reason had anybody to
hope that they believed the story they told on their knees any more than
the other?
* * * * *
Last year the negroes congregated on these plantations cultivated their
crops in their own way and on their own account. The military
authorities selected some seventy of the best, and allotted to each a
tract of thirty acres. Each was permitted to draw mules and supplies, to
be paid for at the end of the year, and each hired as many negroes to
assist him as he thought he needed to cultivate the land. The officers
say they worked well, and would have made large profits, but for the
ravages of the army-worm. As it was, they only gathered one hundred and
thirty bales of cotton from their entire plantation, or scarcely
one-twelfth of a good crop. White lessees, managing large places on the
river, suffered equally from the army-worm, but saved a much larger
proportion of cotton. Still, the experiment was a success. The negroes
paid back all the advances made them by the Government, and some of them
had a balance of between five hundred and a thousand dollars
profits.[38]
These results, it is true, could not have been attained without
Government encouragement and direction; but surely no better way of
dispensing charity was ever devised than to make the destitute earn it
for themselves, and pay back the advances furnished them. Nor was there
anything in the operations of the negro farmers last year, nor in their
prospects when we visited them in June, 1865, to warrant a doubt as to
their capacity for supporting themselves and managing their own affairs,
when once fairly started. Whether they would furnish the country as
great an amount of cotton for export, as under the old system, is
another and a very different question.
* * * * *
We drove through miles of cotton and corn, rank with the luxuriant
growth of a soil marvelous for its fertility. Then came a bad road along
a broken levee, through a cypress swamp, where amid the gloom of
trailing moss, hanging down almost to the edge of the stagnant,
scum-covered water, one could dimly make out the great cypress-knees,
and fancy them fit resting-places for the snakes and alligators which
are said to constitute the only inhabitants. Finally our ambulances
could go no further over the narrow road, and for a little distance we
followed on foot the little path beaten by the crowds of negroes
constantly flocking to the river. The luxuriant grass waved over and
almost concealed it; and here and there it was overgrown with vines, so
that every step crushed the juicy dewberries under our feet. The
steamboat had passed around the bend, and lay awaiting us as we emerged
on its northern side.
-----
Footnote 37:
“There was a colored woman at Davis’ Bend, when our forces took
possession of that place—afterward sent to Cincinnati—who can be
proved, by the testimony of hundreds, to have been the kept mistress
of Jeff. Davis; and she is universally reputed to be the daughter of
Joe Davis, the Rebel insurgent leader’s brother. We know, also, of at
least six persons, the offspring of white Southern women by colored
men. One of these children of white women, after narrowly escaping
death by drowning at the hands of his maternal uncles, is now a
Presiding Elder in the Methodist Church. Another was once sold into
slavery by his mother, for a ‘flitch of bacon.’
“Moreover, in the course of their official action during the past
year, my assistants have become cognizant of four marriages of
Southern white men to colored women. One of them was formerly a
negro-trader. His quadroon slave and mistress would not live with him
without marriage, because, as she said, she had now become free, and
it was no longer right to submit to that to which she had been
helplessly subjected in slavery. A chaplain, altogether unwilling to
assist at mixed marriages, was induced to perform the ceremony in this
instance, by the man’s saying that he had ‘married her in the sight of
God five years ago!’”—_Official Report of Colonel John Eaton, General
Superintendent Freedmen, Department of the Tennessee and State of
Arkansas, for 1864, to the Adjutant General U. S. A._
Footnote 38:
In the Helena (Ark.) District, negro lessees, cultivating small farms,
were in numerous cases comparatively successful. Ten of them, to whom
land had been allotted by direction of Mr. Mellen, realized from their
crops an aggregate of $31,000. The following were favorable specimens:
“Jerome Hubbard and George West leased sixty acres—planted forty in
cotton; their expenses were about $1,200; they sold their crop for
$8,000. Napoleon Bowman leased twenty-four acres; he had some capital
to begin with, and borrowed some; he employed one hand; his expenses
were less than $2,000; sold his crop for $6,000—realizing over $4,000
clear profit. Robert Owens leased seventeen acres; having nothing to
start with, he borrowed his capital; he earned by the season’s work
enough to purchase a good house, with a residue of $300. Samuel Beaden
leased thirteen and a half acres; expended about $600 in its
cultivation, and sold his crop for $4,000.”
They averaged, according to an official report, about $500 profit on
every ten acres cultivated.