Labor Experiments and Prospects.
The officers of a negro regiment at Natchez spent the month of March in
mustering it out of the service. First the muster-out rolls gave
interminable delays; then every body waited for the mustering officer;
then on the paymaster; and, meantime, the camp was inundated by a flood
of planters and speculators seeking to contract for hands.
One Surgeon Dayton, late of our volunteer service, son of the late
United States Minister to France, had leased a plantation over on Black
River. He wanted hands badly, but they wouldn’t leave the Mississippi
River. And the truth was, he didn’t blame them very greatly. All his
neighbors were the old set; mad at him as a Northerner, and mad at the
negroes as freedmen. It wasn’t very pleasant for him and he supposed it
wouldn’t be very pleasant for the negroes. But, nevertheless, he must
have some hands if he could get them; and he was trying to get an
influential sergeant who would be able to carry a dozen or two wherever
he went.
Colonel Wallace, late of an Illinois cavalry regiment,[80] was another.
He wanted hands for some plantation in which he was interested, but he
had about made up his mind that it would cost more than they were worth,
to get them.
“Fact is, gentlemen,” I heard an officer wearing the United States
uniform say to planters, asking about the chances for hands, when the
regiment was disbanded; “Fact is, you had better make your bargains with
us than with the niggers. We control ’em; and we don’t mean to take ’em
to anybody’s plantation without being paid for it.” And, in truth, quite
a number of officers were bargaining all the time with the negro-seeking
planters for their valuable influence. Some insisted on a considerable
share of the crop in return for taking a specified number of negroes to
the place. Others preferred a fixed salary of two, three, or indeed, as
high as five or six thousand dollars a year, for their services—not as
overseers, for they knew absolutely nothing of cotton culture—but simply
in preserving order on the plantations and retaining the confidence of
the negro.[81] After making their own bargain on the most favorable
terms they could secure, it became their duty to persuade the negroes
that this was the identical place they had been looking for, all the
time, in their search for a good home.
In most cases they knew nothing whatever about the homes which they thus
recommended; had never seen them, and had never heard of the proprietors
until they proved themselves adventurers by making these extravagant
offers. In other cases they knew that these men were dishonest and
unprincipled; and yet they encouraged their confiding subordinates to
bind themselves to such men for a year, in remote regions, where there
was little hope for protection from the Freedman’s Bureau or from civil
officers. “Why didn’t you warn the sergeant against that man with whom
he has contracted?” said the colonel of the regiment, one day to the
adjutant. “You had yourself found that the man didn’t keep his promises,
and couldn’t be depended on.” The adjutant blushed, stammered, and
explained: “I expect to stay in this country myself, and I didn’t want
to be making enemies of such men!”
This flunkeyism of Northern men, who “expected to stay in this country
and didn’t want to make enemies,” was manifest everywhere. For a genuine
toady, commend me to a Northern adventurer, or “runner,” in the
cotton-growing regions. Through the winter of 1865-’66, the South was
full of them, looking for cotton-lands, soliciting custom for Northern
business houses, collecting old debts. They never spoke of Rebels, but
with great caution called them Confederates. The National armies became,
in their mouths, “the Federals.” They were always profound admirers of
General Lee, the “second Washington of Virginia;” they grew enthusiastic
over Stonewall Jackson; and, if it became necessary to speak kindly of
any Northern officers, they always, with delicate appreciation of the
proprieties, selected McClellan. If they were found out to be
Northerners, they were anxious to have it understood that, at any rate,
they were not Yankees; and were pretty sure to intimate that if they had
any hatred a little more intense than that which good Christians ought
to cherish toward the devil, it was evoked by the doings or the presence
of these Yankees aforesaid.
Day after day, the camp of the negro regiment was filled with
Mississippi or Louisiana planters. It was refreshing to see with what
careful consideration and scrupulous politeness they approached the
“niggers.” Here was no longer “hatred of the upstarts,” “war of races,”
“unconquerable antagonism.” The negro was king. Men fawned upon him;
took him to the sutler’s shop and treated him; carried pockets full of
tobacco to bestow upon him; carefully explained to him the varied
delights of their respective plantations. Women came too—with coach and
coachman—drove into the camp, went out among the negroes, and with sweet
smiles and honeyed words sought to persuade them that such and such
plantations would be the very home they were looking for. Sambo
listened, took the tobacco, drank the whisky, grinned ample return for
every smile, and——cogitated. Scarcely an old planter got a negro, unless
by some bargain with the officers. Half of them made no engagements at
all; and, in a week after their discharge, the streets of Natchez were
full of ragged, hungry negroes who had spent all their money and lost
all their clothes; and were anxious to contract for a year’s work with
the first planter who came along.
Competition had driven the planters who needed hands the worst to
offering extravagant wages. Twenty dollars per month, with rations,
lodging, etc., was a common offer; and some went as high as twenty-five.
Influential sergeants and corporals were offered thirty and forty
dollars a month, on condition that they brought a certain number of men
with them. In general, the more remote the plantation, the more backward
the work upon it; and the less reliable the owner or lessee, the higher
were the offered wages. The negroes displayed very little judgment, at
last, in making their selections; and, as a rule, the men who made the
most big promises, which they never meant to keep, got the most
laborers.
About the same time the business of furnishing the labor for sugar and
cotton plantations had assumed another phase in New Orleans. A regular
system had been organized early in the year, by which agents, white or
black, undertook to furnish negroes to the planters who needed them, at
so much a head. This gradually degenerated until, in April, hundreds of
negroes were within call of these agents, ready to reenact the _rôle_ of
the Northern bounty-jumpers. The agent would hire them to a planter,
receive his twenty-five dollars a head, and turn them over. The planter
would start with them to his plantation. Sometimes they escaped from the
boat before it started; in other cases they even went to the plantation,
drew their rations for a week, and then ran away. On their return they
shared the proceeds of the little operation with the agent. In Vicksburg
a similar process of swindling was carried on, but on a smaller scale.
* * * * *
A Missouri cooper, who had managed to make enough money on cotton during
the war to secure a plantation, boasted of his better success in
securing labor: “I jist went over to Montgomery, Alabama, and from there
to Selma. I takes my landlord aside, and persuades him to jine me in a
straight drink. Then I told him I was after niggers, and asked him what
he thought of my chances. He tole me he had jist six men in the house on
the same business already. None of ’em had had any luck, and they was a
goin’ to Eufala by the Shamrock. All right, my covey, thinks I. So I
jist steps down to the Shamrock, bargained awhile with the captain, and
finally got the use of her yawl. He wasn’t agoin’ to start till Tuesday
mornin’ and that was Sunday. I puts my nigger into the yawl, and we
pulled down stream all night. Monday mornin’ we was in Eufala. I sends
my nigger out to talk to the people. They had nothin’ to do; Georgians
wanted to hire ’em for their board and clothes; and fifteen dollars a
month seemed enormous. Wednesday mornin’ the Shamrock got down, and as
the Selma nigger-hunters stepped off, I stepped on with sixty-five
niggers.”
He said he had no trouble in getting as many as he wanted, except from
the apprehension of the negroes throughout all that region, that any one
who proposed to take them away anywhere to labor, really meant to run
them over to Cuba and sell them. Several asked him, confidentially,
whether Cuba wasn’t just across the Mississippi River. Even the white
men entertained no doubt of his being a negro smuggler. One
congratulated him on his remarkable luck, and “calculated that lot would
about make his fortune by the time he got them over.”
* * * * *
I saw but one successful experiment with white laborers on a cotton
plantation. This was in one of the northern parishes of Louisiana, where
seventy or eighty Germans, picked up from sponging-houses in New York
and elsewhere, had been engaged for the year. At first they worked very
badly. The overseer treated them as he had been in the habit of treating
the slaves; and, degraded as these Germans were, they would not submit
to it. A new overseer was engaged; and, after a time, matters seemed to
go on measurably well. But it was still too early (about the middle of
April) to tell how they would succeed during the unhealthy summer
months. None of the neighboring planters had any faith in the
experiment. These Germans, they said, were not by any means as good as
the niggers. If you sought Germans of a better class, they wouldn’t
contract with you, unless they saw a chance to become, after a time, the
owners of the soil they cultivated.
Against this, and indeed against any subdivision of the great river
plantations, the feeling was very strong. That a German should buy a
hundred or two acres from the edge of a large plantation, was a thing
not to be tolerated. Even sales of entire tracts to new-comers were very
unpopular. “Johnson has gone and sold his plantation to a Yankee,”
exclaimed one. “Is it possible?” was the reply. “Why, I thought Johnson
was a better citizen than that. If he had to sell, why didn’t he hunt up
some Southern man who wanted to buy?”
The negroes were all anxious to purchase land. “What’s de use of being
free,” said one, an old man of sixty, who was begging permission to
plant cotton; “What’s de use of being free if you don’t own land enough
to be buried in? Might juss as well stay slave all yo’ days.” “All I
wants,” said another, explaining what he was going to do with his money,
of which he had already saved four or five hundred dollars; “All I wants
is to git to own fo’ or five acres ob land, dat I can build me a little
house on and call my home.” In many portions of the Mississippi Valley
the feeling against any ownership of the soil by the negroes is so
strong, that the man who should sell small tracts to them would be in
actual personal danger. Every effort will be made to prevent negroes
from acquiring lands; and even the renting of small tracts to them is
held to be unpatriotic and unworthy of a good citizen. Through such
difficulties is it that the subject-race is called upon to prove, by its
prosperity, its fitness for freedom.
* * * * *
“I stops at your plantation de oder day, but I not know tat you had
goods of your own to sell mit your niggers. I vill not interfere mit no
man’s trade.”
The speaker was a Jew peddler, who also kept up a little store in
Natchez-under-the-hill. He had been peddling down the river on the
Louisiana side, and had been driven away from the plantation, whose
proprietor he was addressing, by the overseer. Once before, the owner
said, the overseer had permitted him to stay all night and trade with
the negroes. He had sold, in a few hours, goods to the amount of nearly
two hundred dollars, and had received payment in full in greenbacks,
from ragged-looking blacks who would never have been suspected of having
a penny. Nearly all the negroes had money. Some saved it quite
carefully. On this very plantation he had field hands, working at
fifteen dollars a month, who had five or six hundred dollars hid away in
old stockings. Of course it wouldn’t do to look too closely into the
means by which they had acquired it. During the war, and especially in
the confusion following the surrender, they had great opportunities for
trade, and their master’s property constituted the stock from which they
drew. He had one man who had made several hundred dollars by killing his
hogs and selling the pork.
But, with the cunning that seemed natural to them, they would rarely
acknowledge the possession of money. “I have had boys come to me with
the sorriest stories of their necessities, to get an advance of a few
dollars on their month’s wages, when I knew that they had as much money
in their pockets as I had in mine. The worst of it was, that what they
had rightfully belonged to me as much as that in my own pocket-book.”
“Vat you tinks about de overflow?” asked the peddler, with an anxious
look at the river, which was then rapidly rising.
“Why, what business is it of yours about the overflow? So you can
swindle my niggers, what do you care about the overflow?”
“Vy, I wants you to make a pig crop. If tere’s an overflow, tere’ll pe
no monish in te country next fall, and my trade ish gone. But if you
makes pig crop, monish ish plenty, and I does pig business.”
The planter subsequently explained, that this fellow had sold common
unbleached muslins and the cheapest calicoes at from seventy-five cents
to a dollar a yard; and that on the trinkets and gew gaws, with which
his pack was liberally supplied, his profits were from five to eight
hundred per cent.[82] The negroes bought readily, no matter what price
he asked; and for the average plantation hand, the more worthless the
article, the greater seemed, often, the desire to purchase it.
* * * * *
There could be no question of the zeal with which, through the exciting
spring months, the people in the interior of the cotton States,
supported the “President’s Policy” of Reconstruction; but it was rarely
a zeal according to knowledge.
“Just think of the infamous lengths those cursed Radicals are going!”
exclaimed a wealthy and by no means illiterate or unpolished Mississippi
cotton-planter to me in April; “They’ve actually turned out Stockton, of
Missouri, from the Senate!”
“I thought it was some New Jersey senator,” I ventured to suggest.
“Oh, no!” (with great positiveness of manner.) “You got that into your
head from having New Jersey and the Stockton name associated. But
there’s a Missouri family of Stocktons, and its one of the finest in the
State. There never was a greater outrage than to turn Stockton out, just
to get a party majority.”
“But how _can_ Mr. Stockton be from Missouri? Haven’t they got Mr.
Henderson and Gratz Brown there already?”
“Well, what’s to hinder them from having three, I’d like to know, except
the infamous usurpation of these Radicals?”
This gentleman owned five large plantations, had an annual income of
certainly not less than a hundred thousand dollars before the war, and
himself belonged to one of “our first families.”
“Have you heard the news?” said a finely-educated and really very
skillful surgeon in one of the inland towns to me one day. “Johnson
isn’t going to put up with your Radicals any longer. He is going to
prorogue Congress at once, to get rid of its meddlesome interference
with his policy!” “I have no doubt,” he continued, in reply to some
incredulous expression of mine; “I have no doubt of it in the world.
Why, you can see yourself from Voor_hees_’ speech that, if he don’t,
they’re going to impeach him right off. Of course he wouldn’t stand
that, or wait for it!” Yet this believer in Voor_hees_ had been educated
in Europe, had traveled nearly over the world, and had the hearing and
manners of an intelligent and accomplished gentleman.
“Johnson’ll be the next President, as sure as the Mississippi runs down
stream,” said a planter, waiting in a bar-room for the ferry-boat.
“Why?” “Because he’s got the South with him, sure, to start on. Then
he’s got Seward with him, and Seward has had the North in his
breeches-pocket for the last six years. I’d like to know how you are
going to beat that combination!”
* * * * *
Sitting in a Natchez parlor, one day, conversing with the hostess, we
were interrupted by the entrance of a smart, bright-looking negro girl,
clothed in a fashionably-short and fashionably-expanded skirt of common
striped bed-ticking. The child made its little courtesy to the stranger,
and timidly stole behind the chair and clung to the skirts of “Missey.”
“This is our little Confederate nigger,” explained the lady. “She is the
only one I have been able to keep; and I only have her because her
parents haven’t yet been able to coax her away. You see she wears her
old Confederate clothes. When we could get nothing else we were forced
to the necessity of ripping up our mattresses to get material for
dresses; and we are all too poor yet to buy new things for their
every-day wear.
“Did you notice,” she continued, patting the woolly head of the child as
it lay with its face buried in her lap, “that she called me ‘Missey,’
just now? All the niggers have been trying to break her of that, but
they can’t. They tell her to call me Miss Lizzie, but she says ‘she may
be your Miss Lizzie, but she’s my Missey.’ The other day she made quite
a scene in church, by breaking away from the other servants and shouting
out, ‘I _will_ sit with my Missey to-day!’ You should have seen
everybody’s head turning to see who it was, in these sorrowful times,
that was still fortunate enough to be called Missey!”
* * * * *
On a Mississippi steamboat, one evening, I encountered an intelligent,
substantial-looking Arkansas planter, hirsute, and clad in Confederate
gray. The buttons had been removed from his military coat; but I soon
discovered that the companion, with whom I was passing an idle evening
in talk about planting and politics, was the Rebel General, E. C.
Cahell.
He was giving the free-labor experiment a fair trial; and risking upon
it pretty nearly all he was worth. He paid his first-class hands a
dollar a day, and furnished them lodgings. They supplied themselves with
clothing and provisions, which he sold—there being no village, or even
store, within six miles of his landing—at a very slight advance on St.
Louis prices, barely enough to cover freight and waste. He felt that he
was paying very high wages; but he fixed upon this plan in preference to
paying them fifteen dollars a month and rations, because a negro seemed
to himself to be getting more for his work. “A dollar a day” was short
and very easily understood; and the negroes thought it had a big sound.
Thus far he had less trouble with his laborers than he had anticipated.
They worked well and seemed contented; but he was by no means certain
that his hold upon them was secure enough to give him the slightest
guaranty of being able to gather what he was planting. Now and then he
found a troublesome negro; but, in the main, they had been unexpectedly
open to reason. “The mistake we have generally made in the South has
been that we have supposed nigger nature was something different from
human nature. But I find that they are just as easily controlled, when
sufficient motives are presented, as any other class of people would
be.” He was getting along without the aid of the Freedman’s Bureau; and,
indeed, without aid of any sort. He knew of no laws and of no officers;
he was off in the woods by himself; and his only resource had been to
try and do what was right, and then convince the negroes that he had
done so.
On one point he had been closely pressed. His negroes all wanted to
plant cotton on their own account, and made a dead-set at him for an
acre of land apiece for that purpose. It would never do to tell them the
truth—that he was afraid to let them grow any, lest, when picking-time
came, they should steal from him to add to their own crops—but he had
approached the delicate point diplomatically. “Of course, Jim, it would
be all right with you; but then you know there are some of the boys here
that _will_ steal. They would bring a bad name on the whole of you, and
get you all into trouble.” And, “nigger nature being very much like
human nature,” his argument had been successful, and he had been
relieved from the embarrassment.
He thought about three-fourths of the good cotton land directly fronting
on the Mississippi, so far as his observation extended, was under
cultivation and might be relied upon, with a favorable season, for an
average crop. Back from the river, through Mississippi, Arkansas, and
West Tennessee, he doubted whether one-fourth of the land was under
cultivation.
Two or three days later, in another steamboat trip, I encountered a
heavy planter, who came to this country originally from Illinois. He
owned a fine plantation in Mississippi, fronting on the river, and with
the cultivation of this he had always been contented. But this year he
regarded as the golden opportunity. The free-labor project had not yet
settled down into a steadily-working system. Half these old planters in
the interior believed the niggers wouldn’t work, and were doing very
little to find out. When all made the discovery that they would work,
cotton would come down to nearly its old prices, and there would be no
great speculation in it. But this year, the men who “went in” would make
the money which the backward ones ought to make, as well as their own.
So he had leased, right and left. He had three plantations near his own,
in Mississippi, and three more across the river, in Louisiana. On all of
them he had plenty of negroes. At that time (3d April) he had a little
over seventeen hundred acres of cotton planted. With good weather, in
another week, he should have over four thousand.
But this was the last year he would do anything of the sort. He didn’t
believe there would be so much money in it another year; but, at any
rate, he was kept forever running up and down the river, from one place
to another, buying supplies and giving directions. He had no peace, day
or night; and he meant to make enough this year to be able to retire and
have some comfort.
He was trying all the different plans of paying negroes, and, next year,
planters would be welcome to his experience. On one place he gave them
fifteen dollars per month,[83] with rations, lodging, and medical
attendance. On another he gave twelve dollars per month, and furnished
clothing also. On one he gave a fifth of the crop, and supported the
negroes; on another, a fourth of the crop, and required them to furnish
a part of their own support. But on none would he permit any of the
hands to plant a stalk of cotton on their own account. Nobody need tell
_him_ anything about niggers. He had owned them long enough to know all
about them, and there wasn’t one in a hundred he would trust to pick
cotton for himself (the negro) out of a patch adjacent to the cotton
fields of his employer.
He could as yet perceive no marked difference in the work of his hands
on the different plantations. None did as much as under the old system,
but all did more than was expected. Much depended on the overseer. Where
the hands thought he understood his business, and could tell when they
were doing their duty, and was, at the same time, disposed to treat them
justly, there was no trouble. But some of the old overseers made a good
deal of mischief on a plantation. They thought they could knock and cuff
niggers about as they used to; and by the time they discovered their
mistake, the niggers were leaving, and keeping others from coming in
their places.
“One o’ my niggers left, the other day, without saying a word to me
about it. You couldn’t guess why. The cussed nigger had been lazy about
mending a plow which was badly needed in the field, and the
nigger-driver scolded him about it. He said he was a free man, and
wasn’t going to be insulted; so off he started. There’s one consolation;
he had only been paid half his wages at the end of each month; and so
there’s a matter of twenty-five or thirty dollars which he lost and I
gained by his running away.”
This man had but an indifferent education; he had seen little of society
or the world; he knew nothing thoroughly, save cotton and the negro.
But, coming down, raw, from Illinois, years ago, he had won the good
opinions of the heiress to a plantation, and had married,——_it_ rather
than her, as an acquaintance expressed it. How he was wealthy, and, with
a fair season, was sure of not less than five thousand bales of cotton,
worth, at only twenty-five cents per pound, half a million dollars, as
the profits of this year’s operations. How he would spend his money when
he got it, it would be difficult to say. Horse-racing and hard drinking
were the amusements most congenial to his class. Gambling was pleasant,
but his business habits had given him a wholesome dread of it; and,
after all, there seemed more probability that he would soon return to
cotton, and end his days in worship at its kingly shrine.
-----
Footnote 80:
Brother to General W. H. L. Wallace, whose death, while gallantly
leading his division at Pittsburg Landing, was so widely lamented.
Footnote 81:
“I told a nigger officer,” said a very consequential planter in the
vicinity of Jackson, Mississippi, to me in November, 1865, “that I’d
give him thirty dollars a month just to stay on my plantation and wear
his uniform. The fellow did it, and I’m havin’ no trouble with my
niggers. They’re afraid of the shoulder-straps.”
Footnote 82:
I have myself seen earrings that cost fifty cents sold for six
dollars.
Footnote 83:
The rate of wages named is that given first-class men. First-class
women get, generally, about two-thirds as much. It is rarely the case
that over one-third of the men and women on a place can be rated
first-class. All the rest receive lower wages, in proportion to their
value.