THE COTTON RÉGIME
It would be hard to overestimate the predominance of the special crops in
the industry and interest of the Southern community. For good or ill they
have shaped its development from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.
Each characteristic area had its own staple, and those districts which had
none were scorned by all typical Southern men. The several areas expanded
and contracted in response to fluctuations in the relative prices of their
products. Thus when cotton was exceptionally high in the early 'twenties
many Virginians discarded tobacco in its favor for a few years,[1] and on
the Louisiana lands from Baton Rouge to Alexandria, the planters from time
to time changed from sugar to cotton and back again.[2] There were local
variations also in scale and intensity; but in general the system in each
area tended to be steady and fairly uniform. The methods in the several
staples, furthermore, while necessarily differing in their details, were so
similar in their emphasis upon routine that each reinforced the influence
of the others in shaping the industrial organization of the South as a
whole.
[Footnote 1: _Richmond Compiler_, Nov. 25, 1825, and _Alexandria Gazette_,
Feb. 11, 1826, quoted in the _Charleston City Gazette_, Dec. 1, 1825 and
Feb. 20, 1826; _The American Farmer_ (Baltimore, Dec. 29, 1825), VII, 299.]
[Footnote 2: _Hunt's Merchant's Magazine_, IX, 149.]
At the height of the plantation system's career, from 1815 to 1860, indigo
production was a thing of the past; hemp was of negligible importance;
tobacco was losing in the east what it gained in the west; rice and
sea-island cotton were stationary; but sugar was growing in local
intensity, and upland cotton was "king" of a rapidly expanding realm.
The culture of sugar, tobacco and rice has been described in preceding
chapters; that of the fleecy staple requires our present attention.
The outstanding features of the landscape on a short-staple cotton
plantation were the gin house and its attendant baling press. The former
was commonly a weatherboarded structure some forty feet square, raised
about eight feet from the ground by wooden pillars. In the middle of the
space on the ground level, a great upright hub bore an iron-cogged pinion
and was pierced by a long horizontal beam some three feet from the ground.
Draught animals hitched to the ends of this and driven in a circular path
would revolve the hub and furnish power for transmission by cogs and belts
to the gin on the floor above. At the front of the house were a stair and a
platform for unloading seed cotton from the wagons; inside there were bins
for storage, as well as a space for operating the gin; and in the rear a
lean-to room extending to the ground level received the flying lint and let
it settle on the floor. The press, a skeleton structure nearby, had in the
center a stout wooden box whose interior length and width determined the
height and thickness of the bales but whose depth was more than twice as
great as the intended bale's width. The floor, the ends and the upper
halves of the sides of the box were built rigidly, but the lower sides were
hinged at the bottom, and the lid was a block sliding up and down according
as a great screw from above was turned to left or right. The screw,
sometimes of cast iron but preferably of wood as being less liable to break
under strain without warning, worked through a block mortised into a timber
frame above the box, and at its upper end it supported two gaunt beams
which sloped downward and outward to a horse path encircling the whole.
A cupola roof was generally built on the revolving apex to give a slight
shelter to the apparatus; and in some cases a second roof, with the screw
penetrating its peak, was built near enough the ground to escape the whirl
of the arms. When the contents of the lint room were sufficient for a bale,
a strip of bagging was laid upon the floor of the press and another was
attached to the face of the raised lid; the sides of the press were then
made fast, and the box was filled with cotton. The draught animals at the
beam ends were then driven round the path until the descent of the lid
packed the lint firmly; whereupon the sides were lowered, the edges of the
bagging drawn into place, ropes were passed through transverse slots in
the lid and floor and tied round the bale in its bagging, the pressure
was released, and the bale was ready for market. Between 1820 and 1860
improvements in the apparatus promoted an increase in the average weight
of the bales from 250 to 400 pounds; while in still more recent times the
replacement of horse power by steam and the substitution of iron ties for
rope have caused the average bale to be yet another hundredweight heavier.
The only other distinctive equipment for cotton harvesting comprised cloth
bags with shoulder straps, and baskets of three or four bushels capacity
woven of white-oak splits to contain the contents of the pickers' bags
until carried to the gin house to be weighed at the day's end.
Whether on a one-horse farm or a hundred-hand plantation, the essentials in
cotton growing were the same. In an average year a given force of laborers
could plant and cultivate about twice as much cotton as it could pick. The
acreage to be seeded in the staple was accordingly fixed by a calculation
of the harvesting capacity, and enough more land was put into other crops
to fill out the spare time of the hands in spring and summer. To this
effect it was customary to plant in corn, which required less than half as
much work, an acreage at least equal to that in cotton, and to devote the
remaining energy to sweet potatoes, peanuts, cow peas and small grain. In
1820 the usual crop in middle Georgia for each full hand was reported at
six acres of cotton and eight of corn;[3] but in the following decades
during which mules were advantageously substituted for horses and oxen,
and the implements of tillage were improved and the harvesters grew more
expert, the annual stint was increased to ten acres in cotton and ten in
corn.
[Footnote 3: _The American Farmer_ (Baltimore), II, 359.]
At the Christmas holiday when the old year's harvest was nearly or quite
completed, well managed plantations had their preliminaries for the new
crop already in progress. The winter months were devoted to burning
canebrakes, clearing underbrush and rolling logs in the new grounds,
splitting rails and mending fences, cleaning ditches, spreading manure,
knocking down the old cotton and corn stalks, and breaking the soil of the
fields to be planted. Some planters broke the fields completely each year
and then laid off new rows. Others merely "listed" the fields by first
running a furrow with a shovel plow where each cotton or corn row was to be
and filling it with a single furrow of a turn plow from either side; then
when planting time approached they would break out the remaining balks with
plows, turning the soil to the lists and broadening them into rounded plant
beds. This latter plan was advocated as giving a firm seed bed while making
the field clean of all grass at the planting. The spacing of the cotton
rows varied from three to five feet according to the richness of the soil.
The policy was to put them at such distance that the plants when full grown
would lightly interlace their branches across the middles.
In March the corn fields were commonly planted, not so much because this
forehandedness was better for the crop as for the sake of freeing the
choicer month of April for the more important planting of cotton. In this
operation a narrow plow lightly opened the crests of the beds; cotton seed
were drilled somewhat thickly therein; and a shallow covering of earth was
given by means of a concave board on a plow stock, or by a harrow, a roller
or a small shallow plow.
Within two or three weeks, as soon as the young plants had put forth three
or four leaves, thinning and cultivation was begun. Hoe hands, under
orders to chop carefully, stirred the crust along the rows and reduced the
seedlings to a "double stand," leaving only two plants to grow at each
interval of twelve or eighteen inches. The plows then followed, stirring
the soil somewhat deeply near the rows. In another fortnight the hoes gave
another chopping, cutting down the weaker of each pair of plants, thus
reducing the crop to a "single stand"; and where plants were missing they
planted fresh seed to fill the gaps. The plows followed again, with broad
wings to their shares, to break the crust and kill the grass throughout the
middles. Similar alternations of chipping and plowing then ensued until
near the end of July, each cultivation shallower than the last in order
that the roots of the cotton should not be cut.[4]
[Footnote 4: Cotton Culture is described by M.W. Philips in the _American
Agriculturist_, II (New York, 1843), 51, 81, 117, 149; by various writers
in J.A. Turner, ed., _The Cotton Planter's Manual_ (New York, 1856), chap.
I; Harry Hammond, _The Cotton Plant_ (U.S. Department of Agriculture,
Experiment Station, _Bulletin_ 33, 1896); and in the U.S. Census, 1880,
vols. V and VI.]
When the blossoms were giving place to bolls in midsummer, "lay-by time"
was at hand. Cultivation was ended, and the labor was diverted to other
tasks until in late August or early September the harvest began. The
corn, which had been worked at spare times previously, now had its blades
stripped and bundled for fodder; the roads were mended, the gin house and
press put in order, the premises in general cleaned up, and perhaps a few
spare days given to recreation.
The cotton bolls ripened and opened in series, those near the center of the
plant first, then the outer ones on the lower branches, and finally the
top crop. If subjected unduly to wind and rain the cotton, drooping in the
bolls, would be blown to the ground or tangled with dead leaves or stained
with mildew. It was expedient accordingly to send the pickers through the
fields as early and as often as there was crop enough open to reward the
labor.
Four or five compartments held the contents of each boll; from sixty to
eighty bolls were required to yield a pound in the seed; and three or four
pounds of seed cotton furnished one pound of lint. When a boll was wide
open a deft picker could empty all of its compartments by one snatch of
the fingers; and a specially skilled one could keep both hands flying
independently, and still exercise the small degree of care necessary to
keep the lint fairly free from the trash of the brittle dead calyxes. As
to the day's work, a Georgia planter wrote in 1830: "A hand will pick or
gather sixty to a hundred pounds of cotton in the seed, with ease, per day.
I have heard of some hands gathering a hundred and twenty pounds in a day.
The hands on a plantation ought to average sixty-five pounds," [5] But
actual records in the following decades made these early pickers appear
very inept. On Levin Covington's plantation near Natchez in 1844, in a
typical week of October, Bill averaged 220 pounds a day, Dred 205 pounds,
Aggy 215, and Delia 185; and on Saturday of that week all the twenty-eight
men and boys together picked an average of 160 pounds, and all the eighteen
women and girls an average of 125.[6] But these were dwarfed in turn by the
pickings on J.W. Fowler's Prairie plantation, Coahoma County, Mississippi,
at the close of the ante-bellum period. In the week of September 12 to 17,
1859, Sandy, Carver and Gilmore each averaged about three hundred pounds a
day, and twelve other men and five women ranged above two hundred, while
the whole gang of fifty-one men and women, boys and girls average 157
pounds each.[7]
[Footnote 5: _American Farmer_, II, 359.]
[Footnote 6: MS. in the Mississippi Department of History and Archives,
Jackson, Miss.]
[Footnote 7: MS. in the possession of W.H. Stovall, Stovall, Miss.]
The picking required more perseverance than strength. Dexterity was at a
premium, but the labors of the slow, the youthful and the aged were all
called into requisition. When the fields were white with their fleece and
each day might bring a storm to stop the harvesting, every boll picked
might well be a boll saved from destruction. Even the blacksmith was called
from his forge and the farmer's children from school to bend their backs in
the cotton rows. The women and children picked steadily unless rains drove
them in; the men picked as constantly except when the crop was fairly under
control and some other task, such as breaking in the corn, called the whole
gang for a day to another field or when the gin house crew had to clear the
bins by working up their contents to make room for more seed cotton.
In the Piedmont where the yield was lighter the harvest was generally ended
by December; but in the western belt, particularly when rains interrupted
the work, it often extended far into the new year. Lucien Minor, for
example, wrote when traveling through the plantations of northern Alabama,
near Huntsville, in December, 1823: "These fields are still white with
cotton, which frequently remains unpicked until March or April, when the
ground is wanted to plant the next crop."[8] Planters occasionally noted in
their journals that for want of pickers the top crop was lost.
[Footnote 8: _Atlantic Monthly_, XXVI, 175.]
As to the yield, an adage was current, that cotton would promise more and
do less and promise less and do more than any other green thing that grew.
The plants in the earlier stages were very delicate. Rough stirring of the
clods would kill them; excess of rain or drought would be likewise fatal;
and a choking growth of grass would altogether devastate the field.
Improvement of conditions would bring quick recuperation to the surviving
stalks, which upon attaining their full growth became quite hardy; but
undue moisture would then cause a shedding of the bolls, and the first
frost of autumn would stop the further fruiting. The plants, furthermore,
were liable to many diseases and insect ravages. In infancy cut-worms might
sever the stalks at the base, and lice might sap the vitality; in the full
flush of blooming luxuriance, wilt and rust, the latter particularly on
older lands, might blight the leaves, or caterpillars in huge armies reduce
them to skeletons and blast the prospect; and even when the fruit was
formed, boll-worms might consume the substance within, or dry-rot prevent
the top crop from ripening. The ante-bellum planters, however, were exempt
from the Mexican boll-weevil, the great pest of the cotton belt in the
twentieth century.
While every planter had his fat years and lean, and the yield of the belt
as a whole alternated between bumper crops and short ones, the industry was
in general of such profit as to maintain a continued expansion of its area
and a never ending though sometimes hesitating increase of its product. The
crop rose from eighty-five million pounds in 1810 to twice as much in 1820;
it doubled again by 1830 and more than doubled once more by 1840. Extremely
low prices for the staple in the early 'forties and again in 1849 prompted
a campaign for crop reduction; and in that decade the increase was only
from 830,000,000 to 1,000,000,000 pounds. But the return of good prices in
the 'fifties caused a fresh and huge enlargement to 2,300,000,000 pounds in
the final census year of the ante-bellum period. While this was little more
than one fourth as great as the crops of sixteen million bales in 1912 and
1915, it was justly reckoned in its time, at home and abroad, a prodigious
output. All the rest of the world then produced barely one third as much.
The cotton sent abroad made up nearly two thirds of the value of the gross
export trade of the United States, while the tobacco export had hardly a
tenth of the cotton's worth. In competition with all the other staples,
cotton engaged the services of some three fourths of all the country's
plantation labor, in addition to the labor of many thousands of white
farmers and their families.
The production and sale of the staple engrossed no less of the people's
thought than of their work. A traveler who made a zig-zag journey from
Charleston to St. Louis in the early months of 1827, found cotton "a
plague." At Charleston, said he, the wharves were stacked and the stores
and ships packed with the bales, and the four daily papers and all
the patrons of the hotel were "teeming with cotton." At Augusta the
thoroughfares were thronged with groaning wagons, the warehouses were
glutted, the open places were stacked, and the steamboats and barges hidden
by their loads. On the road beyond, migrating planters and slaves bound
for the west, "'where the cotton land is not worn out,'" met cotton-laden
wagons townward bound, whereupon the price of the staple was the chief
theme of roadside conversation. Occasionally a wag would have his jest. The
traveler reported a tilt between two wagoners: "'What's cotton in Augusta?'
says the one with a load.... 'It's cotton,' says the other. 'I know that,'
says the first, 'but what is it?' 'Why,' says the other, 'I tell you it's
cotton. Cotton is cotton in Augusta and everywhere else that I ever heard
of,' 'I know that as well as you,' says the first, 'but what does cotton
bring in Augusta?' 'Why, it brings nothing there, but everybody brings
cotton,'" Whereupon the baffled inquirer appropriately relieved his
feelings and drove on. At his crossing of the Oconee River the traveler saw
pole-boats laden with bales twelve tiers high; at Milledgeville and Macon
cotton was the absorbing theme; in the newly opened lands beyond he "found
cotton land speculators thicker than locusts in Egypt"; in the neighborhood
of Montgomery cotton fields adjoined one another in a solid stretch for
fourteen miles along the road; Montgomery was congested beyond the capacity
of the boats; and journeying thence to Mobile he "met and overtook nearly
one hundred cotton waggons travelling over a road so bad that a state
prisoner could hardly walk through it to make his escape." As to Mobile, it
was "a receptacle monstrous for the article. Look which way you will you
see it, and see it moving; keel boats, steamboats, ships, brigs, schooners,
wharves, stores, and press-houses, all appeared to be full; and I believe
that in the three days I was there, boarding with about one hundred cotton
factors, cotton merchants and cotton planters, I must have heard the word
cotton pronounced more than three thousand times." New Orleans had a
similar glut.
On the journey up the Mississippi the plaint heard by this traveler from
fellow passengers who lived at Natchitoches, was that they could not get
enough boats to bring the cotton down the Red. The descending steamers and
barges on the great river itself were half of them heavy laden with cotton
and at the head of navigation on the Tennessee, in northwestern Alabama,
bales enough were waiting to fill a dozen boats. "The Tennesseeans," said
he, "think that no state is of any account but their own; Kentucky, they
say, would be if it could grow cotton, but as it is, it is good for
nothing. They count on forty or fifty thousand bales going from Nashville
this season; that is, if they can get boats to carry it all." The fleet
on the Cumberland River was doing its utmost, to the discomfort of the
passengers; and it was not until the traveler boarded a steamer for
St. Louis at the middle of March, that he escaped the plague which had
surrounded him for seventy days and seventy nights. This boat, at last,
"had not a bale of cotton on board, nor did I hear it named more than twice
in thirty-six hours...I had a pretty tolerable night's sleep, though I
dreamed of cotton."[9]
[Footnote 9: _Georgia Courier_ (Augusta, Ga.), Oct. 11, 1827, reprinted in
_Plantation and Frontier_, I, 283-289.]
This obsession was not without its undertone of disquiet. Foresighted men
were apprehensive lest the one-crop system bring distress to the cotton
belt as it had to Virginia. As early as 1818 a few newspaper editors[10]
began to decry the régime; and one of them in 1821 rejoiced in a widespread
prevalence of rot in the crop of the preceding year as a blessing, in that
it staved off the rapidly nearing time when the staple's price would fall
below the cost of production.[11] A marked rise of the price to above
twenty cents a pound at the middle of the decade, however, silenced these
prophets until a severe decline in the later twenties prompted the sons of
Jeremiah to raise their voices again, and the political crisis procured
them a partial hearing. Politicians were advocating the home production
of cloth and foodstuffs as a demonstration against the protective tariff,
while the economists pleaded for diversification for the sake of permanent
prosperity, regardless of tariff rates. One of them wrote in 1827: "That we
have cultivated cotton, cotton, cotton and bought everything else, has long
been our opprobrium. It is time that we should be aroused by some means or
other to see that such a course of conduct will inevitably terminate in
our ultimate poverty and ruin. Let us manufacture, because it is our best
policy. Let us go more on provision crops and less on cotton, because we
have had everything about us poor and impoverished long enough.... We have
good land, unlimited water powers, capital in plenty, and a patriotism
which is running over in some places. If the tariff drives us to this,
we say, let the name be sacred in all future generations."[12] Next year
William Ellison of the South Carolina uplands welcomed even the low price
of cotton as a lever[13] which might pry the planters out of the cotton rut
and shift them into industries less exhausting to the soil.
[Footnote 10: Augusta _Chronicle_, Dec. 23, 1818.]
[Footnote 11: _Georgia Journal_ (Milledgeville), June 5, 1821.]
[Footnote 12: _Georgia Courier_ (Augusta), June 21, 1827.]
[Footnote 13: _Southern Agriculturist_, II, 13.]
But in the breast of the lowlander, William Elliott, the depression of the
cotton market produced merely a querulous complaint that the Virginians, by
rushing into the industry several years before when the prices were high,
had spoiled the market. Each region, said he, ought to devote itself to
the staples best suited to its climate and soil; this was the basis of
profitable commerce. The proper policy for Virginia and most of North
Carolina was to give all their labor spared from tobacco to the growing of
corn which South Carolina would gladly buy of them if undisturbed in her
peaceful concentration upon cotton.[14] The advance of cotton prices
throughout most of the thirties suspended the discussion, and the régime
went on virtually unchanged. As an evidence of the specialization of the
Piedmont in cotton, it was reported in 1836 that in the town of Columbia
alone the purchases of bacon during the preceding year had amounted to
three and a half million pounds.[15]
[Footnote 14: _Southern Agriculturist_, I, 61.]
[Footnote 15: _Niles' Register_, LI, 46.]
The world-wide panic of 1837 began to send prices down, and the specially
intense cotton crisis of 1839 broke the market so thoroughly that for five
years afterward the producers had to take from five to seven cents a pound
for their crops. Planters by thousands were bankrupted, most numerously in
the inflated southwest; and thoughtful men everywhere set themselves afresh
to study the means of salvation. Edmund Ruffin, the Virginian enthusiast
for fertilizers, was employed by the authority of the South Carolina
legislature to make an agricultural survey of that state with a view to
recommending improvements. Private citizens made experiments on their
estates; and the newspapers and the multiplying agricultural journals
published their reports and advice. Most prominent among the cotton belt
planters who labored in the cause of reform were ex-Governor James H.
Hammond of South Carolina, Jethro V. Jones of Georgia, Dr. N.B. Cloud of
Alabama, and Dr. Martin W. Philips of Mississippi. Of these, Hammond was
chiefly concerned in swamp drainage, hillside terracing, forage increase,
and livestock improvement; Jones was a promoter of the breeding of improved
strains of cotton; Cloud was a specialist in fertilizing; and Philips was
an all-round experimenter and propagandist. Hammond and Philips, who were
both spurred to experiments by financial stress, have left voluminous
records in print and manuscript. Their careers illustrate the handicaps
under which innovators labored.
Hammond's estate[16] lay on the Carolina side of the Savannah River, some
sixteen miles below Augusta. Impressed by the depletion of his upland
soils, he made a journey in 1838 through southwestern Georgia and the
adjacent portion of Florida in search of a new location; but finding land
prices inflated, he returned without making a purchase,[17] and for the
time being sought relief at home through the improvement of his methods. He
wrote in 1841: "I have tried almost all systems, and unlike most planters
do not like what is old. I hardly know anything old in corn or cotton
planting but what is wrong." His particular enthusiasm now was for plow
cultivation as against the hoe. The best planter within his acquaintance,
he said, was Major Twiggs, on the opposite bank of the Savannah, who ran
thirty-four plows with but fourteen hoes. Hammond's own plowmen were now
nearly as numerous as his full hoe hands, and his crops were on a scale of
twenty acres of cotton, ten of corn and two of oats to the plow. He was
fertilizing each year a third of his corn acreage with cotton seed, and a
twentieth of his cotton with barnyard manure; and he was making a surplus
of thirty or forty bushels of corn per hand for sale.[18] This would
perhaps have contented him in normal times, but the severe depression of
cotton prices drove him to new prognostications and plans. His confidence
in the staple was destroyed, he said, and he expected the next crop
to break the market forever and force virtually everyone east of the
Chattahoochee to abandon the culture. "Here and there," he continued, "a
plantation may be found; but to plant an acre that will not yield three
hundred pounds net will be folly. I cannot make more than sixty dollars
clear to the hand on my whole plantation at seven cents...The western
plantations have got fairly under way; Texas is coming in, and the game is
up with us." He intended to change his own activities in the main to the
raising of cattle and hogs; and he thought also of sending part of his
slaves to Louisiana or Texas, with a view to removing thither himself after
a few years if the project should prove successful.[19] In an address of
the same year before the Agricultural Society of South Carolina, he
advised those to emigrate who intended to continue producing cotton,
and recommended for those who would stay in the Piedmont a diversified
husbandry including tobacco but with main emphasis upon cereals and
livestock.[20] Again at the end of 1849, he voiced similar views at the
first annual fair of the South Carolina Institute. The first phase of the
cotton industry, said he, had now passed; and the price henceforward would
be fixed by the cost of production, and would yield no great profits even
in the most fertile areas. The rich expanses of the Southwest, he thought,
could meet the whole world's demand at a cost of less than five cents a
pound, for the planters there could produce two thousand pounds of lint
per hand while those in the Piedmont could not exceed an average of twelve
hundred pounds. This margin of difference would deprive the slaves of their
value in South Carolina and cause their owners to send them West, unless
the local system of industry should be successfully revolutionized.
The remedies he proposed were the fertilization of the soil, the
diversification of crops, the promotion of commerce, and the large
development of cotton manufacturing.[21]
[Footnote 16: Described in 1846 in the _American Agriculturist_, VI, 113,
114.]
[Footnote 17: MS. diary, April 13 to May 14, 1838, in Hammond papers,
Library of Congress.]
[Footnote 18: Letters of Hammond to William Gilmore Simms, Jan. 27 and Mch.
9, 1841. Hammond's MS. drafts are in the Library of Congress.]
[Footnote 19: Letter to Isaac W. Hayne, Jan. 21, 1841.]
[Footnote 20: MS. oration in the Library of Congress.]
[Footnote 21: James H. Hammond, _An Address delivered before the South
Carolina Institute, at the first annual Fair, on the 20th November, 1849_
(Charleston. 1849).]
Hammond found that not only the public but his own sons also, with the
exception of Harry, were cool toward his advice and example; and he himself
yielded to the temptation of the higher cotton prices in the 'fifties, and
while not losing interest in cattle and small grain made cotton and corn
his chief reliance. He appears to have salved his conscience in this
relapse by devoting part of his income to the reclamation of a great marsh
on his estate. He operated two plantations, the one at his home, "Silver
Bluff," the other, "Cathwood," near by. The field force on the former
comprised in 1850 sixteen plow hands, thirty-four full hoe hands, six
three-quarter hands, two half hands and a water boy, the whole rated at
fifty-five full hands. At Cathwood the force, similarly grouped, was rated
at seventy-one hands; but at either place the force was commonly subject to
a deduction of some ten per cent, of its rated strength, on the score of
the loss of time by the "breeders and suckers" among the women. In addition
to their field strength and the children, of whom no reckoning was made in
the schedule of employments, the two plantations together had five stable
men, two carpenters, a miller and job worker, a keeper of the boat landing,
three nurses and two overseers' cooks; and also thirty-five ditchers in the
reclamation work.
At Silver Bluff, the 385 acres in cotton were expected to yield 330 bales
of 400 pounds each; the 400 acres in corn had an expectation of 9850
bushels; and 10 acres of rice, 200 bushels. At Cathwood the plantings and
expectations were 370 acres in cotton to yield 280 bales, 280 in corn to
yield 5000 bushels, 15 in wheat to yield 100 bushels, 11 in rye to yield
50, and 2 in rice to yield 50. In financial results, after earning in 1848
only $4334.91, which met barely half of his plantation and family expenses
for the year, his crop sales from 1849 to 1853 ranged from seven to twenty
thousand dollars annually in cotton and from one and a half to two and
a half thousand dollars in corn. His gross earnings in these five years
averaged $16,217.76, while his plantation expenses averaged $5393.87, and
his family outlay $6392.67, leaving an average "clear gain per annum," as
he called it, of $4431.10. The accounting, however, included no reckoning
of interest on the investment or of anything else but money income and
outgo. In 1859 Hammond put upon the market his 5500 acres of uplands with
their buildings, livestock, implements and feed supplies, together with 140
slaves including 70 full hands. His purpose, it may be surmised, was to
confine his further operations to his river bottoms.[22]
[Footnote 22: Hammond MSS., Library of Congress.]
Philips, whom a dearth of patients drove early from the practice of
medicine, established in the 'thirties a plantation which he named Log
Hall, in Hinds County, Mississippi. After narrowly escaping the loss of his
lands and slaves in 1840 through his endorsement of other men's notes,
he launched into experimental farming and agricultural publication. He
procured various fancy breeds of cattle and hogs, only to have most of
them die on his hands. He introduced new sorts of grasses and unfamiliar
vegetables and field crops, rarely with success. Meanwhile, however, he
gained wide reputation through his many writings in the periodicals, and in
the 'fifties he turned this to some advantage in raising fancy strains
of cotton and selling their seed. His frequent attendance at fairs and
conventions and his devotion to his experiments and to his pen caused
him to rely too heavily upon overseers in the routine conduct of his
plantation. In consequence one or more slaves occasionally took to the
woods; the whole force was frequently in bad health; and his women, though
remarkably fecund, lost most of their children in infancy. In some degree
Philips justified the prevalent scorn of planters for "book farming."[23]
[Footnote 23: M.W. Phillips, "Diary," F.L. Riley, ed., in the Mississippi
Historical Society _Publications_, X, 305-481; letters of Philips in the
_American Agriculturist, DeBow's Review_, etc., and in J.A. Turner, ed.,
_The Cotton Planter's Manual_, pp. 98-123.]
The newspapers and farm journals everywhere printed arguments in the
'forties in behalf of crop diversification, and _DeBow's Review_, founded
in 1846, joined in the campaign; but the force of habit, the dearth of
marketable substitutes and the charms of speculation conspired to make all
efforts of but temporary avail. The belt was as much absorbed in cotton in
the 'fifties as it had ever been before.
Meanwhile considerable improvement had been achieved in cotton methods.
Mules, mainly bred in Tennessee, Kentucky and Missouri, largely replaced
the less effective horses and oxen; the introduction of horizontal plowing
with occasional balks and hillside ditches, checked the washing of the
Piedmont soils; the use of fertilizers became fairly common; and cotton
seed was better selected. These last items of manures and seed were the
subject of special campaigns. The former was begun as early as 1808 by the
Virginian John Taylor of Caroline in his "Arator" essays, and was furthered
by the publications of Edmund Ruffin and many others. But an adequate
available source of fertilizers long remained a problem without solution.
Taylor stressed the virtues of dung and rotation; but the dearth of forage
hampered the keeping of large stocks of cattle, and soiling crops were
thought commonly to yield too little benefit for the expense in labor.
Ruffin had great enthusiasm for the marl or phosphate rock of the Carolina
coast; but until the introduction in much later decades of a treatment by
sulphuric acid this was too little soluble to be really worth while as a
plant food. Lime was also praised; but there were no local sources of it in
the districts where it was most needed.
Cotton seed, in fact, proved to be the only new fertilizer generally
available in moderate abundance prior to the building of the railroads. In
early years the seed lay about the gins as refuse until it became a public
nuisance. To abate it the village authorities of Sparta, Georgia, for
example, adopted in 1807 an ordinance "that the owner of each and every
cotton machine within the limits of said town shall remove before the first
day of May in each year all seed and damaged cotton that may be about such
machines, or dispose of such seed or cotton so as to prevent its unhealthy
putrefaction."[24] Soon after this a planter in St. Stephen's Parish,
South Carolina, wrote: "We find from experience our cotton seed one of the
strongest manures we make use of for our Indian corn; a pint of fresh seed
put around or in the corn hole makes the corn produce wonderfully",[25]
but it was not until the lapse of another decade or two that such practice
became widespread. In the thirties Harriet Martineau and J.S. Buckingham
noted that in Alabama the seed was being strewn as manure on a large
scale.[26] As an improvement of method the seed was now being given in many
cases a preliminary rotting in compost heaps, with a consequent speeding of
its availability as plant food;[27] and cotton seed rose to such esteem as
a fertilizer for general purposes that many planters rated it to be worth
from sixteen to twenty-five cents a bushel of twenty-five pounds.[28] As
early as 1830, furthermore a beginning was made in extracting cottonseed
oil for use both in painting and illumination, and also in utilizing the
by-product of cottonseed meal as a cattle feed.[29] By the 'fifties the oil
was coming to be an unheralded substitute for olive oil in table use; but
the improvements which later decades were to introduce in its extraction
and refining were necessary for the raising of the manufacture to the scale
of a substantial industry.
[Footnote 24: _Farmer's Gazette_ (Sparta, Ga.), Jan. 31, 1807.]
[Footnote 25: Letter of John Palmer. Dec. 3, 1808, to David Ramsay. MS. in
the Charleston Library.]
[Footnote 26: Harriet Martineau, _Retrospect of Western Travel_, (London,
1838), I, 218; I.S. Buckingham, _The Slave States of America_ (London,
1842), I, 257.]
[Footnote 27: D.R. Williams of South Carolina described his own practice to
this effect in an essay of 1825 contributed to the _American Farmer_ and
reprinted in H.T. Cook, _The Life and Legacy of David R. Williams_ (New
York, 1916), pp. 226, 227.]
[Footnote 28: J.A. Turner, ed., _Cotton Planter's Manual_, p. 99; Robert
Russell, _North America_, p. 269.]
[Footnote 29: _Southern Agriculturist_, II, 563; _American Farmer_, II, 98;
H.T. Cook, _Life and Legacy of David R. Williams_, pp. 197-209.]
The importation of fertilizers began with guano. This material, the dried
droppings of countless birds, was discovered in the early 'forties on
islands off the coast of Peru;[30] and it promptly rose to such high esteem
in England that, according to an American news item, Lloyd's listed for
1845 not less than a thousand British vessels as having sailed in search of
guano cargoes. The use of it in the United States began about that year;
and nowhere was its reception more eager than in the upland cotton belt.
Its price was about fifty dollars a ton in the seaports. To stimulate the
use of fertilizers, the Central of Georgia Railroad Company announced
in 1858 that it would carry all manures for any distance on its line in
carload lots at a flat rate of two dollars per ton; and the connecting
roads concurred in this policy. In consequence the Central of Georgia
carried nearly two thousand tons of guano in 1859, and more than nine
thousand tons in 1860, besides lesser quantities of lime, salt and bone
dust. The superintendent reported that while the rate failed to cover the
cost of transportation, the effect in increasing the amount of cotton to be
freighted, and in checking emigration, fully compensated the road.[31] A
contributor to the _North American Review_ in January, 1861, wrote: "The
use of guano is increasing. The average return for each pound used in the
cotton field is estimated to be a pound and a half of cotton; and the
planter who could raise but three bales to the hand on twelve acres of
exhausted soil has in some instances by this appliance realized ten bales
from the same force and area. In North Carolina guano is reported to
accelerate the growth of the plant, and this encourages the culture on
the northern border of the cotton-field, where early frosts have proved
injurious."
[Footnote 30: _American Agriculturist_, III, 283.]
[Footnote 31: Central of Georgia Railroad Company _Reports_, 1858-1860.]
Widespread interest in agricultural improvement was reported by _DeBow's
Review_ in the 'fifties, taking the form partly of local and general
fairs, partly of efforts at invention. A citizen of Alabama, for example,
announced success in devising a cotton picking machine; but as in many
subsequent cases in the same premises, the proclamation was premature.
As to improved breeds of cotton, public interest appears to have begun
about 1820 in consequence of surprisingly good results from seed newly
procured from Mexico. These were in a few years widely distributed under
the name of Petit Gulf cotton. Colonel Vick of Mississippi then began to
breed strains from selected seed; and others here and there followed his
example, most of them apparently using the Mexican type. The more dignified
of the planters who prided themselves on selling nothing but cotton, would
distribute among their friends parcels of seed from any specially fine
plants they might encounter in their fields, and make little ado about
it. Men of a more flamboyant sort, such as M.W. Philips, contemning such
"ruffle-shirt cant," would christen their strains with attractive names,
publish their virtues as best they might, and offer their fancy seed for
sale at fancy prices. Thus in 1837 the Twin-seed or Okra cotton was in
vogue, selling at many places for five dollars a quart. In 1839 this was
eclipsed by the Alvarado strain, which its sponsors computed from an
instance of one heavily fruited stalk nine feet high and others not so
prodigious, might yield three thousand pounds per acre.[32] Single Alvarado
seeds were sold at fifty cents each, or a bushel might be had at $160. In
the succeeding years Vick's Hundred Seed, Brown's, Pitt's, Prolific, Sugar
Loaf, Guatemala, Cluster, Hogan's, Banana, Pomegranate, Dean, Multibolus,
Mammoth, Mastodon and many others competed for attention and sale. Some
proved worth while either in increasing the yield, or in producing larger
bolls and thereby speeding the harvest, or in reducing the proportionate
weight of the seed and increasing that of the lint; but the test of
planting proved most of them to be merely commonplace and not worth the
cost of carriage. Extreme prices for seed of any strain were of course
obtainable only for the first year or two; and the temptation to make
fraudulent announcement of a wonder-working new type was not always
resisted. Honest breeders improved the yield considerably; but the
succession of hoaxes roused abundant skepticism. In 1853 a certain Miller
of Mississippi confided to the public the fact that he had discovered by
chance a strain which would yield three hundred pounds more of seed cotton
per acre than any other sort within his knowledge, and he alluringly named
it Accidental Poor Land Cotton. John Farrar of the new railroad town
Atlanta was thereby moved to irony. "This kind of cotton," he wrote in a
public letter, "would run a three million bale crop up to more than four
millions; and this would reduce the price probably to four or five cents.
Don't you see, Mr. Miller, that we had better let you keep and plant your
seed? You say that you had rather plant your crop with them than take a
dollar a pint.... Let us alone, friend, we are doing pretty well--we might
do worse."[33]
[Footnote 32: _Southern Banner_( Athens, Ga.), Sept. 20, 1839.]
[Footnote 33: J.A. Turner, ed., _Cotton Planter's Manual_, p. 98-128.]
In the sea-island branch of the cotton industry the methods differed
considerably from those in producing the shorter staple. Seed selection was
much more commonly practiced, and extraordinary care was taken in ginning
and packing the harvest. The earliest and favorite lands for this crop
were those of exceedingly light soil on the islands fringing the coast of
Georgia and South Carolina. At first the tangle of live-oak and palmetto
roots discouraged the use of the plow; and afterward the need of heavy
fertilization with swamp mud and seaweed kept the acreage so small in
proportion to the laborers that hoes continued to be the prevalent means of
tillage. Operations were commonly on the basis of six or seven acres to the
hand, half in cotton and the rest in corn and sweet potatoes. In the swamps
on the mainland into which this crop was afterwards extended, the use of
the plow permitted the doubling of the area per hand; but the product of
the swamp lands was apparently never of the first grade.
The fields were furrowed at five-foot intervals during the winter, bedded
in early spring, planted in late April or early May, cultivated until the
end of July, and harvested from September to December. The bolls opened but
narrowly and the fields had to be reaped frequently to save the precious
lint from damage by the weather. Accordingly the pickers are said to have
averaged no more than twenty-five pounds a day. The preparation for market
required the greatest painstaking of all. First the seed cotton was dried
on a scaffold; next it was whipped for the removal of trash and sand; then
it was carefully sorted into grades by color and fineness; then it went to
the roller gins, whence the lint was spread upon tables where women picked
out every stained or matted bit of the fiber; and finally when gently
packed into sewn bags it was ready for market. A few gin houses were
equipped in the later decades with steam power; but most planters retained
the system of a treadle for each pair of rollers as the surest safeguard
of the delicate filaments. A plantation gin house was accordingly a simple
barn with perhaps a dozen or two foot-power gins, a separate room for the
whipping, a number of tables for the sorting and moting, and a round hole
in the floor to hold open the mouth of the long bag suspended for the
packing.[34] In preparing a standard bale of three hundred pounds, it was
reckoned that the work required of the laborers at the gin house was as
follows: the dryer, one day; the whipper, two days; the sorters, at fifty
pounds of seed cotton per day for each, thirty days; the ginners, each
taking 125 pounds in the seed per day and delivering therefrom 25 pounds of
lint, twelve days; the moters, at 43 pounds, seven days; the inspector and
packer, two days; total fifty-four days.
[Footnote 34: The culture and apparatus are described by W.B. Seabrook,
_Memoir on Cotton_, pp. 23-25; Thomas Spaulding in the _American
Agriculturist_, III, 244-246; R.F.W. Allston, _Essay on Sea Coast Crops_
(Charleston, 1854), reprinted in _DeBow's Review_, XVI, 589-615; J.A.
Turner, ed., _Cotton Planter's Manual_, pp. 131-136. The routine of
operations is illustrated in the diary of Thomas P. Ravenel, of Woodboo
plantation, 1847-1850, printed in _Plantation and Frontier_, I, 195-208.]
The roller gin was described in a most untechnical manner by Basil Hall:
"It consists of two little wooden rollers, each about as thick as a man's
thumb, placed horizontally and touching each other. On these being put into
rapid motion, handfulls of the cotton are cast upon them, which of course
are immediately sucked in.... A sort of comb fitted with iron teeth ... is
made to wag up and down with considerable velocity in front of the rollers.
This rugged comb, which is equal in length to the rollers, lies parallel to
them, with the sharp ends of its teeth almost in contact with them. By
the quick wagging motion given to this comb by the machinery, the buds of
cotton cast upon the rollers are torn open just as they are beginning to be
sucked in. The seeds, now released ... fly off like sparks to the right and
left, while the cotton itself passes between the rollers."[35]
[Footnote 35: Basil Hall, _Travels in North America_ (Edinburgh, 1829),
III, 221, 222.]
As to yields and proceeds, a planter on the Georgia seaboard analyzed his
experience from 1830 to 1847 as follows: the harvest average per acre
ranged from 68 pounds of lint in 1846 to 223 pounds in 1842, with a general
average for the whole period of 137 pounds; the crop's average price per
pound ranged from 14 cents in 1847 to 41 cents in 1838, with a general
average of 23 1/2 cents; and the net proceeds per hand were highest at
$137 in 1835, lowest at $41 in 1836, and averaged $83 for the eighteen
years.[36]
[Footnote 36: J.A. Turner, ed., _Cotton Planter's Manual_, pp. 128, 129.]
In the cotton belt as a whole the census takers of 1850 enumerated 74,031
farms and plantations each producing five bales or more,[37] and they
reckoned the crop at 2,445,793 bales of four hundred pounds each. Assuming
that five bales were commonly the product of one full hand, and leaving
aside a tenth of the gross output as grown perhaps on farms where the
cotton was not the main product, it appears that the cotton farms and
plantations averaged some thirty bales each, and employed on the average
about six full hands. That is to say, there were very many more small
farms than large plantations devoted to cotton; and among the plantations,
furthermore, it appears that very few were upon a scale entitling them
to be called great, for the nature of the industry did not encourage the
engrossment of more than sixty laborers under a single manager.[38] It is
true that some proprietors operated on a much larger scale than this. It
was reported in 1859, for example, that Joseph Bond of Georgia had marketed
2199 bales of his produce, that numerous Louisiana planters, particularly
about Concordia Parish, commonly exceeded that output; that Dr. Duncan of
Mississippi had a crop of 3000 bales; and that L.R. Marshall, who lived at
Natchez and had plantations in Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas, was
accustomed to make more than four thousand bales.[39] The explanation lies
of course in the possession by such men of several more or less independent
plantations of manageable size. Bond's estate, for example, comprised not
less than six plantations in and about Lee County in southwestern Georgia,
while his home was in the town of Macon. The areas of these, whether
cleared or in forest, ranged from 1305 to 4756 acres.[40] But however large
may have been the outputs of exceptionally great planters, the fact remains
on the other hand that virtually half of the total cotton crop each year
was made by farmers whose slaves were on the average hardly more numerous
than the white members of their own families. The plantation system
nevertheless dominated the régime.
[Footnote 37: _Compendium of the Seventh Census_, p. 178]
[Footnote 38: _DeBow's Review_, VIII, 16.]
[Footnote 39: _Ibid_., XXVI, 581.]
[Footnote 40: Advertisement of Bond's executors offering the plantations
for sale in the _Federal Union_ (Milledgeville, Ga.), Nov. 8, 1859.]
The British and French spinners, solicitous for their supply of material,
attempted at various times and places during the ante-bellum period to
enlarge the production of cotton where it was already established and to
introduce it into new regions. The result was a complete failure to lessen
the predominance of the United States as a source. India, Egypt and Brazil
might enlarge their outputs considerably if the rates in the market were
raised to twice or thrice their wonted levels; but so long as the price
held a moderate range the leadership of the American cotton belt could not
be impaired, for its facilities were unequaled. Its long growing season,
hot in summer by day and night, was perfectly congenial to the plant, its
dry autumns permitted the reaping of full harvests, and its frosty winters
decimated the insect pests. Its soil was abundant, its skilled managers
were in full supply, its culture was well systematized, and its labor
adequate for the demand. To these facilities there was added in the
Southern thought of the time, as no less essential for the permanence of
the cotton belt's primacy, the plantation system and the institution of
slavery.