_Coffin's Point, March 20._ Just a year ago to-night I entered this
house for the first time. If our Northern croakers could only be made
to realize as we do here the ease with which we have reduced a
comparative degree of order out of the chaos we found, and see how
ready this degraded and half-civilized race are to become an
industrious and useful laboring class, there would not be so much
gabble about the danger of immediate emancipation, or of a stampede of
negro labor to the North.
We found them a herd of suspicious savages who regarded their change
of condition with fear and trembling, looking at the cotton-field as a
life-long scene of unrequited toil, and hailing with delight the
prospect of "no more driver, no more cotton, no more lickin'." They
had broken up the cotton-gins and hidden the iron-work, and nothing
was more remote from their shallow pates than the idea of planting
cotton for "white folks" again.
Now they have, without the least urging, prepared for planting some
two hundred acres of cotton-land upon this plantation, having spread
on it sixteen hundred ox-cart-loads of manure, and worked up every
inch of the ground with their hoes. They have also planted one hundred
and thirty acres of corn, and have begun ploughing to-day, banking up
into ridges with the ploughs the cotton-land into which the manure had
been first hoed. The ploughs run over twenty acres per day on this
place. They were made at Groton, Mass., and astonish the negroes by
their efficiency.
As a sample of the change of feeling in regard to working on cotton, I
will relate how I got the cotton ginned on this and the various other
plantations in this neighborhood. I walked through the negro quarters
one day in December and told the people I would pay them three cents
per pound of clean cotton if they would gin, assort, clean, and pack
their cotton ready for market. They said in reply their gins were all
broken up. I told them that was their own fault, and that, if they
wanted other people to gin their cotton and get their seed away from
the place, they would do so, and so get all the money and leave them
no good seed to plant. "Dat' so, Massa," said they, and I passed
along. The next time I came they had hunted up the broken pieces of
twenty-five gins, and patched them up, and had ginned and packed all
their cotton, in two weeks, wanting to know what I would have them do
next, for they did not want to lie still and do nothing.
So you see there is some satisfaction in being among these people,
although they are not exactly companions for us.