DAVIS’S BEND.—GRAND GULF.—NATCHEZ.
Descending the Mississippi, the first point of interest you pass is
Davis’s Bend, the former home of the President of the Confederacy.
A curve of the river encircles a pear-shaped peninsula twenty-eight
miles in circumference, with a cut-off across the neck seven hundred
yards in length, converting it into an island. There is a story told of
a man who, setting out to walk on the levee to Natchez, from Mr. Joe
Davis’s plantation, which adjoins that of his brother Jeff, unwittingly
made the circuit of this island, and did not discover his mistake until
he found himself at night on the spot from which he had started in the
morning.
About a mile from the river stands the Jeff Davis Mansion, with its wide
verandas and pleasant shade-trees. The plantation comprises a thousand
acres of tillable land, now used as a Home Farm for colored paupers,
under the superintendence of a sub-commissioner of the Bureau. Here are
congregated the old, the orphaned, the infirm, and many whose energies
of body and mind were prematurely worn out under the system which the
Confederacy was designed to glorify and perpetuate.
Here you find the incompetent and thriftless. Some have little
garden-spots, on which they worked last season until their vegetables
were ripe, when they stopped work and went to eating the vegetables. The
government cultivates cotton with their labor; and once, at a critical
period, it was necessary to commence ejecting them from their quarters
in order to compel them to work to keep the grass down.
The freedmen on the other plantations of the island represent other
qualities of the race. Besides the Home Farm there are five thousand
acres divided into farms and homesteads, cultivated by the negroes on
their own account, and paying a large rent to the government. On these
little farms twenty-five hundred bales of cotton were raised last year,
besides large quantities of corn, potatoes, and other produce. Many of
the tenants had only their naked hands to begin with: they labored with
hoes alone the first year, earning money to buy mules and ploughs the
next. The signal success of the colony perhaps indicates the future of
free labor in the South, and the eventual division of the large
plantations into homesteads to be sold or rented to small farmers. This
system suits the freedman better than any other; and under it he is
industrious, prosperous, and happy.
There were about three thousand people at the Bend. Some worked a few
acres, others took large farms, and hired laborers. Fifty had
accumulated five thousand dollars each during the past two years; and
one hundred others had accumulated from one to four thousand dollars.
Some of these rising capitalists had engaged Northern men to rent
plantations for the coming year, and to take them in as partners,—the
new black code of Mississippi prohibiting the leasing of lands to the
freedmen.
The colony is self-governing, under the supervision of the
sub-commissioner. There are three courts, each having its colored judge
and sheriff. The offender, before being put on trial, can decide whether
he will be tried by a jury, or have his case heard by the judge alone.
Pretty severe sentences are sometimes pronounced; and it is found that
the negro will take cheerfully twice the punishment from one of his own
color that he will from a white court.
Some sound sense often falls from the lips of these black Solomons. Here
is a sample. A colored man and his mother are brought up for stealing a
bag of corn.
_Judge_: “Do you choose to be tried by a jury?”
_Culprit_ (not versed in the technicalities of the court): “What’s dat?”
_Judge_: “Do you want twelve men to come in and help me?”
_Culprit_, emphatically: “No, sah!”—for he thinks one man will probably
be too much for him.
_Judge_, sternly: “Now listen you! You and your mother are a couple of
low-down darkies, trying to get a living without work. You are the cause
that respectable colored people are slandered, and called thieving and
lazy niggers; when it’s only the likes of you that’s thieving and lazy.
Now this is what I’ll do with you. If you and your mother will hire out
to-day, and go to work like honest people, I’ll let you off on good
behavior. If you won’t, I’ll send you to Captain Norton. That means,
you’ll go up with a sentence. And I’ll tell you what your sentence will
be: three months’ hard labor on the Home Farm, and the ball and chain in
case you attempt to run away. Now which will you do?”
_Culprit_, eagerly: “I’ll hire out, sah!” And a contract is made for him
and his mother on the spot.
The next point of interest is Grand Gulf; the only place that offered
any resistance to our gun-boats between Vicksburg and Port Hudson. It
had before the war a thousand inhabitants, three churches, and several
steam-mills. Water and fire appear to have conspired against it. The
Yankees burned every vestige of the village, and the river has torn away
a large section of the bank on which it stood. A number of cheap
whitewashed wooden buildings have taken its place on the shore; above
and behind which rises a steep rocky bluff, covered with sparse timber,
sedge, and cane-brakes, and crowned by Rebel batteries.
There was formerly an extensive whirlpool below the confluence of the
Big Black with the Mississippi, which had worn a gulf six hundred feet
deep, just above this place: hence its name, Grand Gulf. This immense
chasm has been filled, since the beginning of the war, by the river that
excavated it; and where the whirlpool was there is now a solid sand-bar
overgrown with cotton-wood bushes. Opposite the town, on the Louisiana
side, there is another sand-bar, bare and low, occupying the place of a
fine plantation that flourished there before the war.
A hundred and twenty miles below Vicksburg is Natchez, one of the most
romantically and beautifully situated cities in the United States. It is
built on an almost precipitous bluff, one hundred and fifty feet above
the river, which is overlooked by a delightful park and promenade along
the city front. The landing is under the bluff.
The “Quitman” (in which I had taken passage) stopped several hours at
Natchez getting on board a quantity of cotton. Above Vicksburg, I
noticed that nearly all the cotton was going northward: below, it was
going the other way, toward New Orleans. At every town, and at nearly
every plantation landing, we took on board, sometimes a hundred bales
and more, sometimes but two or three, until the “Quitman” showed two
high white walls of cotton all round her guards, which were sunk to the
water’s edge. She was constructed to carry forty-three hundred bales.
On the levee at Natchez I made the acquaintance of an old plantation
overseer. He knew all about cotton raising. “I’ve overseed in the
swamps, and I’ve overseed on the hills. You can make a bale to the acre
in the swamps, and about one bale to two acres on the hills. I used to
get ten to fifteen hundred dollars a year. I’m hiring now to a Northern
man, who gives me three thousand. A Northern man will want to get more
out of the niggers than we do. Mine said to me last night, ‘I want you
to get the last drop of sweat and the last pound of cotton out of my
niggers;’ and I shall do it. I can if anybody can. There’s a heap in
humbuggin’ a nigger. I worked a gang this summer, and got as much work
out of ’em as I ever did. I just had my leading nigger, and I says to
him, I says, ‘Sam, I want this yer crop out by such a time; now you go
ahead, talk to the niggers, and lead ’em off right smart, and I’ll give
you twenty-five dollars.’ Then I got up a race, and give a few dollars
to the men that picked the most cotton, till I found out the extent of
what each man could pick; then I required that of him every day, or I
docked his wages.”
As we were talking, the mate of the “Quitman” took up an oyster-shell
and threw it at the head of one of the deck-hands, who did not handle
the cotton to suit him. It did not hurt the negro’s head much, but it
hurt his feelings.
“Out on the plantations,” observed my friend the overseer, “it would
cost him fifty dollars to hit a nigger that way. It cost me a hundred
and fifty dollars just for knocking down three niggers lately,—fifty
dollars a piece, by ——!”
He thought the negroes were going to be crowded out by the Germans; and
went on to say, with true Southern consistency,—
“The Germans want twenty dollars a month, and we can hire the niggers
for ten and fifteen. The Germans will die in our swamps. Then as soon as
they get money enough to buy a cart and mule, and an acre of land
somewhar, whar they can plant a grape-vine, they’ll go in for
themselves.”