PLANTATION GLIMPSES.
In travelling through the South one sees many plantations ruined for
some years to come by improper cultivation. The land generally washes
badly, and where the hill-sides have been furrowed up and down, instead
of being properly “horizontalized,” the rains plough them into gulleys,
and carry off the cream of the soil. Or perhaps neglect, during four
years of war, has led to the same result. Many worn-out plantations are
in this condition, the gulleys cutting the slopes into ridges and
chasms.
In Georgia, as in parts of Alabama, one becomes weary of tracts of
poor-looking country, overgrown with sedge-grass, or covered with oaks
and pines. The roads, never good, in bad weather are frightful. Never a
church steeple relieves the monotony of the landscape. Occasionally
there is a village, its houses appearing to be built upon props. If
standing upon a ridge above the highway or railroad by which you pass,
the sight of the blue sky _under_ them gives them a singular appearance.
It is customary, all through the South, to build country-houses in this
manner, and rarely with cellars. The props, which are sometimes of
brick, but oftener of fat pine, which makes an underpinning almost as
durable as brick, lift the building a few feet from the earth and allow
a free circulation of air under it. This peculiarity, which strikes a
stranger as unnecessary, is not so. A Northern man of my acquaintance,
settled in North Carolina, told me that he built his house in the
New-England style, with a close underpinning; but soon discovered that
the dampness of the earth was causing the lower timbers to rot badly. By
opening the underpinning, and ventilating the foundation, he succeeded
in checking the decay. Let Northern men emigrating to the South take a
hint from his experience. No doubt many Southern customs, which appear
to us irrational or useless, will thus be found to have originated in
common sense and necessity.
I was too late to see the cotton-picking, and too early for the
chopping-out and hoeing, but in season to witness the preparation of the
ground for planting. Sometimes, in a gang of fifty or sixty laborers
running as many ploughs on the fields of a large plantation, there would
be twenty or thirty women and strong girls. The sight of so many ploughs
in motion, each drawn by a single mule, and scratching its narrow furrow
three inches deep, was of itself interesting; and the presence with the
ploughmen of the stout black ploughwomen added to it a certain
picturesqueness.
I have already related how my ignorance was enlightened with regard to
the manufacture of ploughs on Alabama plantations. I afterwards saw the
blacksmiths at work upon these somewhat rude implements, and learned
that some of the larger plantations manufactured their own carts and
wagons. The plantation harness is a simple affair, and is nearly always
made on the place. While the negro women are spinning and weaving cloth
in rainy-weather, the men are bending hames, braiding mule-collars of
corn husks, and making back-bands of leather or bagging.
I found that some of the large plantations had, besides a white
superintendent, two black overseers,—one whose sole business was to take
care of the ploughs and hoes, and one who looked after the mules and
other live stock.
The buildings of a first-class plantation form a little village by
themselves. There is first the planter’s house, which is commonly a
framed dwelling of good size, with two or four brick chimneys built
outside. There is not a closet in the house. The pantry and dairy form a
separate building. The kitchen is another; and the meat-house still
another. Next in importance to the planter’s house is the overseer’s
house. Then come the negro quarters, which, on some plantations I have
seen, are very comfortable and neat-looking little framed houses. They
are oftener mere huts. A barn is a rare exception. The corn is kept in
cribs, and other grain in out-door bins framed with roof-like covers
that shut down and lock. Then there are the mule-pens; the gin-house (if
it has not been burned); and the mill for crushing sorghum. Orchards are
rare, planters thinking of little besides cotton, and living, like their
negroes, chiefly on hog and hominy.
Travelling by private conveyance from Eatonton—the northern terminus of
the Milledgeville and Eatonton Railroad—over to Madison on the Georgia
road, on my way to Augusta, I passed a night at a planter’s house of the
middle class. It was a plain, one-and-a-half story, unpainted,
weather-browned framed dwelling, with a porch in front, and two front
windows. The oaken floors were carpetless, but clean swept. The rooms
were not done off at all; there was not a lath, nor any appearance of
plastering or whitewash about them. The rafters and shingles of the roof
formed the ceiling of the garret-chamber; the sleepers and boards of the
chamber-floor, the ceiling of the sitting-room; and the undisguised
beams, studs, and clapboards of the frame and its covering, composed the
walls. The dining-room was a little detached framed box, without a
fireplace, and with a single broken window. There was a cupboard, a
wardrobe, and a bed in the sitting-room; a little bedroom leading off
from it; and two beds in the garret.
There was a glowing fire in the fireplace, beside which sat a
neatly-attired, fine-looking, but remarkably silent grandmother, taking
snuff, or smoking.
The house had three other inmates,—the planter and his wife, and their
son, a well-educated young man, who sat in the evening reading “Handy
Andy” by the light of pitch-pine chips thrown at intervals upon the
oak-wood fire. No candle was lighted except for me, at bedtime.
This, be it understood, was not the house of a small farmer, but of the
owner of two plantations, of a thousand acres each. He had fifty-nine
negroes before the war.
There was a branch running through his estate, on the bottom-land of
which he could make a bale of cotton to the acre. On the uplands it took
three or four acres to make a bale. This year his son had undertaken to
run the plantation we were on, while he was to oversee the other.
The young man was far more hopeful of success than his father.
The old man said: “You can’t get anything out of the niggers, now
they’re free.”
“I never knew them to work any better,” said the young man.
“Just now they are showing a little spirit, maybe,” said the father;
“but it won’t continue.”
“I believe mine will do more work this year than ever,” said the son.
“Perhaps they will for you, but they won’t for me.”
The old man went away early in the evening to spend the night on his
other plantation. After he was gone, the young man looked up from the
pages of “Handy Andy,” and remarked emphatically:—
“The great trouble in this country is, the people are mad at the niggers
because they’re free. They always believed they wouldn’t do well if they
were emancipated, and now they maintain, and some of them even hope,
they won’t do well,—that too in the face of actual facts. The old
planters have no confidence in the niggers, and as a matter of course
the niggers have no confidence in them. They have a heap more confidence
in their young masters, and they work well for us. They have still more
confidence in the Yankees, and they work still better for them. They
have the greatest affection for the Yankees; they won’t steal from them,
like they will from us. I had forty-seven hogs in one lot when I took
the plantation; and in two weeks there were only twenty-six left. The
same thing happened to my turnip patch. I don’t reckon it is my freedmen
that steal from me; but the country is full of thieving darkeys that
think it’s no wrong to take from a Southern white man.”
“I wish we older ones had the faculty you say you have for making the
free niggers work,” said the young man’s mother. “I always kept two
women just to weave. The same women are with me now. Before they were
declared free, they could weave six and eight yards of cloth a day,
easy. Now the most they do is about one yard.”
The house was on the main road traversed by the 15th corps, belonging to
the left wing of Sherman’s army, on its way from Madison to
Milledgeville.
“I never would have thought I could stay home while the Yankees were
passing,” said the young man’s mother, “but I did. They commenced
passing early in the morning, and there wasn’t an hour in the day that
they were not as thick, as blue pigeons along the road.
“I was very much excited at first. My husband was away, and I had nobody
with me but our negroes. A German soldier came into the house first of
any. He was an ugly-looking fellow as ever I saw; but I suppose any man
would have looked ugly to me under such circumstances. Said he, ‘I’ve
orders to get a saddle from this house.’ I told him my husband had done
gone off with the only saddle we had. Then he said, ‘A pistol will do.’
I said I had no pistol. Then he told me he must have a watch of me. I
had a watch, but it was put out of the way where I hoped no Yankee could
find it; so I told him I had none for him.
“He then looked all around the room, and said, ‘Madam, I have orders to
burn this house.’ I replied that I hoped the Federals were too
magnanimous to burn houses over the heads of defenceless women. He said,
‘I’ll insure it for fifty dollars;’ for that’s the way they got a heap
of money out of our people. I said, ‘I’ve no fifty dollars to pay for
insuring it; and if it depends upon that, it must burn.’
“Soon as he saw he couldn’t frighten me into giving him anything, he
went to plundering. He had found a purse, with five dollars in
Confederate money in it, when he saw an officer coming into the front
door, and escaped through the back door. He was a very great villain,
and the officer said if he was caught he would be punished.
“I don’t know what I should have done if it hadn’t been for the Yankee
officers. They treated me politely in every way. They couldn’t prevent
my meal and bacon from being taken by the foraging parties,—all except
what I had hid; but they gave me a guard to keep soldiers from
plundering the house, and when one guard was taken away I had another in
his place. Some families on this road, who had no guard, were so broken
up they had nothing left to keep house with.
“When the foragers were carrying off our provisions, I said to an
officer, ‘That’s all the corn meal I have,’—which wasn’t quite true, for
I had some hid away; but he ordered the men to return me a sack. I
didn’t make anything by the lie; for the next party that came along took
the sack the others had left. But I did save a pot of lard. I said to an
officer, ‘They’ve done taken all my turkeys and cows and hogs, and you
will leave me without anything.’ ‘Take back that pot of lard to the
lady,’ said he; and I soon had it where it wasn’t seen again that day.
“What was out doors nothing could prevent the soldiers from taking. I
had bee-gum, and they just carried it off, hives and all. A soldier
would catch up a hive, and march right along, with it on his head, and
with the bees swarming all about him. They didn’t care anything for the
bees. I reckon they wouldn’t sting Yankees.”
During the evening, I paid a visit to the freedmen’s quarters. The doors
of the huts were all open, in a row, and I could see a dozen negro
families grouped around cheerful fires within, basking in the yellow
light, and looking quite happy and comfortable.