FOOTNOTES:
[14] W.G. Moody: Land and Labor in the United States.
[15] Wm. Goodwin Moody shows this conclusively in his work on Land and Labor in the United States.
CHAPTER XIII
Conditions of Labor in the South
I am not seriously concerned about the frightful political disorders which have disgraced the Southern States since the close of the War of the Rebellion; nor am I seriously concerned about the race-wars in that section about which so much has been justly said, and about which so very little is really known, in spite of the vast mass of testimony that did not more than begin to tell the tale. I know that time and education will give proper adjustment to the politics of the South, and that the best men of all classes, the intelligent and the property-holders will eventually grasp the reins of political or civil power and give, as far as they can, equilibrium to the unbalanced conditions.
The men of natural parts, of superior culture and ambitious spirit usually, in all societies, manage to rise to the top as the natural rulers of the people. You cannot keep them down; you cannot repress them. They rise to the top as naturally as sparks fly upward to the heavens. Demagogues and quacks manage only to impose upon the ignorant and confiding, upon men, conscious of their own inability to rule, who gladly transfer the responsibility to the first loud-mouthed fellow who comes along claiming, as his own, superior capacity and virtue. Intelligent men do not permit ignoramuses and adventurers to rule them; they prefer to rule themselves; and they submit to be ruled by such interlopers only so long as it takes them to thoroughly understand the condition of affairs. It is not, therefore, to be marvelled at that the white men of the South spread death and terror in their pathway to the throne of power in subverting the governments of the Reconstruction policy, based as those governments were, upon disorganized ignorance on the part of the blacks and organized robbery on the part of the white adventurers, who have become infamous under the expressive term "carpet-baggers;" although the genuine Northern immigrants, the "Fools" who came in good faith to cast in their lot with the Southern people supposing themselves to be welcome, should not share in the obloquy of that epithet. But, should the white men of the South continue indefinitely as the rulers of the South, to the absolute exclusion of participation of the black citizens of those states, then would my surprise be turned into profound amazement and horror at what such tyranny would produce as a logical result. Yet I know the temper of the people of the South too well to base any deduction upon a proposition so full of horror and despair. And, then, too, such a proposition would be at variance with all accepted precedents of two peoples living in the same community, governed by the same laws and subject to the same social and material conditions. I submit that I have no fears about the future political status of the whites and blacks of the South. The intelligent, the ambitious and the wealthy men of both races will eventually rule over their less fortunate fellow-citizens without invidious regard to race or previous condition. And the great-grandson of Senator Wade Hampton may yet vote for the great-grandson of Congressman Robert Smalls to be Governor of the chivalric commonwealth of South Carolina. Senator Wade Hampton may grit his teeth at this aspect of the case; but it is strictly in the domain of probability. The grandson of John C. Calhoun, the great orator and statesman of South Carolina, has not as yet voted for a colored Governor, but he has for a colored sheriff and probate judge, as the following testimony he gave before the Blair committee on "Education and Labor," (Vol II, p. 173), in the city of New York, September 13, 1883, will show:
"Q. (the Chairman) What do you think of his [the black man's] intellectual and moral qualities and his capacity for development? A. (Mr. Calhoun, John C.) ... The probate judge of my county is a Negro and one of my tenants, and I am here now in New York attending to important business for my county as an appointee of that man. He has upon him the responsibilities of all estates in the county; he is probate judge.
"Q. Is he a capable man? A. A very capable man, and an excellent, good man, and a very just one."
Again (Ibid p. 137), Mr. Calhoun testified:
The sheriff of my county is from Ohio, and a Negro, and he is a man whom we all support in his office, because he is capable of administering his office.
When the grandson of John C. Calhoun can make such admissions, creditable alike to his head and his heart, may not the great-grandson of Wade Hampton rise up to chase the Bourbonism of his great-grandfather into the tomb of disgruntlement? I have not the least doubt of such probability. Again, I say, I am not seriously concerned about the future political status of the black man of the South. He has talent; he has ambition; he possesses a rare fund of eloquence, of wit and of humor, and these will carry him into the executive chambers of States, the halls of legislation and on to the bench of the judiciary. You can't bar him out; you can't repress him: he will make his way. God has planted in his very nature those elements which constitute the stock-in-trade of the American politician—ready eloquence, rich humor, quick perception—and you may rest assured he will use all of them to the very best advantage.
I know of municipalities in the South to-day, where capable colored men are regularly voted into responsible positions by the best white men of their cities. And why not? Do not colored men vote white men into office? And, pray, is the white man less magnanimous than the black man? Perish the thought! No; the politics of the South will readily adjust themselves to the best interest of the people; be very sure of this. And the future rulers of the South will not all be white, nor will they be all black: they will be a happy commingling of the two peoples.
And thus with the so-called "war of races:" it will pass away and leave not a trace behind. It is based upon condition and color-prejudice—two things which cannot perpetuate themselves. When the lowly condition of the black man has passed away; when he becomes a capable president of banks, of railroads and of steamboats; when he becomes a large land-holder, operating bonanza farms which enrich him and pauperize black and white labor; when he is not only a prisoner at the bar but a judge on the bench; when he sits in the halls of legislation the advocate of the people, or (more profit if less honor) the advocate of vast corporations and monopolies; when he has successfully metamorphosed the condition which attaches to him as a badge of slavery and degradation, and made a reputation for himself as a financier, statesman, advocate, land-holder, and money-shark generally, his color will be swallowed up in his reputation, his bank-account and his important money interests.
Is this a fancy picture? Is there no substantial truth seen in this picture of what will, must and shall be, as the logical outgrowth of the Divine affirmation that of one blood he created all men to dwell upon the earth, and of the Declaration of Independence that "we hold these truths to be self-evident:—That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"?
Let us see.
A few months ago I sat in the banking office of Mr. William E. Mathews and ex-Congressman Joseph H. Rainey (of South Carolina), in Washington. As I sat there, a stream of patrons came and went. The whites were largely in the majority. They all wanted to negotiate a loan, or to meet a note just matured. Among the men were contractors, merchants, department clerks, etc. They all spoke with the utmost deference to the colored gentleman who had money to loan upon good security and good interest.
A few months ago I dined with ex-Senator B.K. Bruce (of Mississippi), now Register of the United States Treasury. The ex-Senator has a handsome house, and a delightful family. In running my eyes over his card tray, I saw the names of some of the foremost men and women of the nation who had called upon Register and Mrs. Bruce. In passing through the Register's department with the Senator, sight-seeing, I was not surprised at the marks of respect shown to Mr. Bruce by the white ladies and gentlemen in his department. Why? Because Mr. Bruce is a gentleman by instinct, a diplomat by nature, and a scholar who has "burned the midnight oil." Such a person does not have to ask men and women to respect him; they do so instinctively.
I walked down F street and called at the office of Prof. Richard T. Greener, a ripe scholar and a gentleman. The professor not only has a paying law practice, but is president of a new insurance company. He has all that he can do, and his patrons are both black and white.
All this and more came under my observation in the course of an hour's leisure at the capital of the nation. And the black man has not yet aroused himself to a full sense of his responsibilities or of his opportunities.
In Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston we have colored men of large wealth, who conduct extensive business operations and enjoy the confidence and esteem of their fellow citizens without regard to caste.
Speaking upon the progress of the colored race, in the course of an address on the "Civil Rights Law," at Washington, October 20, 1883, the Hon. John Mercer Langston, United States Minister and Consul General to Hayti, and one of the most remarkable, scholarly, and diplomatic men the colored race in America has produced, drew the following pen-picture:
Do you desire to witness moral wonders? Start at Chicago; travel to St. Louis; travel to Louisville; travel to Nashville; travel to Chattanooga; travel on to New Orleans, and in every State and city you will meet vast audiences, immense concourses of men and women with their children, boys and girls, who, degraded and in ignorance because of their slavery formerly, are to-day far advanced in general social improvement.
It would be remarkable now for you to go into the home of one of our families, and find even our daughters incompetent to discourse with you upon any subject of general interest with perfect ease and understanding. Excuse me, if I refer to the fact that some two weeks ago I visited St. Louis for two reasons; first to see my son and daughter, and secondly and mainly to attend the seventy-second anniversary of the birth of perhaps the richest colored man in the State of Missouri. I went to his house, and I was surprised as I entered his doors and looked about his sitting-room and parlors, furnished in the most approved modern style, in the richest manner; but I was more surprised when I saw one hundred guests come into the home of this venerable man, to celebrate the seventy-second anniversary of his birth, all beautifully attired; and when he told me, indirectly, how much money he had made, since the war, and what he was worth on the night of this celebration, I was more surprised than ever. I am surprised at the matchless progress the colored people of this country have made since their emancipation. I have traveled in the West Indies; I have seen the emancipated English, Spanish and French Negro; but I have seen no emancipated Negro anywhere who has made the progress at all comparable with the colored people of the United States of America.
I desire it to be distinctly understood, that I am not at all anxious about the mental and material development of the colored people of the United States. They are naturally shrewd, calculating and agreeable, possessing in a peculiar degree the art of pleasing; and these qualities will give them creditable positions in the business interests of the country in a few years. But they must have time to collect their wits, to sharpen their intelligence, to train their moral sense and the feeling of social responsibility, to fully comprehend all that the change from chattel slavery to absolute freedom implies. Men cannot awaken from a Rip Van Winkle slumber of a hundred years and grasp at once the altered conditions which flash upon them. The awakening is terrific, appalling, staggering.
When a man has been confined for long years in a dark dungeon he has not trouble in discerning objects about him which, when he first entered his dungeon, were indistinct or invisible to him. So when he is brought suddenly to the strong light of the sun the effulgence overmasters him, and he is blind as a bat. But slowly and painfully he becomes accustomed to the transition from absolute darkness to absolute light, and then nature wears to his vision her naturally gay and winsome appearance. So with the slave. His grasp of the conditions of freedom is slow and uncertain. But give him time, lend him a helping hand, and he will completely master the situation.
In one of the most remarkable pamphlets of the time, written by C.K. Marshall, D.D., of Vicksburg, Miss., entitled The Colored Race Weighed in the Balance, being a reply to a most malicious speech by J.L. Tucker, D.D., of Jackson, Miss., I find many truths that the American people should know. Both Dr. Marshall and Dr. Tucker are white ministers of the South, and both should be intimately acquainted with the characteristics, capacity and progress of the colored people. But Dr. Tucker appears to be as ignorant of the colored race as if he had spent his days in the Sandwich Islands instead of the sunny land of the South.
Dr. Marshall says (p. 55):
I think I know nearly all that can be said against a Negro. In one form or another, the complaints have been a thousand times reiterated; but has he not been, and is he not now what the white man and society have made him? He is naturally peace-loving, docile, and imitative. If kindly and justly treated, with due allowance for the peculiar elements that make up his life, he will render back, in kind at least, equally with the brother in white in like surroundings. Everybody knows some reliable, trustworthy Negro man and woman; and John Randolph said that of two of the politest men he ever saw one was a Negro. Gentleness is a wonderful agency in managing a Negro: I know it tells powerfully upon white folks. The psalmist, addressing his Maker, says, "Thy gentleness hath made me great." It is a mighty lever; it moves the world; it moved it before Archimedes; it moves it still; but peevishness, fault-finding, scolding, cursing, premature censure, haughty and assuming ways, sullenness, ill-temper, whether in the field, the kitchen, the nursery, or parlor, will legitimately result in thriftlessness, revolt, departure, and contempt for white people! Many of the young generation have not yet found their places in the new order of things; and their silly parents work themselves nearly to death to keep their sons from the plow and to make ladies of their daughters, just like white folks; but time, gentleness, bread, and neat homes will, with religion and culture, bring great changes. And I say it to the credit of their former owners, and their own instincts and capabilities, that they constitute to-day the best peasantry, holding similar relations to the ruling classes on the face of the earth. Their vices are no greater; their respect for law about the same; and their care for their children little inferior. Besides, they speak the language of their country better, are less cringing and craven, freer from begging; more manly, more polite, less priest-ridden, less obsequious; have a higher estimate of human rights and obligations; understand farming, cooking, house-work, and manual labor, in which they have been trained, better, I insist, than any similarly conditioned race or people. They are less profane—very much less—than white people; less bitter, vindictive, and bloodthirsty; less intemperate, and far, far less revengeful; and less selfish than what they contemptuously snub as "poor white trash." But he is a sinner! I believe the old stale rhyme tells some truth in a modified sense, "In Adam's fall we sinned all;" but I do not believe the serpent's tooth struck a more deadly and depraving virus into the Negro's share of the apple of Eden, dooming him as a sinner to a lower plane of wickedness than others. He commits not all, but many, of the sins, crimes, and misdemeanors, and indulges many of the vices of polished humanity—cultured Caucasian humanity. They have had but moderate experience in the sole management of their own affairs.
Again (p. 66):
The Negro is neither a beggar, nor a pauper, nor a tramp; and if honestly dealt with, he can make his own way. Where they are idle and profligate, execute the law vigorously against them, and they will approve and aid in the work. We can lift them up, or cast them down. For one, I think we owe them a debt of gratitude and impartial justice for their faithful conduct during the war; and when disposed to criticise and reproach them for not coming in all things up to your sentimental notions, just put yourself in their place. Then you will, if your scales are true and your weights just, settle the question with little difficulty. I cannot serve my readers better, perhaps, than by quoting the words of the Rev. Dr. Callaway, lately Professor in Emory College, Oxford, Ga., and new President of Paine Institute, Augusta, Ga., a native of that State, and to the manor born. In a late address, he says: "We have spoken of the Negro as related to the conduct of the war, but it remains to be said that, in his relation to us as a friend during that period, and to our wives and children as guardian, the testimony of his fidelity is on the lips of every surviving soldier. It is easy to conjecture how, with a race less loyal to home and patron, the testimony in the case might have been a narrative of lawlessness and license. What he refrained from, therefore, is to his credit. But in the four years of darkness and demoralization, when, besides those of military age, every boy whose muscles were equal to the support of a musket, and every old man with vigor enough to mark time, was called to the front, the Negro, commanding as a patriarch and reverent as a priest, kept sacred vigil at our homes. Besides this, with a foresight not developed for himself or his family, but evoked by virtue of his office, and the piteous destitution of our loved ones, he provided for their wants. 'They were a-hungered, and he fed them.' What he did is to his honor. What we refrain from in our place of power as the superior race, shall be to our credit; what we do in return shall be in proof of our appreciation. The conduct of the Negro during the war proves him kindly, temperate, trustworthy; his conduct since the war reveals in him considerateness, purpose, capacity, an order of growing good qualities. During the war his inferior courage, it may be assumed, inured to his superior serviceableness, his fears giving counsel to his courtesy and care. So set it down, if you will, though the logic is as lame as the charge is ungrateful."
This testimony upon the character, temper and adaptability of colored people is all the more valuable because Dr. Marshall not only treats the question from a Christian standpoint, but because his intimate acquaintance with the subject adds weight and authority to his opinion.
In the same strain, Dr. Atticus G. Haygood, President of Emory College, in Georgia, a man of the largest culture, Christian intelligence and progressive ideas, says, in his masterful work, Our Brother in Black, His Freedom and His Future (p. 194):
If white people and black people wish to know how to treat each other in all the relations of life, let them study the Bible. Take for example the business relations of life, the old question of capital and labor, of service and wages. For the settlement of all questions that grow out of these relations the laws laid down and the principles taught in the Bible, are worth all the "political economies" in the world. They apply to all races and conditions of men, in all countries and in all times. They are as needful and useful in New England factories as on Southern plantations. Free Negroes are not the only underlings in the world, Negro servants are not the only hirelings. There are thousands of factory operatives, day laborers, domestic servants, mechanics, sewing women, clerks, apprentices, and such like, whose cry for justice against oppression goes up to heaven by day and by night. "For which things' sake," in all lands, "the wrath of God is come upon the children of disobedience." Let us here recall some of these half-forgotten laws; they must do us all good. I know they are needed in the South; I am persuaded that they are needed wherever there are masters and servants.
Having heard a great deal about the condition of the colored people in Louisiana, I decided that it would not be uninteresting to have an authentic statement of that condition by some person fully capable of furnishing the desired information. I therefore addressed a letter to the Hon. Theophile T. Allain, a colored member of the Louisiana Legislature for Sweet Iberville parish, and a large sugar planter. From Mr. Allain's letter I condense the following statement, which will be found to be interesting for many reasons:
"First," says Mr. Allain, "I speak as a man of the South, who pays taxes on thirty-five thousand dollars worth of property, and without owing to any man one dollar. I claim to be well informed as to the condition of the colored people of the South, the people who bear the heat and burden of the day.
"In the cotton section of the South the Negroes are kept in subjugation, and are not permitted to exercise the right of suffrage guaranteed to them by the provisions of the Federal constitution. In the sugar-growing districts of Louisiana the colored and white people live upon terms of friendship and cordiality. In these districts there are thousands of colored men, who before the war were slaves, who now pay taxes upon property, assessed in their own names, ranging in value from five hundred to fifty thousand dollars. They produce principally rice and sugar. It is a self-evident fact that the labor of the colored men produces two-thirds of all the cotton raised in the South, four-fifths of the sugar, and nine-tenths of all the rice.
"In the cotton sections of Louisiana the colored men work mostly on shares, and here and there some of them have accumulated a little money; but, as a rule, they make fortunes for the landlords and die in poverty because of no fault of their own. Rent here, as everywhere else, pulls the laborer down, and keeps him down. What remains to him after the landlord has taken his share, goes to the Jew shopkeepers and other middle men at crossroads, who will not be satisfied with any profit less than one hundred to one hundred and fifty per cent.
"But the sugar districts of Louisiana are like oases in the desert. Vacuum pans, steam cars, fine machinery and smiling faces are to be met on every hand. Colored laborers find employment very readily in the sugar districts from October to February; and during cultivation-time, in many places, the colored laborers receive as high as one dollar and twenty cents per day, and during the grinding season, which is the harvest time, laborers receive from one dollar and twenty-five cents to one dollar and fifty cents per day in the field and seventy-five cents for one half of the night. At this season we run the sugar machinery night and day. I should not omit to state that colored men are, in the majority of cases, employed as engineers at our sugar mills, and receive from two to two and a half dollars per day:
"You will be surprised when I tell you that the most of the bricklaying and plastering work, and the blacksmithing and carpentering work is done in the sugar districts by colored men, who average three dollars per day for their work.
"There are fifty-eight parishes in Louisiana, twenty-four of them being sugar districts. To illustrate the degree of toleration which obtains in the cotton and sugar growing districts, take the following statement: In the Louisiana House of Representatives there are thirteen colored members—all from the sugar districts; in the Senate there are four colored members—all from the sugar districts. This condition of things is readily accounted for by the fact that the colored people in the sugar districts are more generally tax payers than they are in the cotton districts, and, having mutual interests, both white and black are more tolerant and better informed. The Bulldozer and White Liner can find but little room to ply their nefarious work where everybody finds plenty of work that pays well, and where material prosperity is the first and political bickering the secondary consideration. Because of the mutual interests at stake, colored men in the sugar districts are often protected by their bitterest political opponents.
"The State of Louisiana is assessed at $200,000,000, of which her colored population pay taxes upon more than $30,000,000.—Two thirds of this is owned by colored men in the sugar districts."
I could multiply quotations, but they would serve only to confirm my view, that the colored man merely requires time to fully comprehend his freedom and his opportunities, to enjoy the ample immunities of the first and to improve to the utmost the advantages of the second. All over the country the colored man is coming to understand that if he is ever to have and enjoy a status in this country at all commensurate with that of his white fellow-citizens, he must get his grip upon the elements of success which they employ with such effect, and boldly enter the lists, a competitor who must make a way for himself. Dr. Marshall says truly: "The Negro is neither a beggar, nor a pauper, nor a tramp." He is, essentially, a man of the largest wealth, God having given him, under tropical conditions, a powerful physique, with ample muscle and constitution to extract out of the repositories of nature her buried wealth. He only needs intelligence to use the wealth he creates. When he has intelligence, he will no longer labor to enrich men more designing and unscrupulous than he is; he will labor to enrich himself and his children. Indeed, in his powerful muscle and enduring physical constitution, directed by intelligence, the black man of the South, who alone has demonstrated his capacity to labor with success in the rice swamps, the cotton, and the cornfields of the South, will ultimately turn the tables upon the unscrupulous harpies who have robbed him for more than two hundred years; and from having been the slave of these men, he, in turn, will enslave them. From having been the slave, he will become the master; from having labored to enrich others, he will force others to labor to enrich him. The laws of nature are inexorable, and this is one of them. The white men of the South may turn pale with rage at this aspect of the case, but it is written on the wall. Already I have seen in the South the black and white farm laborer, working side by side for a black landlord; already I have seen in the South a black and a white brick-mason (and carpenters as well) working upon a building side by side, under a colored contractor. And we are not yet two decades from the surrender of Robert E. Lee and the manumission of the black slave.
I have no disposition to infuriate any white man of the South, by placing a red flag before him; we simply desire to accustom him to look upon a picture which his grand-children will not, because of the frequency of the occurrence, regard with anything more heart-rending than complacent indifference. The world moves forward; and the white man of the South could not stand still, if he so desired. Like the black man, he must work, or perish; like the black man, he must submit to the sharpest competition, and rise or fall, as the case may be. And so it should be.
CHAPTER XIV
Classes in the South
Since the war the people of the South are, from a Northern standpoint, very poor. There are very few millionaires among them. A man who has a bank account of fifty thousand dollars is regarded as very rich. I am reminded of an incident which shows that the Southern people fall down and worship a golden calf the same as their deluded brothers of the North and West.
A few years ago I was a resident of Jacksonville, the metropolis of Florida. Florida is a great Winter resort. The wealthy people of the country go there for a few months or weeks in the Winter. It is fashionable to do so. A great many wealthy northern men have acquired valuable landed interests in Jacksonville, among them the Astors of New York, who have a knack for pinning their interests in the soil. The people of Jacksonville were very proud to have as a resident and property holder, Mr. Wm. B. Astor. And Mr. Astor appeared to enjoy immensely the worship bestowed upon his money. He built one or two very fine buildings there, which must net him a handsome return for his investment by this time. Mr. Astor had with him a very shrewd "Man Friday," and this Man Friday got it into his head that he would like to be Mayor of Jacksonville, and he sought and obtained the support of his very powerful patron. It leaked out that Mr. Astor favored his Man Friday for Mayor. The "business interests" of the city took the matter "under advisement." After much "consultation" and preliminary skirmishing, it was decided that it would be unwise to antagonize Mr. Astor's Man Friday; and so he was placed in nomination as the "Citizens' Candidate." He was elected by a handsome majority. I believe it is a disputed question to-day, whether Mr. Astor's Man Friday was, or was not, a citizen of the place at the time he was elected Mayor. Be that as it may, it showed beyond question that the people knew how to go down upon their knees to the golden calf.
A condition of slavery or of serfdom produces two grievous evils, around which cluster many others of less importance, viz: the creation of vast landed estates, and the pauperization and debasement of labor. Pliny declared that to the creation of vast latifundia (aggregated estates) Italy owed its downfall. The same is true of the downfall of the South and its pet institution, since they produced a powerful and arrogant class which was not content to lord it on their vast demesnes and over their pauper labor, but must needs carry their high-flown notions into the councils of the nation, flaunting their gentle birth and undulating acres in the faces of horny-handed statesmen like Abraham Lincoln, Henry Wilson, and others.
The operations of the vast landed estates of the South produced all the industrial disjointments which have afflicted the South since the war. The white man was taught to look upon labor as the natural portion of the black slave; and nothing could induce a white man to put his hand to the plow, but the gaunt visage of starvation at his door. He even preferred ignominious starvation to honest work; and, in his desperate struggle to avoid the horror of the one and the disgrace of the other, he would sink himself lower in the scale of moral infamy than the black slave he despised. He would make of himself a monster of cruelty or of abject servility to avoid starvation or honest work. It was from this class of vermin that the planters secured their "Nigger drivers" or overseers, and a more pliable, servile, cruel, heartless set of men never existed. They were commonly known as "poor white trash," or "crackers." They were most heartily and righteously detested by the slave population. As the poor whites of the South were fifty years ago, so they are to-day—a careless, ignorant, lazy, but withal, arrogant set, who add nothing to the productive wealth of the community because they are too lazy to work, and who take nothing from that wealth because they are too poor to purchase. They have graded human wants to a point below which man could not go without starving. They live upon the poorest land in the South, the "piney woods," and raise a few potatoes and corn, and a few pigs, which never grow to be hogs, so sterile is the land upon which they are turned to "root, or die." These characteristic pigs are derisively called "shotes" by those who have seen their lean, lank and hungry development. They are awful counterparts of their pauper owners. It may be taken as an index of the quality of the soil and the condition of the people, to observe the condition of their live stock. Strange as it may appear, the faithful dog is the only animal which appears to thrive on "piney woods" land. The "piney woods" gopher, which may be not inappropriately termed a "highland turtle," is a great desideratum in the food supply of the pauper denizens of these portions of the South. There is nothing enticing about the appearance of the gopher. But his flesh, properly cooked, is passably palatable.
The poor white population of the South who live in the piney woods are sunk in the lowest ignorance, and practice vices too heinous to be breathed. They have no schools, and their mental condition hardly warrants the charitable inference that they would profit much if they were supplied with them. Still, I would like to see the experiment tried. Their horrible poverty, their appalling illiteracy, their deplorable moral enervation, deserve the pity of mankind and the assistance of philanthropic men and a thoughtful government. Though sunk to the lowest moral scale, they are men, and nothing should be omitted to improve their condition and make them more useful members of the communities in which they are now more than an incubus.
It may not be out of place here to state that the Kuklux Klan, the White Liners League, the Knights of the White Camelia, and other lawless gangs which have in the past fifteen years made Southern chivalry a by-word and reproach among the nations of the earth, were largely recruited from this idle, vicious, ignorant class of Southerners. They needed no preparation for the bloody work perpetrated by those lawless organizations, those more cruel than Italian brigands. They instinctively hate the black man; because the condition of the black, his superior capacity for labor and receptivity of useful knowledge, place him a few pegs higher than themselves in the social scale. So these degraded white men, the very substratum of Southern population, were ready tools in the hands of the organized chivalrous brigands (as they had been of the slave oligarch), whose superior intelligence made them blush at the lawlessness they inspired, and who, therefore, gladly transferred to other hands the execution of those deeds of blood and death which make men shudder even now to think of them. It was long a common saying among the black population of the South that "I'd rudder be a niggah den a po' w'ite man!" and they were wise in their preference.
It is safe to say, that the peasantry of no country claiming to be civilized stands more in need of the labors of the schoolmaster and the preacher, than do the so-called "poor white trash" of the South. On their account, if no other, I am an advocate of a compulsory system of education, a National Board of Education, and a very large National appropriation for common school and industrial education.
I name this class first because it is the very lowest.
Next to this class is the great labor force of the South, the class upon whose ample shoulders have fallen the weight of Southern labor and inhumanity for lo! two hundred years—the black man. Time was, yesterday, it appears to me, when this great class were all of one condition, driven from the rising to the setting of the sun to enrich men who were created out of the same sod, and in the construction of whose mysterious mechanism, mental and physical, the great God expended no more time or ingenuity. Up to the close of the Rebellion, of that gigantic conflict which shook the pillars of republican government to their center, the great black population were truly the "mudsills" of Southern society, upon which rested all the industrial burdens of that section; truly, "the hewers of wood and the drawers of water;" a people who, in the mysterious providence of God, were torn root and branch from their savage homes in that land which has now become to them a dream "more insubstantial than a pageant faded," to "dwell in a strange land, among strangers," to endure, like the children of Israel, a season of cruel probation, and then to begin life in earnest; to put their shoulders to the wheel and assist in making this vast continent, this asylum of the oppressed of the world, the grandest abode of mingled happiness and woe, and wealth and pauperization ever reared by the genius and governed by the selfishness and cupidity of man. And to-day, as in the dark days of the past, this people are the bone and sinew of the South, the great producers and partial consumers of her wealth; the despised, yet indispensable, "mudsills" of her industrial interests.
A Senator of the United States from the South, whose hands have been dyed in the blood of his fellow citizens, and who holds his high office by fraud and usurpation, not long since declared that his State could very well dispense with her black population. That population outnumbers the white three to one; and by the toil by which that State has been enriched, by the blood and the sweat of two hundred years which the soil of that State has absorbed, by the present production and consumption of wealth by that black population, we are amazed at the ignorance of the great man who has been placed in a "little brief authority." The black population cannot and will not be dispensed with; because it is so deeply rooted in the soil that it is a part of it—the most valuable part. And the time will come when it will hold its title to the land, by right of purchase, for a laborer is worthy of his hire, and is now free to invest that hire as it pleases him best. Already some of the very best soil of that State is held by the people this great magnus in the Nation's councils would supersede in their divine rights.
When the war closed, as I said, the great black population of the South was distinctively a laboring class. It owned no lands, houses, banks, stores, or live stock, or other wealth. Not only was it the distinctively laboring class but the distinctively pauper class. It had neither money, intelligence nor morals with which to begin the hard struggle of life. It was absolutely at the bottom of the social ladder. It possessed nothing but health and muscle.
I have frequently contemplated with profound amazement the momentous mass of subjected human force, a force which had been educated by the lash and the bloodhound to despise labor, which was thrown upon itself by the wording of the Emancipation Proclamation and the surrender of Robert E. Lee. Nothing in the history of mankind is at all comparable, an exact counterpart, in all particulars, to that great event. A slavery of two hundred years had dwarfed the intelligence and morality of this people, and made them to look upon labor as the most baneful of all the curses a just God can inflict upon humankind; and they were turned loose upon the land, without a dollar in their hands, and, like the great Christ and the fowls of the air, without a place to lay their head.
And yet to-day, this people, who, only a few years ago, were bankrupts in morality, in intelligence, and in wealth, have leaped forward in the battle of progress like veterans; have built magnificent churches, with a membership of over two million souls; have preachers, learned and eloquent; have professors in colleges by the hundreds and schoolmasters by the thousands; have accumulated large landed interests in country, town and city; have established banking houses and railroads; manage large coal, grocery and merchant tailoring businesses; conduct with ability and success large and influential newspaper enterprises; in short, have come, and that very rapidly, into sharp competition with white men (who have the prestige of a thousand years of civilization and opportunity) in all the industrial interests which make a people great, respected and feared. The metamorphosis has been rapid, marvelous, astounding. Their home life has been largely transformed into the quality of purity and refinement which should characterize the home; they have now successful farmers, merchants, ministers, lawyers, editors, educators, physicians, legislators—in short, they have entered every avenue of industry and thought. Their efforts yet crude and their grasp uncertain, but they are in the field of competition, and will remain there and acquit themselves manfully.
Of course I speak in general terms of the progress the colored people have made. Individual effort and success are the indicators of the vitality and genius of a people. When individuals rise out of the indistinguishable mass and make their mark, we may rest assured that the mass is rich and capable of unlimited production. The great mass of every government, of every people, while adding to and creating greatness, go down in history unmentioned. But their glory, their genius, success and happiness, are expended and survive in the few great spirits their fortunate condition produced. The governments of antiquity were great and glorious, because their proletarians were intelligent, thrifty and brave, but the proletarians fade into vagueness, and are great only in the few great names which have been handed down to us. It has been said that a nation expends a hundred years of its vitality in the production of a great man of genius like Socrates, or Bacon, or Toussaint l'Overture, or Fulton. And this may be true. There can now be no question that the African race in the United States possess every element of vitality and genius possessed by their fellow citizens of other races, and any calculation of race possibilities in this country which assumes that they will remain indefinitely the "mudsills" only of society will prove more brittle than ropes of sand.
At this time the colored people of the South are largely the industrial class; that is, they are the producing class. They are principally the agriculturists of the South; consequently, being wedded to the soil by life-long association and interest, and being principally the laboring class, they will naturally invest their surplus earnings in the purchase of the soil. Herein lies the great hope of the future. For the man who owns the soil largely owns and dictates to the men who are compelled to live upon it and derive their subsistence from it. The colored people of the South recognize this fact. And if there is any one idiosyncrasy more marked than another among them, it is their mania for buying land. They all live and labor in the cheerful anticipation of some day owning a home, a farm of their own. As the race grows in intelligence this mania for land owning becomes more and more pronounced. At first their impecuniosity will compel them to purchase poor hill-lands, but they will eventually get their grip upon the rich alluvial lands.
The class next to the great black class is the small white farmers. This class is composed of some of the "best families" of the South who were thrown upon their resources of brain and muscle by the results of the war, and of some of the worst families drawn from the more thrifty poor white class. Southern political economists labor hard to make it appear that the vastly increased production of wealth in the South since the war is to be traced largely to the phenomenally increased percentum of small white farmers, but the assumption is too transparent to impose upon any save those most ignorant of the industrial conditions of the South, and the marvelous adaptability to the new conditions shown by colored men. I grant that these small white farmers, who were almost too inconsiderable in numbers to be taken into account before the war, have added largely to the development of the country and the production of wealth; but that the tremendous gains of free labor as against slave labor are to be placed principally to their intelligence and industry is too absurd to be seriously debated. The Charleston (S.C.) News and Courier, a pronounced anti-negro newspaper, recently made such a charge in all seriousness. The struggle for supremacy will largely come between the small white and black farmer; because each recurring year will augment the number of each class of small holders. A condition of freedom and open competition makes the fight equal, in many respects. Which will prove the more successful small holder, the black or the white?
The fourth class is composed of the hereditary land-lords of the South; the gentlemen with flowing locks, gentle blood and irascible tempers, who appeal to the code of honor (in times past) to settle small differences with their equals and shoot down their inferiors without premeditation or compunction, and who drown their sorrows, as well as their joviality in rye or Bourbon whiskey; the gentlemen who claim consanguinity with Europe's titled sharks, and vaunt their chivalry in contrast to the peasant or yeoman blood of all other Americans; the gentlemen who got their broad acres (however they came by their peculiar blood) by robbing black men, women and children of the produce of their toil under the system of slavery, and who maintain themselves in their reduced condition by driving hard bargains with white and black labor either as planters or shop-keepers, often as both, the dual occupations more effectually enabling them to make unreasonable contracts and exactions of those they live to victimize. They are the gentlemen who constantly declare that "this is a white man's government," and that "the Negro must be made to keep his place." They are the gentlemen who have their grip upon the throat of Southern labor; who hold vast areas of land, the product of robbery, for a rise in values; who run the stores and torture the small farmer to death by usurious charges for necessaries; these are the gentlemen who are opposed to the new conditions resultant from the war which their Hotspur impetuosity and Shylock greed made possible. In short, these gentlemen comprise the moneyed class. They are the gentlemen who are hastening the conflict of labor and capital in the South. And, when the black laborer and the white laborer come to their senses, join issues with the common enemy and pitch the tent of battle, then will come the tug of war.
But the large land-owners and tradesmen of the South will not in the future belong exclusively to the class of persons I have described. On the contrary this class of hereditary land-owners will be sensibly diminished and their places be taken by successful recruits from the ranks of small white and black farmers. Indeed, I confess, I strongly incline to the belief that the black man of the South will eventually become the large land-holding class, and, therefore, the future tyrants of labor in that section. All the indications strongly point to such a possibility. It is estimated that, already, the colored people own, in the cotton growing states, 2,680,800 acres, the result of seventeen years of thrift, economy, and judicious management; while in the State of Georgia alone they own, it is reliably estimated, 680,000 acres of land, and pay taxes on $9,000,000 worth of property. Dr. Alexander Crummell, a most learned African, in a very interesting pamphlet drawn out by the malicious misstatements of Dr. Tucker, before referred to by me, makes the following deductions and statements, to wit:
Let me suggest here another estimate of this landed property of the Negro, acquired since emancipation. Taking the old slave States in the general, there has been a large acquisition of land in each and all of them. In the State of Georgia, as we have just seen, it was 680,000 acres. Let us put the figure as low as 400,000 for each State—for the purchase of farm lands has been everywhere a passion with the freedman—this 400,000 acres multiplied into 14, i.e. the number of the chief Southern States, shows an aggregate of 5,600,000 acres of land, the acquisition of the black race in less than twenty years.
But Dr. Tucker will observe a further fact of magnitude in this connection: It is the increased production which has been developed on the part of the freedman since emancipation. I present but one staple, and for the reason that it is almost exclusively the result of free negro labor.
I will take the five years immediately preceding the late civil war and compare them with the five years preceeding the last year's census-taking; and the contrast in the number of cotton-bales produced will show the industry and thrift of the black race as a consequent on the gift of freedom:
| Years | Bales |
| 1857 | 2,939,519 |
| 1858 | 3,113,962 |
| 1859 | 3,851,481 |
| 1860 | 4,669,770 |
| 1861 | 3,656,006 |
| ————— | |
| Total | 18,230,738 |
| Years | Bales |
| 1878 | 4,811,265 |
| 1879 | 5,073,531 |
| 1880 | 5,757,397 |
| 1881 | 6,589,329 |
| 1882 | 5,435,845 |
| ————— | |
| The five years' work of freedom | 27,667,367 |
| The five years' work of slavery | 18,230,738 |
| ————— | |
| Balance in favor of freedom | 9,436,629 |
Now this item of production is a positive disproof of Dr. Tucker's statement, "that the average level in material prosperity is but little higher than it was before the war." Here is the fact that the Freedman has produced one-third more in five years than he did in the same time when a slave!
Another view of this matter is still more striking. The excess of yield in cotton in seven years [i.e., from 1875 to 1882] over the seven years [i.e., from 1854 to 1861] is 17,091,000 bales, being an average annual increase of 1,000,000 bales. If Dr. Tucker will glance at the great increase of the cotton, tobacco, and sugar crops South, as shown in Agricultural Reports from 1865 to 1882, and reflect that negroes have been the producers of these crops, he will understand their indignation at his outrageous charges of "laziness and vagabondage:" and perhaps he will listen to their demand that he shall take back the unjust and injurious imputations which, without knowledge and discrimination, he makes against a whole race of people.
This impulse to thrift on the part of the Freedmen was no tardy and reluctant disposition. It was the immediate offspring of freedom.
It is not possible even to approximate the landed acquisitions of the colored people, but that they have been large purchasers of small holdings will readily be admitted by all candid persons who are acquainted with the intense pastoral nature of the people, their constant thrift, and their deepseated determination to own their own homes. If we assume, with Dr. Crummell, that in the past seventeen years, the hardest, most disadvantageous years they will ever again be compelled to go through, they have come into possession of 5,600,000 acres, the gain in the next seventeen years must be vastly greater. At any rate, we are free to place the holdings in the next fifty years at not less than 35,000,000 acres, and the probability is that it will be vastly more.
In the Popular Science Monthly for October 1881, Mr. J. Stahl Patterson, in an article on the "Movement of the Colored Population," says: "It would seem that in the industrial aspects of the case the white and colored men may be, under certain circumstances, the complement of each other." Again: "There are two distinct classes of colored economists. One is satisfied with dependence on others for employment, the other affects independent homes, and struggles to secure them, however humble. Some even acquire wealth."
In the same monthly for February, 1883, Prof. E.W. Gilliam has a long article on the "African in the United States," in which he does all he can to make wider the breach between the blacks and the whites. He has very little good to say of the black man. But he was forced to make the following admissions, viz:
"The blacks are an improving race, and the throb of aspiration is quickening. * * * Advancement in mental training and in economic science must needs be slow but there is advancement."
The learned professor makes the interesting calculation that the blacks in the Southern States will increase from 6,000,000 in 1880, to 192,000,000, in 1980; while the whites in the South, in 1880, 12,000,000, will number only 96,000,000, in 1980. The learned professor infers that this vast army will be "doomed to remain where they have been, and be hewers of wood and drawers of water," because they form a "distinct alien race." I think, if the professor will wait until 1980, he will find that this "alien race," which profligate white men have done and are doing so much to amalgamate with their own race, will not only increase approximately as he has figured it out, in numbers, but in wealth as well.
The future landlord and capitalist of the South are no longer confined to the white race: the black man has become a factor, and he must be counted.
CHAPTER XV
The Land Problem
The ownership of land in the South is the same pernicious thing it has come to be in every civilized country in the world. Instead of being, as it was intended to be, a blessing to the people, it is the crying curse which takes precedence of all other evils that afflict mankind. And the cause is not far to seek. Land is, in its very nature, the common property of the people. Like air and water, it is one of the natural elements which inhere in man as a common right, and without which life could in no wise be sustained. A man must have air, or he will suffocate; he must have water, or he will perish of thirst; he must have access to the soil, for upon it grow those things which nature intended for the sustentation of the physical man, and without which he cannot live. Deprive me of pure fresh air, and I die; deprive me of pure fresh water, and I die; deprive me of free opportunity to earn my bread by the sweat of my brow, by sowing in the sowing time and reaping in the reaping time, and I die. There is no escape from this aspect of the case: there is no logic that can reduce these truisms to sophistries. They are founded in the omnipotent laws of God, and are as universal as the earth. They apply with as much truth to life in the United States as in Dahomey; they operate in like nature upon the savage as upon man in the civilized state. Individual ownership in the land is a transgression of the common right of man, and a usurpation which produces nearly, if not all, the evils which result upon our civilization; the inequalities which produce pauperism, vice, crime, and wide-spread demoralization among all the so-called "lower classes;" which produce, side by side, the millionaire and the tramp, the brownstone front and the hut of the squatter, the wide extending acres of the bonanza farm and the small holding, the lord of the manor and the cringing serf, peasant and slave.
I maintain, with other writers upon this land question, that land is common property, the property of the whole people, and that it cannot be alienated from the people without producing the most fearful consequences. No man is free who is debarred in his right, to so much of the soil of his country as is necessary to support him in his right to life, for without the inherent right to unrestrained access to the soil he cannot support life, except in primitive society where land is plentiful, population sparse, and industry undiversified. As population becomes denser and land becomes scarcer from having been monopolized by the more far seeing, or more fortunate, and industry becomes more diversified, mankind begins to feel the pressure of population described by Malthus, and the scarcity of subsistence; caused, not by this pressure of population, as Malthus maintains, but by the restricted production of subsistence caused by the monopoly and concentration of the soil, which inhibits the producing agency from the production of the increased subsistence necessary to the increased number of mouths to be fed. There can be no such thing as overproduction when there are hundreds and thousands who perish for food; there can be no pressure upon population when there are hundreds and thousands of acres of arable land locked up in a deed purchase, or entail, or primogeniture, upon which alone beasts are allowed to trespass. The idea is preposterous. And yet men who are regarded as standard authority upon economic questions impose this sophistry of overproduction and pressure of population upon mankind, and are applauded for their ignorance, or the cupidity which makes them to pervert the truth.
Monopoly of land is the curse of the race in every modern government. Being the one great source from which all wealth must and does spring, its concentration in the hands of a few men not only impoverishes the people, but seriously cripples the operations of government (the one and the other being substantially identical) by curtailing the productive energies of the people and diverting into the coffers of individuals rental which should flow into the common treasury as taxes, thus lifting from the shoulders of the people the enormous burden of the maintenance of government which falls upon them.
Monopoly of land was the prime element which hastened the decay of Roman greatness and strength, because when the people no longer had homes to fight for they ceased to be patriots, ceased to be virtuous, and became mercenaries, or slaves or tyrants; left to those who had monopolized the soil, the defense of their property: and these, being few in numbers, parsimonious after the nature of their class, and effeminate from luxurious living and habits of indolence, fell easy victims to the rapacity and iron nerve of Goth and Vandal. The great French Revolution would have never occurred but for the monopoly of land, which, after long ages, became centered in a few hands, who by reason of this were a privileged class and in the refinement of language had been designated as the "nobility." The nobility, as was natural, having been created by the State, not only ground the proletariat to powder but dictated to the State. When it was no longer possible to purchase land, because those whose nobility rested upon it would not alienate it, and when the proletariat had been reduced to a state of vassalage, more vile and grinding than slavery itself, the proletariat rose up in its might and crushed at one tremendous blow the hydra-headed monstrosity. Marat, Danton and Robespiere concentrated in their intense natures the venom, the hate, and the desperation of the people—a more terrible triumvirate than the celebrated one which colored the Tiber with the patrician blood of Rome. The Nihilism of Russia is the outgrowth of monopoly in land and the consequent enslavement of the people by the aristocracy, beginning with the autocrat upon his throne. England has reached a transition period. The pressure of her population has become so intense, that the great producing classes can no longer stand the tension and live. The land has been filched from the people to enrich the brainless favorites and the courtesans of kings, and entailed upon their progeny generation after generation. The land of Great Britain is held by the nobility and the princely cormorants of trade, who exact rental which cannot be paid from the produce of the soil, so usurious is it, or who turn the rich acres into pleasure grounds and pasturages. As Nero fiddled while Rome was one vast blaze of conflagration and horror, so the nobility of Great Britain dance and make merry while the people starve or seek in other lands that opportunity to live which their country denies to them. For the past five years the government of Great Britain has been engaged in a most desperate struggle with the people of one of her constituent islands, the agitation assuming, like the chameleon, different colors or names as the exigencies of the contending forces determined. But the one great question at the root of the agitation is the monopoly of the land by the "nobility" and the successful cormorants of trade, and the consequent pressure of population upon the enforced circumscription of production. The best lands have been alienated from the people, while the inferior lands upon which they are allowed to live will not yield the exorbitant rental demanded and the necessary subsistence for those who work them. Hence, Ireland is in a state so explosive that it can only be appropriately described by the term "dynamitic." In the interest of a few landlords the whole Irish nation has been demoralized and impoverished, so that the government of Great Britain finds it necessary to "assist" able-bodied men to reach America, or any other portion of the world they desire to go to, in order to make a living.
If monopoly in land produces such results as these is it not to be condemned as subversive of correct social adjustments and the perpetuity of government? The question admits of but one answer. If monopoly in land compels a government to "assist" its able-bodied men, its laborers, its producers of wealth, its soldiery, to go to other lands, is it not to be condemned as parasitical, destroying the very bone and sinew of government? The answer is self-evident. If monopoly in land produces such results as these, would it not be wise statesmanship and sound governmental policy to confiscate to the people the millions of acres which avarice, cunning, favoritism and robbery have turned into parks, pasturages and game preserves—making the few thousands who constitute the land monopolists, the idlers and the harpies, go honestly to work to make a living, and giving at the same time the same opportunity to the great laboring classes, who earnestly desire to make a living but to whom the opportunity is cruelly and maliciously denied?
I am opposed to aristocracies and so-called privileged classes, because they are opposed to the masses. They make inequalities, out of which grow all the miseries of society, because there is no limit to their avarice, parsimony and cruelty. So they thrive, all the rest of humanity may go to the dogs; so they revel in luxury and debauchery, all the rest of humanity may revel in poverty, vice and crime; so they enjoy all the blessings of organized society, all the rest of humanity may bear its curses. Man is essentially a selfish animal. Self-preservation is the very first law which he learns to observe and to practice. That he may get on top of the social ladder and remain there, he will sacrifice family, common humanity and patriotism. Naturally, Moloch-self is the god he serves. To enjoy a little brief authority, he would enslave universal mankind, and declare, as Solomon did, after exhausting the catalogue of tyranny and libertinism, "all is vanity"—emptiness! Thus, it is dangerous to confide in the humanity of man. To place in his hands a weapon so all-powerful as land, is to place him upon a pinnacle from whose vast altitude he can, will, and does crush his unfortunate fellowman.
Like the small stream which gathers volume and momentum in its wanderings from the small lake to the gulf, into which it debouches as a mighty river like the "Father of Waters," so the first encroachments of the land shark are small, and hardly felt; but give him time, let him grow from the Norman soldier of fortune into the English nobility of to-day, and you have a monster whose proportions and rapacity stagger the imagination to fully apprehend. What the common soldier of fortune received as reward for his valor eight hundred years ago, and which he held subject to confiscation to his prince if he failed to render him service in person and with retainers, has developed into a huge monopoly which appropriates in rental more than the tenant can pay, with the added necessary subsistence required to sustain him. There are also the imposition of direct taxes by the government and indirect taxes upon all implements and other articles of manufacture, occasioned by the division of labor, which he must use; all of which taxes the land monopolists have managed to shift upon the tenant and wage-laborer. Time augments the evil. So that, to-day, in Great Britain, a man cannot purchase land, except in rare cases, and then the purchaser must pay a fortune for the privilege. The poor farmer, the wage-laborer, the common man, has not and cannot have any grip upon the soil, but must come into the world a slave, and go down to his grave after a life of toil and self-denial, a slave, with the tormenting consciousness that as he was, so must the unfortunate offspring of his loins be!
If this be the tendency of organized society—if the tendency be to enslave mankind, place a premium upon human woe and crime—then organized society is organized robbery, and the savage state is preferable. There is no appeal from this deduction. What avail the triumphs of art, science and commerce, if the majority of mankind are ground to powder to make those triumphs possible!
It is not the law of God, but the law of man, that produces these herculean evils which constantly threaten the peace and safety of society.
But the British land-owner, having enslaved the people of his own island, has shackled the people of Ireland, Scotland and Wales, doomed them and their posterity to be perpetual aliens in their native lands; he has, upon the plea of conquest, the argument of the base assassin and robber, reduced the people of India to a state worse than death; and his iron grip has been placed upon the uncounted millions of African soil; the Islands of the sea squirm in his grasp; the West India Islands are his prostrate prey; while a portion of the vast continent of America owns his sway and groans under his exactions.
But this is not all. In our own country the British land shark has made his appearance. His vile clutch, which our forefathers unwrenched in the strength of their Colonial greatness, has again been fastened upon our throat. The following table will show the extent to which the parasite has insinuated himself into our vital parts. Let the good people of this country—who should know that monopoly in land is the death note of free institutions; that large estates are the parasites of republics and the death of small freeholders—let the people read the following table with the closeness which its gravity should inspire. The San Francisco Daily Examiner, a leading paper on the Pacific coast says:
Besides the millions of acres belonging to railroad and other corporations, the amount of land that is being acquired by foreign capitalists and landlords is fairly amazing. Ireland is to-day groaning beneath the yoke of oppression, and not many years will roll around before the American tenant, upon his knees, will also look up into the scowling face of his master and acknowledge his obedience. Following are a few of America's foreign landlords, and the amount of their holdings expressed in acres:—
An English Syndicate, No. 3, in Texas 3,000,000 The Holland Land Company, New Mexico 4,500,000 Sir Edward Reid, and a syndicate in Florida 2,000,000 English Syndicate, in Mississippi 1,800,000 Marquis of Tweedale 1,750,000 Philips, Marshal & Co., London 1,300,000 German Syndicate 1,100,000 Anglo-American Syndicate, Mr. Rogers President, London 750,000 Byron H. Evans, of London, in Mississippi 700,000 Duke of Sutherland 425,000 British Land Company, in Kansas 320,000 William Whallay, M.P., Peterboro, England 310,000 Missouri Land Company, Edinburgh, Scotland 300,000 Robert Tennant, of London 230,000 Dundee Land Company, Scotland 247,000 Lord Dunmore 120,000 Benjamin Newgas, Liverpool 100,000 Lord Houghton, in Florida 60,000 Lord Dunraven, in Colorado 60,000 English Land Company, in Florida 50,000 English Land Company, in Arkansas 50,000 Albert Peel, M.P., Leicestershire, England 10,000 Sir J.L. Kay, Yorkshire, England 5,000 Alexander Grant, of London, in Kansas 35,000 English Syndicate (represented by Closs Bros.) Wisconsin 110,000 M. Ellerhauser, of Halifax, Nova Scotia, in West Virginia 600,000 A Scotch Syndicate, in Florida 500,000 A. Boysen, Danish Consul, in Milwaukee 50,000 Missouri Land Company, of Edinburgh, Scotland 165,000 Total 20,747,000
| An English Syndicate, No. 3, in Texas | 3,000,000 |
| The Holland Land Company, New Mexico | 4,500,000 |
| Sir Edward Reid, and a syndicate in Florida | 2,000,000 |
| English Syndicate, in Mississippi | 1,800,000 |
| Marquis of Tweedale | 1,750,000 |
| Philips, Marshal & Co., London | 1,300,000 |
| German Syndicate | 1,100,000 |
| Anglo-American Syndicate, Mr. Rogers President, London | 750,000 |
| Byron H. Evans, of London, in Mississippi | 700,000 |
| Duke of Sutherland | 425,000 |
| British Land Company, in Kansas | 320,000 |
| William Whallay, M.P., Peterboro, England | 310,000 |
| Missouri Land Company, Edinburgh, Scotland | 300,000 |
| Robert Tennant, of London | 230,000 |
| Dundee Land Company, Scotland | 247,000 |
| Lord Dunmore | 120,000 |
| Benjamin Newgas, Liverpool | 100,000 |
| Lord Houghton, in Florida | 60,000 |
| Lord Dunraven, in Colorado | 60,000 |
| English Land Company, in Florida | 50,000 |
| English Land Company, in Arkansas | 50,000 |
| Albert Peel, M.P., Leicestershire, England | 10,000 |
| Sir J.L. Kay, Yorkshire, England | 5,000 |
| Alexander Grant, of London, in Kansas | 35,000 |
| English Syndicate (represented by Closs Bros.) Wisconsin | 110,000 |
| M. Ellerhauser, of Halifax, Nova Scotia, in West Virginia | 600,000 |
| A Scotch Syndicate, in Florida | 500,000 |
| A. Boysen, Danish Consul, in Milwaukee | 50,000 |
| Missouri Land Company, of Edinburgh, Scotland | 165,000 |
| Total | 20,747,000 |
Commenting upon these startling figures, the New York (Daily) World, one of the best informed papers of the time says:
The land grabber is not a fungus of nineteenth century growth. He first came among English-speaking peoples over eight centuries ago. Wherever his foot has found a standing-place pauperism and its sequence, crime, have followed. In the British Isles he is known as an Acreocrat. Since he has extended his operations from his native country to our own free soil the land-grabber should be examined under the microscope of history analytically, impartially, and truthfully.
The unnaturalized foreigner threatens us with other dangers than those which would be created by our indigenous American land-grabber. The British acreocrat who owns real estate in this country believes in the cancer of English monarchy with its hideous annals of nearly a thousand years. He accepts the tradition of an hereditary House of Lords, a body composed of the effete and played out descendants of the most tyrannical and profligate rascals which Europe ever produced, and he will remain an English blueblood in every thought and action, which cannot fail to bring about in free America and on his own acres here the same poverty-stricken class of peasants as now curse Great Britain and Ireland.
English "upper-tendom" is represented in recent purchases of American soil by one duke, one marquis, two earls, a baron, two baronets and two members of Parliament. The British duke owns 425,000 acres; the marquis, 1,750,000 acres; the two earls, 160,000 acres; the baron, 60,000 acres; the brace of baronets, 2,000,500 acres; and the pair of Parliamentary politicians, 860,000 acres. In the rest of the land purchased by our brand-new imported lords of the soil, England's governing acreocrats, are largely represented in their 20,941,666 acres.
Much ignorance is affected in American society respecting the manner in which the British landocrats came by their property. It is enough that "my lud" has a handle to his name, and Murray Hill shoddyocracy will wine and dine and toady him, and perhaps for his title marry him to some sweet, pure and good American girl, whose life hereafter will be a purgatory to herself and a mutual misery to both.
But the land held by the foreigner in the United States is a mere bagatelle. He is odious not because he is a foreigner, but only because he is the representative, on the one hand, of the odious land system of the Old World, and on the other of those monarchical ideas which have made the great body of the European people unwilling slaves, reducing them to the very verge of desperation and starvation. Archimedes explained, as illustrating the vast power of the fulcrum, that if he had a place to stand he could move the world. The British land-shark, having got his hold upon the soil, possesses the place to stand for which the Greek sighed in vain, and no man will say he does not move the world; and he will continue to move it until such time as the world shall move him.
The foreign land-shark is still in his infancy. We have an indigenous land-shark whose maw is so capacious that the rapacity of his appetite in no wise keeps pace with its lightning-like digestion. Congressman William Steel Holman, of Indiana, one of the purest statesmen of these corrupt times, and one of the most thoroughly informed men of the country upon the question of eminent domain, and the bestowal of that domain upon corporations and syndicates, recently said, on the floor of the House of Representatives, in the course of a discussion on the Post-office Appropriation bill:
Is it just and proper to require the landgrant railroads to transport your mails at 50 per cent of the rates you pay to corporations whose railroads were built by private capital? I think it is. I think it liberal and more than liberal when the cost in public wealth is considered in the building of these land-grant railroads. I submit tables of the railroads built under the land-grant system, compiled from official reports, and they show an aggregate of 218,386,199 acres, 192,081,155 acres of which were granted between June 30, 1862, and March 4, 1875, the aggregate length of railroads for which the grants were made being 20,803 miles, 13,071 miles independent of the 7,732 mileage of the Pacific roads; and the reports of the Post-office Department show that last year the Government paid, on 11,588,56 miles of land-grant railroad, independent of the Union Pacific system and the great body of lapsed grants, $1,144,323.91 for postal service. The startling fact appears that in the gradual development of these grants, great as they are, they still swell in their proportions. I pointed out on a former occasion the startling discrepancies that appear in the official statements of these grants, and can only say now, as I did then, that in such enormous grants a few million acres either way is considered of no moment.
Again:
There are other grants which I have not included in either of the foregoing tables where not a spadeful of earth has been dug in the construction of a railroad, yet the lands are withdrawn from settlement and claimed by the corporation, although the grants were long since forfeited. The forfeiture of these grants will, of course, be declared. Of all of these grants over 109,000,000 acres, including over 16,000,000 this House has already declared forfeited, are beyond any reasonable question forfeited, and the declaration of that forfeiture by Congress is demanded by the highest consideration of public policy, common honesty, and justice to the people. Even to the extent these land-grant railroads enumerated in the first table were completed, you paid them, as I have shown, last year $1,144,323.91 for transporting your mails. This bill would, as to these roads, to the extent they are entitled to the lands granted and including the Pacific systems, save to the Treasury annually, I think, near a million dollars, perhaps more.
Deducing from the foregoing statement of land-grants to corporations, Mr. Holman draws the following picture of what the people may do when they are fully informed and aroused to the enormous extent to which they have been despoiled by their unfaithful servants in congress:
The wealth that builds palaces, undermines the foundations of free Government, and wrings from the heart of labor the cry of despair! With the public lands exhausted, with remnants of the Indian-tribes despoiled of their reservations, and the lands seized upon by capitalists and merciless speculators (except so far as you have pledged them in advance to the railroad corporations), and lands everywhere advanced in price beyond the reach of laboring men, with the hope of better fortune and of independent homes dying out of the heart of labor, with men fully conscious of the wrong you have done them by your legislation, can the peaceful order of society be hoped for as of old? I am not astonished that gentlemen deem this early hour an opportune moment to urge the policy of a great navy; it will come, if it does come, in the natural order before a great army. Capital is timid and full of suggestions; the Navy is the most remote, but I am not surprised that here and there comes also the intimation that your Army is too small. These, too, may be some of the bitter fruits of your imperial grants. I fear that it will be seen soon enough that when you have destroyed the very foundations of security and hope upon which labor has rested so long, the old-time repose and peaceful order will be no more. Gentlemen should not forget that the wrong that has been done to laboring men and their children by giving over their natural inheritance to an accursed monopoly will in due time be considered by the most intelligent body of laboring men who ever debated a public wrong—men fully aware of their rights and capable of asserting them.
But the foreign land-shark, and the corporate land-shark, dwindle into insignificance by the side of the individual land-shark. Every hamlet, town, city, and state in the Union is in the grasp of the individual land holder. Starting with his fellows as a pioneer two hundred and fifty years ago, with his pickaxe on his shoulder, he has steadily grown in size and importance, so that today he holds in his hands the destinies of the Republic and the life of his fellow citizens. His bulk has become mastodonian in proportions and his influence has shrivelled up the energies of the people. More absolute than the Iron Prince of Germany, he pays no taxes; he limits production, not to the requirements of the population but to the demand of the market, at such figures as he can extort from the crying necessities of the people through the operations of "corners;" he regulates the wheels of government, State and Federal, and dictates to the people by making them hungry and naked.
We stand only upon the threshold of governmental existence; the nation, in comparison to the hoary-handed commonwealths of Europe, was born but yesterday; but, having adopted at the beginning the system which hastened the downfall of Rome after she had spread her authority over the known world, we are already weak and exhausted. Monopoly has stunted the people, and they stagger to the grave, starved to death by a system of robbery almost too transparent to require minute elucidation at the hand of the conscientious writer upon economic questions. The suppressed groans of the toiling masses are echoed and reëchoed from every corner of the land, and burst forth in mobocratic fury that the entire police authority finds it almost impossible to stay. The newspapers are a daily chronicle of the desperate condition to which the country has been brought by the rapacity and ignorance of legislators and the parasitical manipulations of the gang which has rooted itself in the soil of the country.
The fires of revolution are incorporated into the Magna Charta of our liberties, and no human power can avert the awful eruption which will eventually burst upon us as Mount Vesuvius burst forth upon Herculaneum and Pompeii. It is too late for America to be wise in time. "The die is cast."
CHAPTER XVI
Conclusion
I know it is not fashionable for writers on economic questions to tell the truth, but the truth should be told, though it kill. When the wail of distress encircles the world, the man who is linked by "the touch of nature" which "makes the whole world kin" to the common destiny of the race universal; who hates injustice wherever it lifts up its head; who sympathizes with the distressed, the weak, and the friendless in every corner of the globe, such a man is morally bound to tell the truth as he conceives it to be the truth.
In these times, when the law-making and enforcing authority is leagued against the people; when great periodicals—monthly, weekly and daily—echo the mandates or anticipate the wishes of the powerful men who produce our social demoralization, it becomes necessary for the few men who do not agree to the arguments advanced or the interests sought to be bolstered up, to "cry aloud and spare not." The man who with the truth in his possession flatters with lies, that "thrift may follow fawning" is too vile to merit the contempt of honest men.
The government of the United States confiscated as "contraband of war" the slave population of the South, but it left to the portion of the unrepentant rebel a far more valuable species of property. The slave, the perishable wealth, was confiscated to the government and then manumitted; but property in land, the wealth which perishes not nor can fly away, and which had made the institution of slavery possible, was left as the heritage of the robber who had not hesitated to lift his iconoclastic hand against the liberties of his country. The baron of feudal Europe would have been paralyzed with astonishment at the leniency of the conquering invader who should take from him his slave, subject to mutation, and leave him his landed possessions which are as fixed as the Universe of Nature. He would ask no more advantageous concession. But the United States took the slave and left the thing which gave birth to chattel slavery and which is now fast giving birth to industrial slavery; a slavery more excruciating in its exactions, more irresponsible in its machinations than that other slavery, which I once endured. The chattel slave-holder must, to preserve the value of his property, feed, clothe and house his property, and give it proper medical attention when disease or accident threatened its life. But industrial slavery requires no such care. The new slave-holder is only solicitous of obtaining the maximum of labor for the minimum of cost. He does not regard the man as of any consequence when he can no longer produce. Having worked him to death, or ruined his constitution and robbed him of his labor, he turns him out upon the world to live upon the charity of mankind or to die of inattention and starvation. He knows that it profits him nothing to waste time and money upon a disabled industrial slave. The multitude of laborers from which he can recruit his necessary laboring force is so enormous that solicitude on his part for one that falls by the wayside would be a gratuitous expenditure of humanity and charity which the world is too intensely selfish and materialistic to expect him. Here he forges wealth and death at one and the same time. He could not do this if our social system did not confer upon him a monopoly of the soil from which subsistence must be derived, because the industrial slave, given an equal opportunity to produce for himself, would not produce for another. On the other hand the large industrial operations, with the multitude of laborers from which Adam Smith declares employers grow rich, as far as this applies to the soil, would not be possible, since the vast volume of increased production brought about by the industry of the multitude of co-equal small farmers would so reduce the cost price of food products as to destroy the incentive to speculation in them, and at the same time utterly destroy the necessity or the possibility of famines, such as those which have from time to time come upon the Irish people. There could be no famine, in the natural course of things, where all had an opportunity to cultivate as much land as they could wherever they found any not already under cultivation by some one else. It needs no stretch of the imagination to see what a startling tendency the announcement that all vacant land was free to settlement upon condition of cultivation would have to the depopulation of over-crowded cities like New York, Baltimore and Savannah, where the so-called pressure of population upon subsistence has produced a hand-to-hand fight for existence by the wage-workers in every avenue of industry.
This is no fancy picture. It is a plain, logical deduction of what would result from the restoration to the people of that equal chance in the race of life which every man has a right to expect, to demand, and to exact as a condition of his membership of organized society.
The wag who started the "forty acres and a mule" idea among the black people of the South was a wise fool; wise in that he enunciated a principle which every argument of sound policy should have dictated, upon the condition that the forty acres could in no wise be alienated, and that it could be regarded only as property as long as it was cultivated; and a fool because he designed simply to impose upon the credulity and ignorance of his victims. But the justness of the "forty acre" donation cannot be controverted. In the first place, the slave had earned this miserable stipend from the government by two hundred years of unrequited toil; and, secondly, as a free man, he was inherently entitled to so much of the soil of his country as would suffice to maintain him in the freedom thrust upon him. To tell him he was a free man, and at the same time shut him off from free access to the soil upon which he had been reared, without a penny in his pocket, and with an army of children at his coat-tail—some of his reputed wife's children being the illegitimate offspring of a former inhuman master—was to add insult to injury, to mix syrup and hyssop, to aggravate into curses the pretended conferrence of blessings.
When I think of the absolutely destitute condition of the colored people of the South at the close of the Rebellion; when I remember the moral and intellectual enervation which slavery had produced in them; when I remember that not only were they thus bankrupt, but that they were absolutely and unconditionally cut off from the soil, with absolutely no right or title in it, I am surprised,—not that they have already got a respectable slice of landed interests; not that they have taken hold eagerly of the advantages of moral and intellectual opportunities of development placed in their reach by the charitable philanthropy of good men and women; not that they have bought homes and supplied them with articles of convenience and comfort, often of luxury—but I am surprised that the race did not turn robbers and highwaymen, and, in turn, terrorize and rob society as society had for so long terrorized and robbed them. The thing is strange, marvelous, phenomenal in the extreme. Instead of becoming outlaws, as the critical condition would seem to have indicated, the black men of the South went manfully to work to better their own condition and the crippled condition of the country which had been produced by the ravages of internecine rebellion; while the white men of the South, the capitalists, the land-sharks, the poor white trash, and the nondescripts, with a thousand years of Christian civilization and culture behind them, with "the boast of chivalry, the pomp of power," these white scamps, who had imposed upon the world the idea that they were paragons of virtue and the heaven-sent vicegerents of civil power, organized themselves into a band of outlaws, whose concatenative chain of auxiliaries ran through the entire South, and deliberately proceeded to murder innocent men and women for political reasons and to systematically rob them of their honest labor because they were too accursedly lazy to labor themselves.
But this highly abnormal, unnatural condition of things is fast passing away. The white man having asserted his superiority in the matters of assassination and robbery, has settled down upon a barrel of dynamite, as he did in the days of slavery, and will await the explosion with the same fatuity and self-satisfaction true of him in other days. But as convulsions from within are more violent and destructive than convulsions from without, being more deepseated and therefore more difficult to reach, the next explosion will be more disastrous, more far-reaching in its havoc than the one which metamorphosed social conditions in the South, and from the dreadful reactions of which we are just now recovering.
As I have said elsewhere, the future struggle in the South will be, not between white men and black men, but between capital and labor, landlord and tenant. Already the cohorts are marshalling to the fray; already the forces are mustering to the field at the sound of the slogan.
The same battle will be fought upon Southern soil that is in preparation in other states where the conditions are older in development but no more deep-seated, no more pernicious, no more blighting upon the industries of the country and the growth of the people.
It is not my purpose here to enter into an extended analysis of the foundations upon which our land system rests, nor to give my views as to how matters might be remedied. I may take up the question at some future time. It is sufficient for my purpose to have indicated that the social problems in the South, as they exfoliate more and more as resultant upon the war, will be found to be the same as those found in every other section of our country; and to have pointed out that the questions of "race," "condition" "politics," etc., will all properly adjust themselves with the advancement of the people in wealth, education, and forgetfulness of the unhappy past.
The hour is approaching when the laboring classes of our country, North, East, West and South, will recognize that they have a common cause, a common humanity and a common enemy; and that, therefore, if they would triumph over wrong and place the laurel wreath upon triumphant justice, without distinction of race or of previous condition they must unite! And unite they will, for "a fellow feeling makes us wond'rous kind." When the issue is properly joined, the rich, be they black or be they white, will be found upon the same side; and the poor, be they black or be they white, will be found on the same side.
Necessity knows no law and discriminates in favor of no man or race.
APPENDIX
I append to this volume a portion of the testimony of Mr. John Caldwell Calhoun because of the uniform fairness with which he treated the race and labor problem in the section of country where he is an extensive landowner and employer of labor.
Mr. Calhoun's testimony was given before the Blair Senate Committee on Education and Labor and will be found in the Committee's Report as to The Relations between Labor and Capital. (Vol. II, pp. 157).
New York, Thursday, September 13, 1883
labor in the southwest
John Caldwell Calhoun sworn and examined
By the Chairman:
Question. Where do you reside?
—Answer. In Chicot County, Arkansas.
Q. State to the committee, if you please, where you were born, of what family connection you are, and what have been your opportunities for becoming acquainted with the past and the present condition of agricultural labor in the Southern States.
—A. I was born in Marengo County, Alabama. My father was a planter there before the war.
Q. He was a son of John C. Calhoun, the statesman?
—A. He was a son of Mr. John C. Calhoun, of South Carolina.
Q. You are his grandson, then?
—A. Yes, sir; I am his grandson. My father was Col. Andrew P. Calhoun. I was reared in South Carolina. In 1854 my father removed his residence from his plantations in Alabama to Fort Hill, South Carolina, near Pendleton, where I was raised. I have been identified with the agricultural interest of the South from my earliest recollections, and have been a practical cotton planter myself since the war, giving my own personal attention to my interests since 1869.
Q. When did you remove from South Carolina?
—A. I removed from South Carolina to Chicot County, Arkansas, in 1869.
Q. Until 1869 you had been a resident of South Carolina?
—A. Yes, sir.
Q. And of course very familiar with the condition of things on the Atlantic coast. Since that time you have been in the Mississippi Valley?
—A. Yes, sir; my experience as a cotton planter and with the laborers of the South is confirmed, I may say, almost entirely to the Mississippi Valley, for I left South Carolina so soon after the war that things had hardly shaped themselves there so that I could form an accurate estimate of the labor or the condition of affairs in South Carolina or on the Atlantic coast.
The Chairman. Not having had a personal acquaintance with Mr. Calhoun, and learning of his rare opportunities to give valuable information to the committee, and of his presence in the city, I addressed him a letter, calling attention to the subject-matter upon which we should like information, and which I had reason to think he could give us better than almost any one else, indicating certain questions which I would like to have him prepared to answer, and receiving a courteous reply, expressing a willingness to oblige the committee, I have called him before the committee, and will now read the questions:—
1st. What is the condition of the laborers in your section?
2d. Under what system are the laborers in your section employed?
3d. When hired for wages what is paid?
4th. What division is made between labor and capital of their joint production when you work on shares?
5th. When you rent what division is made?
6th. How many hours do the laborers work?
7th. Under what system do you work?
8th. What is the relation existing between the planters and their employees?
9th. What danger is there of strikes?
10th. How can the interest of the laborers of your section be best subserved?
If you have prepared answers to these questions, and can give your answers consecutively, I would like you to do so. The Witness. I have prepared replies in order that I might save the committee time as well as condense my ideas.
Q. 1. What is the condition of the laborers in your section?
—A. The laborers in the Mississippi Valley are agricultural. But few whites are employed; they soon become landowners or tenants. Your question, therefore, reduces itself to, What is the condition of the negroes? I should say good, as compared with a few years ago, and improving. You must recollect that it has only been 18 years since the negroes emerged from slavery without a dollar and with no education, and that for generations they had been taught to rely entirely upon others for guidance and support. They became, therefore, at once the easy prey of unscrupulous men, who used them for their personal aggrandizement, were subjected to every evil influence, and did not discover for years the impositions practiced upon them. They were indolent and extravagant, and eager to buy on a credit everything the planter or merchant would sell them. The planter had nothing except the land, which, with the crop to be grown, was mortgaged generally for advances. If he refused to indulge his laborers in extravagant habits during the year, by crediting them for articles not absolutely necessary, his action was regarded as good grounds for them to quit work, and there were those present who were always ready to use this as an argument to array the negroes against the proprietors. This, of course, demoralized the country to a very great extent, and it has only been in the past few years the negro laborers have realized their true condition and gone to work with a view of making a support for themselves and families. There is yet much room for improvement, but they will improve just as they gain experience and become self-reliant.
Considering their condition after emancipation and the evil influences to which they have been subjected, even the small advancement they have made seems surprising.
Q. 2. Under what systems are the laborers in your section employed?
—A. There are three methods: we hire for wages, for a part of the crop, or we rent.
Q. 3. When hired for wages what is paid?
—A. When hired by the month we pay unskilled field hands from $10 to $20 per month and board. When hired by the day, for unskilled laborers, from 75 cents to $1. Teamsters, $1 a day and board. Artisans, from $2 to $5. In addition to their wages and board, the laborers are furnished, free of cost, a house, fuel, and a garden spot varying from half to one acre; also the use of wagon and team with which to haul their fuel and supplies, and pasturage, where they have cattle and hogs, which they are encouraged to raise.
Q. 4. What division is made between labor and capital of their joint production when you work on shares?
—A. I doubt if there is greater liberality shown to laborers in any portion of the world than is done under this system. The proprietor furnishes the land and houses, including dwelling, stables, and outhouses, pays the taxes, makes all necessary improvements, keeps up repairs and insurance, gives free of cost a garden spot, fuel, pasturage for the stock owned by the laborer, and allows the use of his teams for hauling fuel and family supplies, provides mules or horses, wagons, gears, implements, feed for teams, the necessary machinery for ginning, or, in short, every expense of making the crop and preparing it for market, and then divides equally the whole gross proceeds with the laborers. In addition to all this, the proprietor frequently mortgages his real estate to obtain means to advance to the laborers supplies on their portion of the crop yet to be grown, thus mortgaging what he actually possesses, and taking a security not yet in existence, and which depends not only upon the vicissitudes of the seasons, but the faithfulness of the laborers themselves. Under this system thrifty, industrious laborers ought soon to become landowners. But, owing to indolence, the negroes, except where they are very judiciously managed and encouraged, fail to take advantage of the opportunities offered them to raise the necessaries of life. They idle away all the time not actually necessary to make and gather their corn and cotton, and improvidently spend what balance may remain after paying for the advances made to them.
Q. 5. When you rent, what division is made?
—A. Where the laborer owns his own teams, gears, and implements necessary for making a crop, he gets two-thirds or three-fourths of the crop, according to the quality and location of the land.
Under the rental system proper, where a laborer is responsible and owns his team, &c., first-class land is rented to him for $8 or $10 per acre. With the land go certain privileges, such as those heretofore enumerated.
Q. 6. How many hours do the laborers work?
—A. This is an extremely difficult question to answer. Under the wages system, from sunrise to sunset, with a rest for dinner of from one and one-half to three hours, according to the season of the year.
Under the share or rental system there is much time lost; for instance, they seldom work on Saturday at all, and as the land is fertile, and a living can be made on a much smaller acreage than a hand can cultivate, they generally choose one-third less than they should, and it is safe to say that one third of the time which could and would be utilized by an industrious laborer is wasted in fishing, and hunting, and idleness.
Q. 7. Under what system do you work?
—A. We are forced to adopt all systems heretofore stated. We prefer, however, the tenant system. We wish to make small farmers our laborers, and bring them up as nearly as possible to the standard of the small white farmers. But this can only be done gradually, because the larger portion of the negroes are without any personal property. We could not afford to sell the mules, implements, &c., where a laborer has nothing. Therefore the first year we contract to work with him on the half-share system, and require him to plant a portion of the land he cultivates in corn, hay, potatoes, &c. For this portion we charge him a reasonable rent, to be paid out of his part of the cotton raised on the remainder. In this way all of the supplies raised belong to him, and at the end of the first year he will, if industrious, find himself possessed of enough supplies to support and feed a mule. We then sell him a mule and implements, preserving, of course, liens until paid. At the end of the second year, if he should be unfortunate, and not quite pay out, we carry the balance over to the next year, and in this way we gradually make a tenant of him. We encourage him in every way in our power to be economical, industrious, and prudent, to surround his home with comforts, to plant an orchard and garden, and to raise his own meat, and to keep his own cows, for which he has free pasturage. Our object is to attach him as much as possible to his home. Under whatever system we work, we require the laborer to plant a part of his land in food crops and the balance in cotton with which to pay his rent and give him ready money. We consider this system as best calculated to advance him. Recognizing him as a citizen, we think we should do all in our power to fit him for the duties of citizenship. We think there is no better method of doing this than by interesting him in the production of the soil, surrounding him with home comforts, and imposing upon him the responsibilities of his business. Who will make the best citizen or laborer, he who goes to a home with a week's rations, wages spent, wife and children hired out, or he who returns to a home surrounded with the ordinary comforts, and wife and children helping him to enjoy the products of their joint labor? We recognize that no country can be prosperous unless the farmers are prosperous. Under our system, we seek to have our property cultivated by a reliable set of tenants, who will be able to always pay their rent and have a surplus left.
Again, a large portion of the cotton crop of the country is made by small white farmers. These to a great extent are raising their own supplies, and making cotton a surplus crop. The number who do this will increase year by year. It must be apparent that the large planters cannot afford to hire labor and compete with those whose cotton costs nothing except the expenditure of their own muscle and energy. The natural consequence resulting from this condition of things is that the negro, if he is to prosper, must gradually become a small farmer, either as a tenant or the owner of the soil, and look himself upon cotton as a surplus crop.
Q. 8. What is the relation existing between the planters and their employers?
—A. Friendly and harmonious. The planter feel an interest in the welfare of his laborers, and the latter in turn look to him for advice and assistance.
Q. 9. What danger is there of strikes?
—A. Very little. As a rule the laborers are interested in the production of the soil, and a strike would be as disastrous to them as it would be to the proprietors. There is really very little conflict between labor and capital. The conflict in my section, if any should come in future, will not assume the form of labor against capital, but of race against race.
Q. 10. How can the interest of the laborers of your section be best subserved?
—A. By the establishment by the States of industrial schools, by the total elimination from Federal politics of the so-called negro question, and by leaving the solution to time, and a reduction of taxation, both indirect and incidental. It is a noteworthy fact that the improvement of my section has kept pace, pari passu, with the cessation of the agitation of race issues. The laborers share equally with the landowners the advantages of the improvement, and there is every reason to expect increasing and permanent prosperity if all questions between the landowners and their laborers in our section are left to the natural adjustment of the demand for labor. For many years the negroes regarded themselves as the wards of the Federal Government, and it were well for them to understand that they have nothing more to expect from the Federal Government, than the white man, and that, like him, their future depends upon their own energy, industry, and economy. This can work no hardship. The constant demand for labor affords them the amplest protection. Nothing, probably, would contribute so immediately to their prosperity as the reduction of the tariff. They are the producers of no protected articles. The onerous burdens of the tariff naturally fall heaviest upon those who are large consumers of protected articles and produce only the great staples, grain and cotton, which form the basis of our export trade, and which can, from their very nature in this country, receive no protection from a tariff.
Q. In your own State, Arkansas, what portion of the land cultivated and what proportion of the acreage of the land cultivated is in the form of large plantations?
—A. That lying along the Mississippi and Arkansas Rivers. It would be hard for me to estimate the proportions. I do not know that I have ever considered it, but the portions which are cultivated in large plantations lie directly on the Mississippi River in front of the State of Arkansas and on the Arkansas River. The rest of the State is cultivated very much by small white farmers.
Q. And are the productions of the small holdings and large holdings similar; I inquire as to cotton particularly?
—A. No, sir. In the interior of the State cotton is made a surplus crop entirely.
Q. What are the principal crops there?
—A. Our people are raising their own supplies, fruits and vegetables. For instance, it was stated by the land agent of the Iron Mountain Railroad at a public meeting in Little Rock some weeks ago that that road had carried out from the State of Arkansas in one week 800,000 pounds of green peas and strawberries.
Q. To what market?
—A. To Saint Louis, going to different markets. The section of the State lying between Little Rock and Fort Smith is peculiarly adapted for growing fruit, and there is a very large fruit trade.
Q. What kinds of fruit?
—A. I might say almost all kinds, but particularly apples; that section of country is noted for its apples.
Q. Are peaches raised there also?
—A. Very fine, indeed.
Q. Plums?
—A. Yes, sir.
Q. Are oranges raised there?
—A. No, sir; we do not raise any of the tropical fruits, such as oranges, bananas, and lemons.
Q. How in regard to oats, rye, corn, wheat, potatoes, and crops of that description?
—A. If our exhibit, which is now being made at the Louisville Exposition, can be seen it will compare favorably with that of any other portion of the United States.
Q. Even with the Northwest?
—A. Even with the Northwest.
Q. Would you judge that one-half the cultivated surface of Arkansas is made up of the larger plantations?
—A. No, sir; I should not say more than a third, as a rough estimate.
Q. Upon these plantations is there any crop raised for consumption anywhere but upon the plantations, save the cotton?
—A. Only in a very limited way. We raise Irish potatoes for the northern markets, and it is an extremely profitable and productive crop with us.
Q. What is the home market price?
—A. We do not sell these potatoes at home at all. We get them to Saint Louis, Chicago, and Cincinnati before the ground is really thawed out up there. We get from $5 to $10 a barrel for them.
Q. A barrel of about 3 bushels?
—A. A barrel of about 3 bushels. That of course is a fancy price, and only lasts until the product comes in from other sources.
Q. That is an advantage no farmer has elsewhere in the United States than in Arkansas?
—A. In Arkansas and Louisiana, on the Mississippi River.
Q. Are potatoes raised largely in Louisiana?
—A. Yes, sir; in parts. The cultivation of the alluvial lands in Louisiana is very similar to what I am speaking of in Arkansas.
Q. Is the potato of good quality raised on those rich lands?
—A. Of very fine quality.
Q. Can you give the average crop of potatoes per acre?
—A. I cannot, as I have never raised any myself for market. We leave it almost entirely to our small farmers to do that sort of thing.
Q. About 300 bushels per acre, Senator Pugh says. This is the Irish potato you speak of, not the sweet?
—A. The Irish potato. We raise also the sweet potato there. I have raised sweet potatoes that weighed five pounds.
Q. And of good quality?
—A. Of fine quality.
Q. The size does not depreciate the quality, then?
—A. Not at all.
Q. They, I suppose are raised for exportation from the State?
—A. No, sir; they are raised almost entirely for home consumption by our farmers.
Q. Do your people at home prefer the sweet to the Irish potato for their own use?
—A. I cannot say they do. I think they raise both in equal proportions.
Q. Which, on the whole, is the most profitable crop to raise of potatoes?
—A. The Irish potatoes because we export and sell them. The sweet potato does not mature until the fall of the year.
Q. Upon your plantations you encourage the raising of the variety of crops you have spoken of for consumption, by the laborers, and for the use of the planter, I suppose, but not for exportation and sale?
—A. Not for sale. We merely raise them for home consumption in case of a disaster to our cotton crops. The cotton crop is subjected to very many vicissitudes, and we want to have all our supplies at home, so that in case of a failure of the cotton crop we have our living made at least.
Q. Are the planters and those who labor upon the plantations substantially independent of the small farmers surrounding them, or do they constitute consumers for the smaller farmers in the interior?
—A. We have our own gardens, and generally raise our own supplies, but every planter interests himself to find a market for all the products of his laborers. For instance, we encourage them to raise poultry to a great extent. If they have a surplus of potatoes, or eggs, or chickens, we will buy it and create a market for it, and ship the articles off in order that if they have any surplus they may realize on it. On the Mississippi River we have nearly all the markets. Boats are passing there every day going directly by the banks of the river. We have the markets of New Orleans, Vicksburg, Memphis, Saint Louis, Chicago, and we have, you may say, the whole country open before us where we can create a market. We make the best market we can for the products of our small farmers.
Q. Do you know something of the prices in the North for the various crops you have mentioned, and if so, how do they compare with the price realized by your laborers at home?
—A. Our laborers realize the prices of the Northwest. We ship the articles for them. For instance, a negro has several barrels of potatoes; I consign them to my merchants in Saint Louis, and have them sold for his account.
Q. There are no middlemen, really; you transact this business for them?
—A. I transact this business for them direct.
Q. Charging them simply the cost of transportation?
—A. You are asking me the relationship between the proprietor and the negro. There are a great many stores on the Mississippi River, and negroes sometimes go and trade directly. There are a great many properties in the Mississippi Valley owned by non-residents. There are some plantations rented out to negroes that there is not a white man on at all. The proprietor comes and collects his rent at the end of the year when the crop is made; or it may be his negro tenant consigns the cotton to a factor in New Orleans.
Q. Where is the proprietor himself usually resident?
—A. In different States. We have people who are proprietors of real estate who live out in Orange, New Jersey; some live in South Carolina; some live in Georgia, in the various States, but they own property with us, and this property is rented directly to the negroes. Generally, though, there is a responsible manager in charge of this property, but there are instances where there is not even a white man on the place at all.
Q. In those instances, how do matters work? Do the negroes conduct affairs with reasonable prudence, and consult the interest of the owners?
—A. No, sir; in these instances the property generally goes to decay gradually; the negro will not make an improvement on real estate at all.
Q. In these cases do the negroes work together and carry on the plantation as a whole, or is the plantation cut up into small holdings and rented out to negroes?
—A. It is cut into small portions and rented according to the size of the family. Some men work two mules; some four. It is regulated better by the number of animals he works. For instance, a mule can cultivate in that country with ease about fifteen acres. A man with two mules would work thirty acres; a man with four, sixty, and so on. I know some negroes who work eight and ten mules that they have paid for; but I will say this right here, and it shows the necessity of the education of the negro and of fitting him for the condition of being able to take care of himself and make his own contracts and sign his own name to a contract: I have known of numerous instances where negroes, working under the management of a proprietor of a plantation, have made enough money to buy a home; such a one will go back out in the hills, that section of country lying back of the alluvial lands, and buy a home. In three or four years he will move back to the river again, having lost all his property, mortgaged it to some storekeeper, become extravagant, and that storekeeper in a short time—three or four years probably—will have absorbed all he had earned under the management of a planter.
Q. About that store system; how extensive is it, and how great an evil does it constitute?
—A. It constitutes a very considerable evil, but you cannot blame the storekeeper for it, for this reason, or he can only be blamed partially: Capital in that country is very limited. When you consider the fact that New Orleans, which handles the cotton crop of that country, has a smaller banking capital than any one of your little towns in Massachusetts or New Hampshire, it shows at once that there is not enough capital to be advanced to the country people at reasonable enough rates of interest for those people to conduct a strictly legitimate business. I have known capital to cost in New Orleans, counting the commissions, 15 or 20 per cent, for money loaned. The storekeeper who borrows money to conduct his business with has to buy his goods from some merchant at some point who must make his profit. He cannot go directly to the producer, because he has got to have somebody to help him out if his capital falls short. Therefore, before the goods get down to him, they cost him perhaps 30, 40, or 50 percent more than the first price. Therefore he has to tack on an enormous profit to bring himself out whole and pay his expenses in order to meet his obligations with the factor in New Orleans. There is, however, among a certain class, as there would be in all sections of the country, as exists right here in New York, or anywhere else, a set of people who will always prey upon ignorance. The best protection that can be afforded to the laborer of that country is education; fit him for his condition of life, that he may protect himself.
Q. Do you mean to be understood that these traders do business upon borrowed capital?
—A. Almost entirely.
Q. Their capital is hired in New Orleans?
—A. Or any points they may go for it; I merely mention New Orleans as one point. A number of our people borrow money in Memphis, and some borrow money in Vicksburg.
Q. Do you know whether those people to any extent borrow capital of Northern capitalists in New York and other portions of the North
—A. That class of people do not. In the last few years—I might say almost within the last two years—Northern capital has begun to seek investment in our section of the country, but only upon mortgages on real estate. The class of storekeepers I allude to generally have no real estate at all; they only have their stores.
Q. Your system by which the planter makes a market for the surplus productions of the laborers upon his plantation dispenses with a middleman, and enables the laborer to make a saving, whereas, if he goes to the hills he makes a loss?
—A. Yes, sir. I will put it more definitely: As long as he is under the guidance and care of the proprietor of the plantation he prospers, the planter, as we express it in that country, "loaning him our aid"; we make it very expressive to the negro, we loan him our aid, that is, he must follow our advice, and he has learned to do that, and by doing that he accumulates; but when thrown upon his own resources—there are individual exceptions, of course, where a good many negroes prosper themselves when thrown upon their own resources in Arkansas—but as a general fact, where he leaves the guidance and care of the proprietor of a plantation and subjects himself just as any one else does to the common trading with storekeepers, in a very few years he loses what he has accumulated.
Q. Under these favorable circumstances which surround the laborer on the plantation one would think he ought to accumulate; but I understand you that as a rule he is rather improvident and fails to accumulate. To what do you attribute that improvidence on the part of the negro laborer?
—A. It is simply from the want of a proper appreciation of the opportunities of advancement from his condition. The negroes are just beginning, as I expressed it, to realize the responsibilities of life, and just as they begin to realize the responsibilities of life here, they begin to prosper. The prosperity of the South has only begun in the last few years, and it has begun to increase just as the race issue has ceased. I will demonstrate that to you by a little paragraph I cut out of the New York Herald last night, taken from the New Orleans Times-Democrat. If you take the assessed valuation of real estate in Alabama, in 1879 it was at $117,486,581; in 1883 it is assessed at $152,920,115. There has been that increase in four years from $117,000,000 to $152,000,000. Now let us take the State of Arkansas: in 1879 our real estate was valued at $86,892,541; in 1883 it is valued at $136,000,000. It goes on just in that same proportion. For instance, this shows that in eight of the Southern and Southwestern States there has been an increase of nearly half a billion dollars—that is, $494,836,686—in value of taxable property during the short period of four years.
I happened to pick up this book last night. If I had an opportunity I could have gotten some statistics to show you the increased production in these different States, and how completely it has taken place, as the laborer has begun to rely on himself and been thrown on his resources.
Q. Have you observed the origin of these statistics?
—A. They come from the New Orleans Times-Democrat. I will read this in order that they may be known. This is from the Herald of yesterday:
SOUTHERN PROGRESS
The New Orleans Times-Democrat has gathered from trustworthy sources and given to the public valuable statistics showing the industrial progress made in the Southern States during the past four years. This covers the period since 1879, the year to which the figures of the latest national census apply. The census returns show a marvelous material growth in the South during the preceding ten years. But, according to the reports published by our New Orleans contemporary, the progress of the past four years is greater and more wonderful than that achieved during the decade between the census years.
Taking the important item of assessed value of property, a comparison between the years 1879 and 1883 gives the following remarkable results:
States Assessment 1883 Tax rate Assessment 1879 Tax rate Alabama $152,920,115 6½ $117,486,581 7 Arkansas 136,000,000 7 86,892,541 6½ Florida 56,000,000 5 29,471,648 7 Georgia 300,000,000 2½ 135,659,530 5 Louisiana 200,000,000 6 209,361,402 6 Mississippi 116,288,810 2½ 129,308,345 3½ Tennessee 252,289,873 2 223,211,345 1 Texas 500,000,000 3 304,470,736 5 Total 1,710,498,798 4½ 1,215,662,128 5 This shows that in eight Southern and Southwestern States there has been an increase of nearly half a billion dollars—$494,836,668—in the value of taxable property during the short period of four years, while the rate of taxation has been actually reduced. At the same time liberal appropriations have been made for schools, public improvements, and other useful purposes. "Nor is this marvelous advance in valuation," says the Times-Democrat, "the result of any inflation in value, but the natural sequence of grand crops, new industries developed, new manufactories, mines, and lumber mills established."
The extension of railroads has been hardly less astonishing. In the eight States above enumerated there were in 1879 11,604 miles of railroad. There are now 17,891 miles, showing an increase in four years of 6,287 miles. The agricultural progress made is shown by the fact that the value of raw products raised in these States, including all crops, lumber, cattle, and wool, has advanced from $398,000,000 in 1879 to $567,000,000 in 1883, or an increase of $169,000,000. During this period the mineral output of Alabama alone has increased from $4,000,000 to $19,000,000, and the lumber product of Arkansas from $1,790,000 to $8,000,000.
The trade of New Orleans is a barometer of Southern industry and commerce. The value of domestic produce in that city in 1881-82 was $159,000,000; in 1882-83 it was $200,000,000. The value of exports of domestic produce to foreign countries in the former year amounted to $68,000,000; in the latter it reached $95,000,000.
These figures tell a remarkable story of recent progress in the Southern States. Always rich in natural resources, the South has long been poor through lack of development. It has at last entered upon a new era of industrial activity, and is now making rapid strides toward a stage of material prosperity commensurate with its great natural wealth.—New York Herald, September 12,1883.
Now, here is quite a remarkable fact to which I wish to call your attention, to show you the opportunities for labor existing in the South and what is the condition of certain counties in the South. I hold in my hand a book that is compiled for the benefit of the Georgia Pacific Railroad, but I happened to find it in my room and thought these matters would be interesting.
Q. The data you consider reliable?
—A. What I read I think comes from the census report; I think this is reliable:
| States | Assessment 1883 | Tax rate | Assessment 1879 | Tax rate |
| Alabama | $152,920,115 | 6½ | $117,486,581 | 7 |
| Arkansas | 136,000,000 | 7 | 86,892,541 | 6½ |
| Florida | 56,000,000 | 5 | 29,471,648 | 7 |
| Georgia | 300,000,000 | 2½ | 135,659,530 | 5 |
| Louisiana | 200,000,000 | 6 | 209,361,402 | 6 |
| Mississippi | 116,288,810 | 2½ | 129,308,345 | 3½ |
| Tennessee | 252,289,873 | 2 | 223,211,345 | 1 |
| Texas | 500,000,000 | 3 | 304,470,736 | 5 |
| Total | 1,710,498,798 | 4½ | 1,215,662,128 | 5 |
In this connection let us glance at Montgomery County, Alabama, which, although not in the belt we are studying, is on the same prairie formation crossed by the Georgia Pacific Railway, on the edge of Mississippi. Compare it with Butler County, Ohio, which "shows the best record of any county in the West." In live stock Montgomery has $1,748,273; Butler, $1,333,592.
That is the largest producing county in Ohio as compared with Montgomery County, Alabama, before the war.
Montgomery had 63,134 hogs; Butler, 51,640. Animals slaughtered: Montgomery, $336,915; Butler, $318,274. In grain Butler was considerably ahead, but in roots Montgomery led. Montgomery doubled Butler in the production of wool, and had its cotton crop to show besides. The total value of the crops of Montgomery County was $3,264,170; those of Butler only $1,671,132.
There is Montgomery County, Alabama, compared with the leading producing county in Ohio.
Q. Do you know as to the relative size of the two counties?
—A. I think it was given here:
A handsome triumph for the Alabama county! And yet Montgomery is not up to the average of the prairie counties of Alabama.
I do not know the relative size. Here is a fact to which I wish to call particular attention:
We have examined the mortality tables of the United States census for 1880, and find that as regards health, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi make a better showing than some of the oldest and most densely populated Northern States.
There is generally an idea prevailing that the Southern States are very unhealthy. It is a point that bears directly on our labor question, and for that reason I wish to call special attention to this table, which is taken directly from the census:
ANNUAL DEATH RATE FOR EACH THOUSAND OF POPULATION
New York 17.38 Pennsylvania 14.92 Virginia 16.32 Massachusetts 18.59 Kentucky 14.39 Georgia 13.97 Alabama 14.20 Mississippi 12.89 Mississippi has the smallest average death rate of any of that number of States which I have enumerated.
Q. I suppose the circumstance that the average death rate is larger in cities ought to be taken into account, the Southern population being mostly rural, is it not?
—A. The Southern population is to a very great extent rural—Still there are cities in Georgia which I suppose in proportion to our rural population would not make the latter in excess of what it is here. If you take your rural population here and in New Jersey, where you are densely populated, we are no more densely populated in the proportion of our city population to the country than you are here, I think.
Q. Of the population, which is, as a rule, the more healthy in the South, the colored or the white population?
By Mr. Pugh:
Q. There must be some qualification of that difference between the death rate between such States as Massachusetts, for instance, and Georgia, on account of the fact—which I suppose must be conceded—that in these new States population is younger and more vigorous than in the older States. The emigration to these States has been of the younger and more vigorous population, not so liable to die as those who remain behind and are older?
—A. There has been but very little emigration into these States up to this census.
MR. Pugh. That is the fact to some extent, I suppose, anyway.
The Chairman. In that same connection, I suppose, should be borne in mind the fact that the population of these Eastern States is largely re-enforced by immigration from Europe, and that is of the younger and more vigorous European population, and I do not know but what the people in Massachusetts will insist upon it that they are as young and as vigorous as anybody.
Mr. Pugh. I have no doubt. I saw a great many very old people there.
The Witness. I merely mentioned this because I wanted to do away with the impression which generally exists that the Southern States are very unhealthy.
Mr. Pugh. I have no doubt that what you state is true as a general fact.
The Witness. Now, to bear out the assertion which I made that the prosperity of the negroes began to increase with the cessation of race issues in the South, which has been so apparent to me that I can almost mark the time that it began, look at the cotton crop that is being made to a great extent by small farmers; look at the increase of the cotton crop in the different States in the last few years. For instance, take Georgia: in 1870 she made 473,934 bales of cotton; in 1880 she made 814,441, an increase of 75 per cent. Alabama in 1870 produced 429,482 bales; and in 1880 699,654, an increase of 62 per cent. Mississippi in 1870 produced 564,938 bales; in 1880 she produced 955,808 bales, an increase of 69 per cent.
Here is a very significant fact also with regard to the condition of our laborers in the South, and it shows one of the disadvantages we have had to labor under. During the war, and from the results of the war, nearly all of our live stock was destroyed, a great portion of it was destroyed, which left us after the war without the means of raising our own meat and such supplies at home, and took away from the South a great portion of our wealth, for we know that cattle, hogs &c., increase in arithmetical progress. If you have a hog, this year she bears so many pigs, and in a couple of years those pigs bear so many, and so on. But we were left without live stock. I have here a table which shows, even under those difficulties, the increase in that respect in the Southern States of live stock. These are very significant figures. It is entirely an accident that I happened to get hold of them last night. The live stock of New York in 1870 was 5,286,421; in 1880, 5,422,238, an increase of 2 per cent. In Pennsylvania it was 4,484,748 in 1870; in 1880, 5,255,204, an increase of 17 per cent. In Georgia, in 1870, it was 2,275,137; in 1880, 3,139,101, an increase of 38 per cent. In Alabama it was 1,606,299 in 1870, and in 1880, 2,586,221, an increase of 61 per cent, and in Mississippi, in 1870, it was 1,724,295, and in 1880, 2,398,334, an increase of 38 per cent. This shows that with all the disadvantages the South had to contend with of their stock cattle being destroyed, the natural advantages of climate and pasturage, to which I attribute it, existing in the South have enabled them to increase more rapidly their live stock than any other of the States of the Union. That shows clearly the advantages which that country offers for immigration and labor. This is an advantage to labor. As I stated in my written reply to your submitted questions, we work but few white laborers in my section of the country. Why? Because they soon become land-owners with the opportunities which present themselves to them. The white men will not be there more than two or three years before he has bought and paid for his land in almost every instance.
By the Chairman:
Q. And he becomes an employer himself?
—A. He becomes an employer himself.
Q. Does he usually locate upon the plantation lands along the rivers?
—A. No, sir; he cannot buy this land, because the planter would not divide a large plantation into tracts; he would not sell off a portion of his land without selling the whole.
Q. In how large tracts are the plantations held? Just mention the acreage of some of them that you are acquainted with.
—A. I would say variously from 500 to 2,500 acres in cultivation.
Q. How valuable are these plantations per acre?
—A. That is a question which cannot be answered definitely except in this way: where a planter owns the land, and he is out of debt, the land is not for sale, because he cannot invest his money in anything that is so profitable; but where a planter's property is mortgaged, and the mortgagee wants to foreclose and will foreclose, and there is not in that country the money which the planter can borrow to relieve himself of his indebtedness, he will probably sell his land at a small excess of his debt in order to save something. You see there is a want of capital in that country, and if a planter is involved, as many planters are and have been ever since the war, he must do the best he can. There are many planters in that country who are nothing but agents of the factors, from the fact that the interest and commissions they pay upon the debt amount to more than the rent for the property, and they hold on to it as a home. Therefore, a planter in that condition will sell at a nominal price, whereas a plantation owned and paid for is not for sale.
By Mr. Pugh:
Q. There is really no established market price?
—A. None at all, owing to the necessity of the one to sell and the desire of another to buy.
By the Chairman:
Q. At what rates per acre have you known the title to change in some instances?
—A. I have known lands to be bought there, including woodlands and cleared lands, at from $20 to $25 an acre, which would be, say, $40 or $50 an acre for the cleared land, and I have known other planters to refuse $80 an acre, cash.
Q. Do you think that $80 or $100 per acre would be a reasonable price for these plantation lands?
—A. They sold before the war for $120 an acre.
By Mr. Call:
Q. You are speaking now of the alluvial lands?
—A. I am speaking of the alluvial lands on the Mississippi River, cleared, ready for cultivation, with the improvements existing upon them.
By the Chairman:
Q. Improved plantations?
—A. Yes, sir.
Q. Upon what price per acre do you think those lands would pay, one year with another, an interest of 6 per cent?
—A. I will best answer that question by the figures of rents which I have given. The rent, without any responsibility attached to the proprietor at all, is from $8 to $10 an acre.
Q. In money?
—A. In money. I will say further that I have been living in that country since 1869, and I have never yet known a year when there has not been a sufficient crop made to pay the rent, without a single exception.
By Mr. Call:
Q. What is left to the tenant after he pays this $10 an acre?
—A. That land produces on an average 400 pounds of lint cotton to the acre, which at 10 cents a pound is $40.
By the Chairman:
Q. To what extent is Northern capital availing itself of opportunity to invest in these plantations?
—A. I might say it is limited.
Q. From what fact does that arise?
—A. From the fact that the safety of investments there is just becoming apparent to capitalists. Capitalists up to this time have been afraid to go to the South, owing to the disturbed condition of affairs politically and this very race-issue question. A man does not want to carry his money down there and put it into a country that might be involved in riots and disturbances. Those questions are now just beginning to settle themselves, and capital is beginning to find its way.
Q. Do you anticipate in the near or remote future any further difficulty from the race question?
—A. Not at all, and if we are left to ourselves things will very soon equalize themselves.
Q. You are left to yourselves now, are you not?
—A. We are now.
Q. All you ask is to continue to be let alone?
—A. Just to be let alone. The South, with her natural resources and advantages of climate and soil, feels that she is perfectly able to take care of herself and her affairs, and all she wants is that the legislation of the country, both Federal and State, should be that which will mete out justice to all her citizens, colored as well as white.
Q. Does the South feel as though all she had got to do was to take care of herself, or does she feel a little responsibility for the other section of the country?
—A. She feels, more immediately now, responsibility for that section, for this reason, that the negro population of the South, compared with the white population of the South, might be a dangerous element, but the negro population, compared with the whole white population of the United States as an integral body, sinks into insignificance. Therefore, the forces which are at work in the South today make us strongly Union. They are directly contrary to what were existing before the war, and there are no people in this Government today who have the same interest in the Federal Union that the people of the Southern States have, and they appreciate it.
Q. You feel that it is to your advantage that the negro population should be dealt with by the forty or fifty millions of whites, that the races should be balanced in that proportion rather than in the proportion that exists between them and the white population of the South alone?
—A. Yes, sir.
Q. The central idea of the South is a national idea, then?
—A. The central idea of the South is more a national idea now than it has been in this respect.
Q. I would use the word "leading" rather than "central" there—the leading idea?
—A. We, of course, claim that we want to manage the internal affairs of our States just as much as New York, or New Hampshire, or Massachusetts would want to manage theirs, but that it is necessary for us to have the guidance and protection of the Government: we want it just as much as either of those States.
Q. Have you traveled considerably through the North?
—A. I have.
Q. What portions of the North have you visited within the last few years?
—A. I have visited Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Hartford, and I might say a number of other points in the States of which they are the chief cities.
Q. While we are speaking of this matter of reciprocal feeling between the sections of country, as you have mentioned the attitude of the South, I should like to know from you, from your personal observation and knowledge, what you find to be that of the North toward the South?
—A. I think it is of the kindliest character. I have never in my life been treated with more consideration than I have been by gentlemen in the East who were most opposed to the South during the war.
Q. I do not refer simply to personal courtesy, but I mean the expression of feeling as between the sections, the general tendency and drift of Northern feeling towards the Southern portions of the country, to the people of the South?
—A. I think, so far as I have been able to observe, that the feeling in the East towards the South is a general anxiety for her prosperity. I would go so far as to speak of it as anxiety for her prosperity.
Q. You think the war of sections is pretty much over?
—A. I think it is obliterated, and for that reason I go back to this point, that our prosperity in the South has begun.
Q. You have described with some minuteness the condition of things among the planters and those who work upon the plantations. I should like to ask this question further, whether any of the negroes along the alluvial bottoms are obtaining ownership of lands in fee-simple?
—A. In very few instances in the alluvial lands. When they make enough money to buy a home they generally go to the hill country, where land can be bought at a much more reasonable price.
Q. With what amount of accumulation will a negro get up and go to the hills?
—A. There are negroes right in my section of the country who have an accumulation clear of all expenses of from a thousand to $3,500 a year.
Q. Do they remain or do they go and buy homesteads for themselves?
—A. They probably remain until they accumulate a few thousand dollars, and then go and buy a home. We encourage it, from the fact that we want the others behind to be stimulated to do the same thing. I will say in that connection that the future of the negro of the South is the alluvial lands.
Q. These plantations?
—A. Not only these plantations particularly. What I mean by alluvial lands are the alluvial lands on the coast and the alluvial lands of the Mississippi Valley, the rich lands where the negro relies on his own energy and exertion rather than on his brains. There is an immigration coming into the older States now.
Q. The older Southern States?
—A. The older Southern States. As they come in the negroes gradually give way and go to the richer lands. For instance, one railroad last year brought into the Mississippi Valley over 10,000 negro immigrants.
Q. From what States?
—A. From the Atlantic and Gulf States.
Q. What became of them?
—A. They were scattered along the alluvial lands of the Mississippi Valley. As the negroes of the Mississippi Valley either immigrate from that valley and go in different directions and buy land, the planters of the Mississippi Valley send out to the older States and replace them with labor from those States. A negro in the older States, probably, to make his support would have to cultivate 15 or 20 acres of land, whereas a negro in the Mississippi Valley can make his support on 8 or 10 acres of land.
Q. Will this result in the ownership of the alluvial lands being transferred to the negro?
—A. No, sir; because as he makes money he goes off.
Q. He is a Chinese immigrant?
—A. I mean by "goes off" he does not go out of the State, but he goes to the hills.
Q. And to smaller ownerships?
—A. To smaller ownerships.
Q. And the aim of the Southern planter is to accommodate this tendency of things to smaller rentings?
—A. Yes, sir.
Q. Do you think a plantation is more productive where, under a general supervision by the planter or the owner, it is let out in small sections to the negroes to cultivate, or is it better to cultivate the plantation as a whole?
—A. It is better to let it out, as I stated in my written answers. The cotton crop of this country is being raised to such an extent by the small white farmers that the large planter can no longer afford to hire and compete with that class of labor who only expend their own energy; consequently the tendency is to make farmers of the negroes.
Q. What chance is there of the planter securing white labor to carry on these plantations?
—A. There is such a small proportion of white labor in the South that it would be difficult for him to find them, and the tide of foreign immigration is just beginning to be turned in that direction. There has been a prejudice against white emigrants going to the South, on account of going among the negroes.
Q. Do you think that is diminishing?
—A. Diminishing yearly.
Q. You mean that immigration from Europe is being employed on the plantations?
—A. Not exactly upon the large cotton plantations, but the smaller plantations are now being converted into farms. For instance, there has been a large immigration of European emigrants into that section of the country between Little Rock and Fort Smith.
Q. Do they, upon these farm or small plantations being converted into farms, work in companionship with the negro laborer?
—A. No; they generally buy the land and work it themselves; they may hire a negro and work with him; they are laborers themselves.
Q. Is there any tendency among the white and colored laborers of any class to work in companionship, or to fraternize at all in labor?
—A. I cannot say that there is. A white man would not take a negro in as a partner to work with him in the field.
Q. And will a white man find any difficulty in hiring another white man and negro to work together side by side in the field?
—A. No, sir; I have them myself working side by side.
Q. There is no prejudice of that kind?
—A. None at all.
Q. No white man inquires whether he can work by himself or is to work in company with a negro? Do they exhibit any reluctance to work in company with the negro?
—A. The class of white people that work in our country for wages comes from Ohio, and Missouri, and Indiana, and that section of country, and I find there is some prejudice among that class of people sometimes, but still there are instances—as I say, I have men from Indiana now myself hired working right in a gang with negroes.
Q. There is no strong tendency in that way, I suppose?
—A. No strong tendency in that way. There are no white laborers from the South proper; at least the number we can hire for wages is so small that it is not sufficient to call it a class.
Q. In the Southern States proper about two thirds of the population is white, is it not?
—A. I do not recollect. According to the census returns I think there are about seven millions of negroes. The census would give the exact statement.
Q. Not far from two thirds of the population, I think, is white. In the Gulf States proper at least one half the population must be white. In what way is the white laboring population of the South employed?
—A. They are employed as small farmers nearly almost entirely.
Q. Not to as great extent as mechanics and artisans?
—A. I suppose there is a liberal proportion of them to the population; we have to have our artisans and mechanics; but as a rule the white population of the South are small farmers, either owners of the land themselves or tenants.
Q. How as to their material prosperity and thrift and saving?
—A. It varies very much. For instance, take the State of Georgia—and I believe it is admitted that Georgia is one of the most thrifty and prosperous of all the Southern States—I think the small farmers are generally self-sustaining; they raise their own supplies.
Q. Do these small white farmers employ negro help to any extent?
—A. To a certain extent. If a man has more land than his family can work he will hire a negro laborer. There is no prejudice against his doing so either on the part of the farmer hiring him or the negro hired.
Q. He may hire some white and other colored laborers, I suppose?
—A. Yes, sir.
Q. Do they work together?
—A. Yes, sir.
Q. How in regard to the value of the hill lands you have spoken of in the State of Arkansas; as compared with the alluvial, what is the difference in value?
—A. It is very great. There are farms in Arkansas that can be bought, partially cleared up, and with some improvements upon them, for from $5 to $20 an acre, less than the rent of fair lands on the river. There is no finer section of country in the world—I say that unhesitatingly—for a foreign immigrant, or the immigrant from the East, or from anywhere, than is afforded to-day in Arkansas and Texas.
Q. And political disturbances are at an end?
—A. We apprehend nothing at all; there is no reason why we should.
Q. You were speaking of the necessity of the education of the laborer of the South, the negro especially. Will you not describe to us the actual condition of the masses of the colored people in the matter of education, to what extent it has progressed, and what facilities and opportunities exist, and what additional are required?
—A. It varies in different sections. For instance, Georgia, and Tennessee are probably ahead of any of the Southern States in point of educating the colored people; they have more facilities; they have negro primary schools and colleges where a man is educated. The education that I was speaking of, more particularly for the negro, is a plain English education, sufficient to enable him to read and write.
Q. What we call up North a common school education?
—A. A common school education. I will illustrate that. Suppose a negro comes to me to make a contract that I have written for him, and he cannot read or write. I offer that contract to him, and I read it to him. He touches a pen and signs his mark to it; there is no obligation attached at all. He says at once, "That man is an educated man; he has the advantage of me; he shows me that contract; I do not know what is in it; I cannot even read it." Therefore a contract made with a negro in that way is almost a nullity; but if he could read that contract himself and sign his own name to it, it would be a very different thing. I never allow a negro to sign a written contract with me before he has taken it home with him and had some friend to read it over and consult with him about it, because I want some obligation attached to my contracts.
Q. It is necessary for you as well as the negro?
—A. Necessary for my protection as well as his.
Q. How many of the negroes on the plantations can comprehend a written contract by reading it, because a man may be somewhat educated and not be able to decipher a contract?
—A. I cannot give you an exact proportion, for it varies to a great extent. I can only say that that number is increasing rapidly.
Q. From what circumstances comes this increase?
—A. From their desire to gain knowledge.
Q. Do you find that desire strong among the colored people?
—A. Very strong indeed; and there are two ideas which a negro possesses that give me great hopes for his future. If I did not believe the negro was capable of sufficient development to make him a responsible small farmer, I should not want to remain in the business that I am any longer, because I believe that the development of my business is necessarily based upon the development of the negro and the cultivation of my lands. The negro possesses two remarkable qualifications: one is that he is imitative, and the other is that he has got pride; he wants to dress well; he wants to do as well as anybody else does when you get him aroused, and with these two qualifications I have very great hopes for him in the future.
Q. What do you think of his intellectual and moral qualities and his capacity for development?
—A. There are individual instances I know of where negroes have received and taken a good education. As a class, it would probably be several generations, at any rate, before they would be able to compete with the Caucasian. I believe that the negro is capable of receiving an ordinary English education, and there are instances where they enter professions and become good lawyers. For instance, I know in the town of Greenville, Miss., right across the river from me, a negro attorney, who is a very intelligent man, and I heard one of the leading attorneys in Greenville say he would almost have anybody on the opposite side of a case rather than he would that negro. The sheriff of my county is from Ohio, and a negro, he is a man whom we all support in his office. We are anxious that the negroes should have a fair representation. For instance, you ask for the feeling existing between the proprietor and the negroes. The probate judge of my county is a negro and one of my tenants, and I am here now in New York attending to important business for my county as an appointee of that man. He has upon him the responsibilities of all estates in the county; he is probate judge.
Q. Is he a capable man?
—A. A very capable man, and an excellent, good man, and a very just one.
Q. Do you see any reason why, with fair opportunities assured to himself and to his children, he may not become a useful and competent, American citizen?
—A. We already consider him so.
Q. The question is settled?
—A. I thought you were speaking personally of the man I referred to.
Q. No; I was speaking of the negro generally—the negro race.
—A. Let me understand your question exactly.
Q. Do you see any reason why the negroes, as a component part of the American population, may not, with a fair chance, come to be useful, industrious, and competent to the discharge of the duties of citizenship?
—A. I think they may as a class, but it will take probably generations for them to arrive at that standard.
Q. It has taken us generations to arrive at the standard, has it not?
—A. Yes, sir.
Q. There is some talk about our ancestors having been pirates, I believe. Now, will you state to us what the existing facilities for education are among the negroes?
—A. I can only speak as regards Arkansas. Of course I do not know much of the other States. In Arkansas we have in each county a school board. These boards examine and employ teachers. We are taxed for a school fund, from which these teachers are paid.
Q. What proportion of the colored children attend school, do you think?
—A. On my own property there are five schools, and I think the larger portion, I might say nearly all that are capable of going to school, do go to school.
Q. How many children are there on your own property?
—A. I could scarcely form an idea.
Q. There are five schools?
—A. There are five schools, and I should suppose from 300 to 500 children.
Q. Those are educated in public schools?
—A. Yes, sir.
Q. I understand you to say that nearly all of them attend?
—A. Yes, sir.
Q. For how long a time each year is school kept open?
—A. The schools extend all the year except vacation, I think, which is about three months; but a number of the negroes will withdraw their children from school during cotton-picking season, to help them pick the crop.
Q. Between what ages do they actually attend school?
—A. From 6 to 19. I know a great many of them who are going to school who are 17, 18, and 19, who can just begin to read and write a little.
Q. Do you find any inclination among the older negroes who are past school age to endeavor to read and write?
—A. Not very much, but they are anxious their children should, and appeal to them. In almost every instance where a man has a child who can read and write, he will bring him along with him when he makes a contract. They are very proud of their children being able to read and write.
Q. Are they satisfied, as a rule, with their simply becoming able to read and write, or do they like to have them make a little further progress in mathematics, geography, &c.?
—A. As a class they look to them simply to read and write. They think when they have got that far they know everything; but then there are certain ones who have ambition, just as it is with our own race. There are some men who have tastes for literature, and receive a better education than others do, but it is not the same proportion of the negro race of course that it is with our own. There are instances where negroes are also anxious to obtain a collegiate education, and become school teachers.
Q. I do not know that you are able to state to what extent they actually attend school in the hill districts?
—A. I am not.
Q. You speak both of your own plantation and of other plantations as well as your own in that regard?
—A. I am speaking of the alluvial lands along the Mississippi River.
Q. In Arkansas?
—A. Not only in Arkansas, but in Louisiana and Mississippi; I will say the alluvial lands on the Mississippi River between Memphis and Vicksburg.
Q. Are the negroes on those lands generally having the same opportunities for education that they do on your plantation?
—A. Oh, yes, sir; there is a common school system.
Q. And it is as prevalent in Louisiana and Mississippi as in Arkansas?
—A. I think it is.
Q. What is the nativity of those teachers, as a rule?
—A. They are generally colored people from either the East or the Northwest. There are some white teachers, but very few.
Q. Are any of the white teachers Southern in birth?
—A. There is not a white teacher on my own property; they are all colored teachers on my own property. The proportion of white teachers is very small.
Q. How much do these colored teachers themselves know?
—A. Some of them are remarkably well educated.
Q. And generally earnestly devoted to their work?
—A. Perfectly so.
Q. Or is it simply to get their money?
—A. No; I think some of them really have a desire to see their scholars advance.
Q. Some pride in their race, to have them get on, I suppose?
—A. I think there is a certain pride in that respect; and, again, they want to gain a reputation as teachers.
Q. What compensation does a teacher get?
—A. I think about from $50 to $100 a month.
Q. Do they pay their own expenses, board and shelter?
—A. Yes, sir; but board is cheap, merely nominal.
Q. About what amount?
—A. I should say these teachers can get board for $10 a month.
Q. Is the cost of clothing in your part of the country about the same as here?
—A. This is our market.
Q. You buy the ready-made clothing largely for the population in general, I suppose?
—A. We buy both ready-made clothing and cloth to make up.
Q. I suppose the colored population hardly buy custom goods?
—A. A great many of them buy the cloth, and some of their women are as good tailoresses as you would find anywhere. They buy the cloth and make it up themselves.
Q. That must bring a suit of clothes pretty cheap in a colored family; they really expend nothing but buy the cloth themselves?
—A. They sell very good jeans cloth there at 35 or 40 cents a yard; they generally wear jeans.
Q. All seasons of the year?
—A. Generally in all seasons of the year. In the summer time a laboring man hardly ever wears a coat at all.
Q. What do you think an average colored Southern laborer expends per annum for his clothing, say the head of the family, the man—what does it cost him for clothing a year?
—A. I cannot give you a definite answer. I will only say that we who are the producers of cotton are very glad to see them get in a prosperous condition in order that there may be more consumption, and when a man is prosperous he will buy two suits of clothes, where if he is not prosperous he will make one do.
Q. We have had a good deal of testimony as to what it actually costs a Northern laborer a year for clothing. I have no desire to show that any laborers dress cheaply or poorly; I merely want to get an idea of the relative cost of the laboring man living North or South, in the item of clothing?
—A. I can sell and do sell a man a pair of jeans pants and a coat from $7 to $12 per suit.
Q. How many suits will he want in a year?
—A. That will depend on his condition and his ability to pay me. If he is a prosperous man and beginning to accumulate he will make one do. Whenever a negro begins to accumulate he goes to extremes; he does not want to buy anything; he wants to accumulate rapidly. Where a man is not doing so well, and there is little doubt of his ability to pay, he would probably want several suits; but I would confine him to one or two.
Q. The same is true, I suppose, of his wife and children?
—A. Yes, sir.
Q. But you look on the matter of clothing as a much less expensive item in the laborer's account in your country than here in the North where the climate is colder, I suppose?
—A. Yes, sir. What absorbs the profit of the laborers with us is their want of providence; that is, if they get surplus money they throw it away for useless articles.
Q. It has been suggested that a postal savings bank might be a good thing as a place of deposit of the savings of the colored population of the South; they might feel some confidence in an institution of that kind, and that it would be a beneficial thing to them. What is your own judgment?
—A. I advocate it and approve it, and indeed propose to start a savings bank in our own neighborhood. In this connection I will mention another important feature. In the Mississippi Valley—and when I speak of the Mississippi Valley I mean both sides of the river, Arkansas and Louisiana on one side and Mississippi on the other—there are numbers of negroes who have considerable accumulations and use their surplus to advance to other negroes. For instance, there are negroes right on our property who have accumulated enough to help out certain others, as they express it, and they use their money as an investment in that way. For instance one negro who has got something will advance it to another negro and take a mortgage on his crop. Consequently there are numbers of them who are getting advances from their co-laborers, and I always give them that opportunity when they want it. My idea of the adjustment in the Mississippi Valley, seeing what I can make from the mercantile portion of my business, is that it is simply my revenue that I get from the rent of my land as an investment on my capital; and whenever a negro can get his own merchant in New Orleans—a number of them have very good factors in New Orleans and ship their cotton direct—I encourage it. When one negro wants to help out another, I give him the privilege of doing it and encourage it. There are several negroes, a great many, not a few in Chicot County to-day who have their own factors in New Orleans, ship their own goods, and receive their own accounts of sales.
Q. They are not owners of alluvial lands?
—A. They are not owners at all; they are tenants.
Q. I suppose some time they will be liable to make some accumulations, and they will now and then own a plantation?
—A. I do know of one instance on the river below Vicksburg where the old property of Mr. Davis was bought by a former slave of his.
Q. Is that the only instance?
—A. The only instance I know of.
Q. One question we have been accustomed to put is as to the actual personal feeling that exists between the laborers and capitalists of different parts of the country. What is the feeling between the laborers, colored and white, and the owners of the land and of capital at the South?
—A. I confine my replies to my own section, because I am not familiar with the others. I have answered that question in the written answers. The feeling is harmonious and good, as I have expressed it there. The negro naturally looks to the planter for advice and for assistance, and the planter looks to his laborers for the development of his property. Consequently their interests are identical and their feelings good.
Q. You have alluded once or twice to the pressure of outside, and I suppose Northern, opinion; I assume that you mean political opinion in the past and the desirability that it should cease. What is the fact as to a progressive disintegration of the solid Republican or solid negro vote of the South? What are the chances of its dividing, and of the white vote dividing? We hear now of a "solid South," colored on the one side and white on the other. What prospect is there of a division in that regard; to what extent does it exist, or is it going on?
—A. The negroes of the South are already divided in their votes. There are a great many who vote with the proprietors of the properties. There are instances where they vote with what they call their Republican friends. A few years ago in the South any man who was an escaped convict from one of your penitentiaries here who would come down to that country and tell the negroes that he was one of General Grant's soldiers, and fought to free him, would vote the last one out; but any of those negroes would come to me at that very time with his money and get me to save it for him, and take care of it for him. He would put all his confidence in me so far as his money was concerned, but when it would come to politics he would vote with this man, who probably did not own the coat he had on his back. Those kind of inferences were what did do us in the South very material damage. Let me illustrate that by a riot in my own county. In Chicot County, in 1872, there was a proposition to impose upon the county a railroad tax of $250,000 for the purpose of building a railroad.
Q. What proportion of the taxable property of the county would that have been?
—A. Our whole assessed valuation was about $1,500,000 at that time. This was brought out by a promise that if the appropriation was made, the levees on our river should be built and this road would run on the levees. At that time the whole of the local government in Chicot County was in the hands of men who did not own any property in the county, and had just come down there and been elected by the negroes, who have a very large majority in that county. This tax was a very great imposition upon us. At that time there was a negro attorney at Lake Village, who was one of the prime movers in this thing. The planters knew that this was only intended as a speculation upon the county, for the vote was afterwards taken, the appropriation was made, and not one foot of levee was put up, and not one foot of that railroad was built in Chicot County. Still we are mandamused now for the interest on that debt that was put on us by that kind of influence. One of our planters was remonstrating with this negro attorney about this debt and told him it was an imposition on the property owners, and that the thing ought not to be done, when the man became violent and insolent, and it resulted in a difficulty between this planter and the negro. The planter had a little pen-knife in his pocket, the blade not longer than my little finger; he struck the negro with it and it happened accidentally to hit him on a vital point and killed him. The sheriff of the county was a negro. The planter, with two innocent parties in whose house this occurrence took place at the county-seat, in Lake Village, was arrested and lodged in jail. A few days afterwards—probably not more than two or three—nearly every negro in the county was summoned to Lake Village, and they rose like so many locusts, coming in from every direction, took those three men out of jail shot them to pieces, murdered them. It was such an outrage that the people from Memphis and Vicksburg and from the hill countries, commenced to come in there with companies, started down with companies. On investigation we found out that the sheriff of the county had exercised his authority to send out to the ignorant negroes of the county and summon them to the village, and these fellows went because they were afraid not to obey the mandate of the sheriff. At that time feeling was running very high, and these people were anxious to come in and quell this riot, but a few of us who were more prudent, a few of the leading planters of the county, got together, sent these different companies word not to come there, that we did not want them in the county; some of the companies were already on their way to Chicot County, thinking the people there were going to be massacred. A great many of our people had to run away from their homes for several days; but we took the ground that we would let the thing take its natural course. As soon as things quieted down, which they did so partially in three or four days, some of our gentlemen who had gone off with their families returned, and it resulted in our arresting a few of the ringleaders in the county. The courts and the administration were all at that time in the hands of persons not identified with the interests of the county, and it was impossible for us to get justice meted out. We saved a massacre of the negroes of the county, but we never could bring those men to any kind of punishment before the courts, and finally we came to a compromise with them, that if they would leave the county we would withdraw the suit against them, and that was the way the thing was ended. Now, I do not believe you could get up a riot in Chicot County because I think there are many intelligent negroes there who would not permit it. Those are the kind of race issues that I referred to. Relieve us of that sort of thing, and leave our government to ourselves and our people, and give to the negro the same protection the white man has, but do not give him any more. Do not let him feel that he has the United States Government standing behind him, and that he is the child of the United States Government to be taken care of, but that he must rely on his own resources and energy for his living, and time will solve the question, and the demand for his labor will protect him.
Q. Do you find that the feeling among the negroes which resulted in the exodus of a few years ago has been allayed and perhaps has disappeared?
—A. I will tell you something that is rather amusing about that. The first that I heard of a negro exodus in my section of the country—it was to Kansas—was my manager coming into my room one morning and saying that the negroes were going out to the river to go to Kansas. I said, "It is several miles to the river; how are they going?" Said he, "They are toting their things out on their heads." Said I, "Go right at once there and offer them the wagons on the plantation to haul the things. What is the matter?" Said he, "I don't know; I went out this morning and summoned the hands to the field, but they say they are all going to Kansas." I got on my horse and rode out and met a negro who had been my engineer. I said to him, "What is the matter, where are you all going?" He stopped right on the road and said, "Mr. Calhoun, you never have deceived me, and I am going to tell you what is the matter. There were two men came through here last week, one night, and said 'You see this picture?' There is a picture of a farm in Kansas for me that General Grant has bought out there for me. That is so because my name is on the back of it, and here is my ticket; that carries me to Kansas." Said I, "Let me see it." He showed me a piece of pasteboard that had printed on it "Good for one trip to Kansas." Said I, "What did you pay him for this?" He said, "We paid him $2 a piece." "How many of you are in this thing?" "Over eighty of us are in this thing." Said I, "That man then swindled you out of $160; he is an imposter; there is no farm bought for you in Kansas." I saw that the time for me to remonstrate with them was not then; they were on their way to the Mississippi River, and I let them all go. After they got out there I went and expostulated with them; told them of the difference in climate, soil, and everything else that they were accustomed to, and that if they went there many of them would lose their families and children. They would not listen to me. They went on to the river bank, and those negroes who went out there owed me over $109,000.
Q. How many of them were there? Eighty I think you said?
—A. There were 80, I think. Once, I suppose, there were 150 negroes, perhaps more, on the bank of the river. They were not at a regular landing. They went out to the intermediate points where a boat would not be compelled to land. We notified all the boats coming up the river not to land at this point. I did not want these negroes to go off, being satisfied that they were going to their ruin if they did; that they were leaving comfortable homes; many of them had sold their mules or given them away at a mere sacrifice. One negro sold a mule worth $150 for $15 to get off. They opened their potato-houses, they opened their corn-cribs and scattered the corn, giving it away to everybody that would offer them five cents a bushel. I had given two of these people a piece of land, the productions of all of which they were to have for bringing it into cultivation and improving it. Knowing the negro nature as I do, and knowing that he would not want anybody to derive the benefit of something that he thought he was entitled to, I got two white men in the county to come and offer me to take this piece of land and cultivate it on shares with me, giving me one half its product, whereas with them I was entitled to nothing. As soon as those two fellows found out that I had made a good bargain for their land they went back home from the river bank, and as soon as they went back all the rest followed. Then I called the whole plantation up and told them to appoint two representatives and that I would send them to Kansas at my own expense to examine into this matter and report to them. These two men went to Kansas, came back, and reported the true condition of affairs; and now if what they call in that country "a poor white man"—the negro's expression—goes through the country and says "Kansas," they almost want to mob him. That was the result of the Kansas movement.
Q. What has become of those who went to Kansas?
—A. Many of them have returned and many have died; numbers of them have died. Quite a large number went to Washington County Mississippi, just opposite me.
Q. From time to time, at Washington, efforts are being made to secure public lands in the Territories, the Indian Territory and elsewhere, for the purpose of colonizing such tracts with negroes. Do you think there is any sort of occasion for that?
—A. None in the world. If the alluvial lands on the Mississippi River were protected from overflow and brought into a condition where they could be cultivated they would afford all the homes, and of the best character, that the negroes could possibly want in the South, and the natural tendency is to come to just such lands.
Q. And the negroes prefer to be there to anywhere else?
—A. Those that come, I notice, never go back.
Q. You suggested the improvement of the levees. What is the necessity, and in what degree is it difficult for those residing along the river banks to protect themselves?
—A. I am the president of the levee board of Chicot County. The plan which has been suggested by the Mississippi River Commission and Mr. Eads, as their chief engineer, is unquestionably the correct one for the improvement of the Mississippi River. We know this not only from theory, but from long experience with the river, those of us who have lived there. The Mississippi River being, as it is generally termed, the "Father of Waters," and passing through several States, it is almost a national system, and it would be impossible for any system to be adopted by the States which would be local. Consequently it is imperatively the duty of the Government of the United States to take care of the improvement of the Mississippi River. There are certain sections of the Mississippi River that are naturally above overflow, made so by cut-offs. The fall of the Mississippi River is about four inches to the mile. Consequently, when there is one of those large bends, where the river runs around where the cut-off is, no increase of water is needed. The fall being four inches to the mile, the lands just above the cut-off are made higher and above overflow, whereas just below, the lands are overflowed or become liable to overflow. The improvement of the Mississippi River itself for commercial purposes, as well as the protection of the lands, is dependent upon the building of the levees, for the levees of course confine the water within its banks, and give not only a greater volumn of water, but greater velocity for scouring purposes, which scours out the sand bars that are formed continually on the river. Captain Eads's plan of forming jetties where the banks cave, saves this deposit, as it were, in the water, which makes the sand bars. A mattress is put against the caving banks which prevents the alluvial land caving into the river which forms the sand bars below. Then the increased volumn and increased velocity of the water wash out the channel, and improve it for commercial purposes, answering the object of protecting the land, and at the same time opening that immense channel for commerce.
Again, there are very important lines of railroad that are being built up and down either bank of the Mississippi River, and it is necessary they should be protected for commercial purposes, as well as that the Mississippi River should be improved for commercial purposes, and they can only be protected by the building of levees. We who have been on the river, and who feel that we are familiar with it, have closely watched the course of the Commission, and I can only say, as an expression of the opinion of the people, that we indorse what the Commission are doing.
Q. And desire still more of it?
—A. Yes, sir; it is absolutely necessary. What has already been expended by the Government would be absolutely useless unless additional appropriations are made to complete the work. I would like to call your attention to this point. The Atchafalaya, in Louisiana, is a stream which runs from just about the mouth of Red River into the Gulf of Mexico. The fall from the mouth of the Atchafalaya and Red River to the Gulf of Mexico is very much greater than the fall from the mouth of Red River to the Gulf by way of New Orleans down the Mississippi River. A few years ago the Atchafalaya was a stream which could be waded across, but owing to the current gradually going through it, it commenced to wash out until now it has got to be a stream 100 feet deep.
Q. Is there or not any perceptible increase or diminution of the column of the Mississippi itself as compared with 25, or 50, or 100 years ago?
—A. We think that our waters are higher now than they have ever been before.
Q. Greater extremes, or is there a uniform flow?
—A. A larger uniform flow, and it is attributed to the destruction of the forests, though that is mere theory. One of the arguments, at any rate, is that it is owing to the destruction of the forests in the Northwest, which causes more rain storms and gives a larger rainfall.
Q. I have heard the idea advanced that the destruction of the woods and timber about the headwaters would, in case of rain, lead to a more rapid deposit in the stream, it would not be held back by the swampy nature of the soil, and so you might have more sudden rises and falls in the river than formerly without the volume of water or the uniform flow being increased or lessened?
—A. I think—at least I have heard it so expressed by men experienced on the river—that the flow of the Mississippi River is greater now than it was formerly.
Q. That one year with another, more water runs down the channel?
—A. We can see a slight increase of the water of the Mississippi River. I do not know how it may increase in the future, or if it will at all, but that is the opinion of people there now. The point I want to call your attention to specifically is the necessity for the prevention of the water of the Red River going down through the Atchafalaya, for if the Atchafalaya washes out it leaves New Orleans, a large commercial city, upon, as it were, an inland sea. The waters which overflow from the banks of the Mississippi River on the front of Arkansas go over into the Red River and never come back into the Mississippi River any more until they come out at the mouth of the Red River. Just at the mouth of Red River, and before Red River reaches the Mississippi, is the Atchafalaya. So that all of this overflow water that could be kept in the Mississippi River by building the levees on the front of Arkansas, now goes into Red River and helps to wash out the Atchafalaya, which will ruin the city of New Orleans if that is not prevented. It is a very strong commercial point, for the commerce of New Orleans is a matter to be considered in our affairs.
Q. I suppose there is no doubt that the Atchafalaya furnishes an outlet, which relieves your plantations very much?
—A. No, sir; it does not affect where I live at all.
Q. Below the Red River, in Louisiana, is it not a relief in case of an overflow?
—A. A partial relief; but in Louisiana, when you get down that far, they pretty much have their system of levees built, which protect the sugar district; there are only probably a few gaps; and the Mississippi River, when it gets that far down, does not rise in the same proportion that it does where I live, 500 miles above. The mouth of the Atchafalaya is 500 miles below where I am.
Q. Has this increased drainage from the Atchafalaya resulted in any injury to the navigation of the river as far north?
—A. Not as yet; but if it is not stopped—the commission realize the fact I am now telling you—if it is not checked, the whole Mississippi River will naturally turn through the Atchafalaya, because the fall is so much greater.
Q. How do they propose to check it?
—A. That is a matter the commission and scientific engineers would have to decide.
Q. Can they block it at the outlet of the Red River?
—A. They propose to check it principally by stopping the water from the Mississippi River that goes into the Red River. There would in that way be an enormous quantity of water kept out of Red River. That would be one method. What the engineers would consider sufficient or necessary to be done, of course I would not venture to express an opinion upon.
Q. What danger is there to the large mass of capital invested in these alluvial lands, unless something is done to prevent the overflows of which you speak?
—A. The lands that are now liable to overflow are almost entirely abandoned.
Q. To how large an extent are they now abandoned?
—A. Taking in the whole of Mississippi Valley proper, from Memphis down.
Q. Has there been any computation or reasonable estimate that you know of the value of those lands affected by the overflow?
—A. I have never heard of it; but I will say that those lands which are liable to overflow now, if brought into cultivation, are just as valuable as any we are cultivating; probably more so, because they have the alluvial deposits upon them. There is a deposit there from 3 to 4 inches.
Q. You have no idea of the extent of those lands?
—A. I cannot give you the proportion. I will simply say it is a very large proportion.
Q. A third, or a half, or a quarter?
—A. More than a half. I saw it estimated some time ago, at least I will give it as a statement published in the Planters' Journal, published in Vicksburgh, that there are thirteen counties on the Mississippi River which, if all cleared up and put into cultivation, are capable of producing the entire cotton crop of the United States, and I have heard the question discussed.
Q. What prevents their being cleared up and put into cultivation?
—A. Simply the overflow.
Q. Have they ever been cleared as yet?
—A. A great portion of them; and now destroyed because the levee system is not complete. On these lands all the negro labor which is not found profitable on the poorer lands in the older States, could be made extremely profitable, not only to the proprietors of the lands, but to the laborers themselves.
Q. Do you think it would be within limit to say that one half of the alluvial plantation lands, such as you have described in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana, is now practically destroyed by reason of this overflow occasioned by the destruction of the levee system?
—A. Yes, sir.
Q. At least one half?
—A. At least one half of that which has been in cultivation, and which can be brought into cultivation.
Q. Of that which is thus useless now, what portion has been formerly under cultivation?
—A. It would be impossible for any one to form an estimate, because it is so varied.
Q. The amount of land that has been improved and which is now destroyed by reason of the overflow, you cannot state?
—A. I cannot state it accurately; I will state it approximately; I should say at least one third.
Q. One third of the entire amount that has been improved is now destroyed by reason of the overflow, resulting from imperfections in the levee system?
—A. Yes, sir; that is what I mean to say.
Q. And of that which has not been improved but might be improved, how much?
—A. At least half.
| New York | 17.38 |
| Pennsylvania | 14.92 |
| Virginia | 16.32 |
| Massachusetts | 18.59 |
| Kentucky | 14.39 |
| Georgia | 13.97 |
| Alabama | 14.20 |
| Mississippi | 12.89 |
As I have devoted some space to the general condition of labor in the whole country, and as some of my statements and conclusions may be looked upon as extravagant, I deem it very pertinent to add to the appendix a portion of the testimony of Dr. R. Heber Newton, given before Senator Blair's Committee on the "Relations between Capital and Labor," in New York City, September 18, 1883 (Vol. II., p. 535). Dr. Newton is recognized as a clear thinker and a ready writer not only on theological but on economic questions as well. His testimony on the points to which I have asked attention was as follows:
A Labor Question Coming
The broad fact that the United States census of 1870 estimated the average annual income of our wage-workers at a little over $400 per capita, and that the census of 1880 estimates it at a little over $300 per capita, is the quite sufficient evidence that there is a labor question coming upon us in this country. The average wages of 1870 indicated, after due allowance for the inclusion of women and children, a mass of miserably paid labor—that is, of impoverished and degraded labor. The average wages of 1880 indicated that this mass of semi-pauperized labor is rapidly increasing, and that its condition has become 25 per cent worse in ten years. The shadow of the old-world proletariat is thus seen to be stealing upon our shores. It is for specialists in political economy to study this problem in the light of the large social forces that are working such an alarming change in our American society. In the consensus of their ripened judgment we must look for the authoritative solution of this problem. I am not here to assume that role. I have no pet hobby to propose, warranted to solve the whole problem without failure. I do not believe there is any such specific yet out. * * *
I
the faults of labor
Plainly, labor's fault must be found with itself.
1. Leaving upon one side the class of skilled labor, a large proportion of our wage-workers are notoriously inefficient. In the most common tasks one has to watch the average workingman in order to prevent his bungling a job. Hands are worth little without some brains; as in the work done, so in the pay won. Our labor is quite as largely uninterested—having no more heart than brains back of the hands. Work is done mechanically by most workingmen, with little pride in doing it well, and little ambition to be continually doing it better.
2. There is too commonly as little sense of identity with the employer's interests, or of concern that any equivalent in work should be rendered for the pay received. In forms irritating beyond expression employers are made to feel that their employees do not in the least mind wasting their material, injuring their property, and blocking their business in the most critical moments. Under what possible system, save in a grievous dearth of laborers, can such labor be well off, and incompetence and indifference draw high wages?
3. Our labor is for the most part very thriftless. In the purchase and in the preparation of food—the chief item of expense in the workingman's family and that wherein economic habits count for most—men and women are alike improvident. The art of making money go the farthest in food is comparatively unknown. Workingmen will turn up their noses at the fare on which a Carlyle did some of the finest literary work of our century. I remember some time ago speaking to one of our butchers, who told me that workingmen largely ordered some of his best cuts. Now an ample supply of nutritious food is certainly essential for good work, whether of the brain or of the brawn. The advance of labor is rightly gauged, among other ways, by its increasing consumption of wheat and meat, but the nutritiousness of meat is not necessarily dependent upon its being from the finest cut. I should like to see all men eating "French" chops and porter-house steaks if they could afford it; but when I know the average wages of our workingmen and the cost of living on the simplest possible scale, it is discouraging to learn such a fact as that which I have mentioned, since all the elements of necessary sustenance can be had in so much cheaper forms. * * *
4. Labor must fault itself further, on the ground of its lack of power of combination and of its defective methods in combination. It has been by combination that the middle class has arisen, and by it that capital has so wonderfully increased. The story of the Middle Ages, familiar to us all, is the story of the rise of the industrial class by combination in guilds. Labor's numbers, now a hindrance, might thus become a help. In a mob men trample upon each other; in an army they brace each other to the charge of victory.
Trades-unions represent the one effective form of combination won by American labor. Trades-unions need no timid apologists. Their vindication is in the historic tale of the successful advances which they have won for workingmen. Called into being to defend labor against legislation in the interests of capital, in the days when to ask for an advance in wages led to workingmen's being thrown into prison, they have in England led on to the brilliant series of reforms which mark our century, as told so well in the articles by Mr. Howell (The Nineteenth Century for October, 1882) and by Mr. Harrison (The Contemporary Review for October, 1883). Doubtless they have committed plenty of follies, and are still capable of stupid tyrannies that only succeed in handicapping labor, in alienating capital, and in checking productivity—that is, in lessening the sum total of divisible wealth. Such actions are inevitable in the early stages of combination on the part of uneducated men, feeling a new sense of power, and striking blindly out in angry retaliation for real or fancied injuries.
Trades-unions are gradually, however, outgrowing their crude methods. The attempts, such as we have seen lately, of great corporations to break them up, is a piece of despotism which ought to receive an indignant rebuke from the people at large. Labor must combine, just as capital has combined, in forming these very corporations. Labor's only way of defending its interests as a class is through combination. It is the abuse and not the use of trades-unions against which resistance should be made.
The chief abuse of our trades-unions has been their concentration of attention upon the organization of strikes.
Strikes seem to me in our present stage of the "free-contract" system entirely justifiable when they are really necessary. Workingmen have the right to combine in affixing a price at which they wish to work. The supply of labor and the demand for goods, in the absence of higher considerations, will settle the question as to whether they can get the increase. The trying features of this method of reaching a result are incidental to our immature industrial system. Strikes have had their part to play in the development of that system. We note their failures and forget their successes; but they have had their signal success, and have won substantial advantages for labor. Their chief service, however, has been in teaching combination, and in showing labor the need of a better weapon by which to act than the strike itself.
The strike requires long practice and great skill to wield it well. Practice in it is more costly than the experiments at Woolwich. Mr. Dolles, in his new work on political economy, gives some statistics which abundantly illustrate the folly of strikes, although he only gives one side of the case, namely, the losses which fall directly upon the laborers themselves. If to these were added the losses of capitalists, the aggregate would become colossal. In 1829 the Manchester spinners struck, and lost $1,250,000 in wages before the dispute was at an end. The next year their brethren at Ashton and Stayleybridge followed their example in striking and in losing $1,250,000. In 1833 the builders of Manchester forfeited $360,000 by voluntary idleness. In 1836 the spinners of Preston threw away $286,000. Eighteen years afterward their successor, seventeen thousand strong, slowly starved through thirty-six weeks and paid $1,200,000 for the privilege. In 1853 the English iron-workers lost $12,000 by a strike. Such losses marked, too, the strikes of the London builders in 1860, and tailors in 1868, and the northern iron-workers in 1865. The strike of the Belfast linen-weavers, which was ended a few weeks since by the mediation of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, cost the operatives $1,000,000.
The cost of strikes is expressible only in the aggregate of the savings of labor consumed in idleness, of the loss to the productivity of the country, of the disturbance of the whole mechanism of exchange, and of the injury wrought upon the delicate social organization by the strain thus placed upon it. The famous Pittsburgh strike is estimated to have cost the country ten millions of dollars. When so costly a weapon is found to miss far more often than it hits, it is altogether too dear. * * *
Trades-unions in this country seem to me to be gravely at fault in clinging to such an obsolete weapon. They should have turned their attention to our modern improvement upon this bludgeon.
Arbitration is a far cheaper and more effective instrument of adjusting differences between capital and labor—a far more likely means of securing a fair increase of wages. It places both sides to the controversy in an amicable mood, and is an appeal to the reason and conscience—not wholly dead in the most soulless corporation. It costs next to nothing. It is already becoming a substitute for strikes in England, where the trades-unions are adopting this new weapon. * * *
Trades-unions ought, among us, to emulate the wisdom of European workingmen, and use their mechanism to organize forms of association which should look not alone to winning higher wages but to making the most of existing wages, and ultimately to leading the wage-system into a higher development. The provident features of the English trades-unions are commonly overlooked, and yet it is precisely in these provident features that their main development has been reached. Mr. George Howell shows that a number of societies, which he had specially studied, had spent in thirty years upward of $19,000,000 through their various relief-funds, and $1,369,455 only on strikes. Mr. Harrison speaks of seven societies spending in one year (1879) upward of $4,000,000 upon their members out of work. He shows that seven of the great societies spent in 1882 less than 2 per cent of their income on strikes; and states that 99 per cent of union funds in England "have been expended in the beneficent work of supporting workmen in bad times, in laying by a store for bad times, and saving the country from a crisis of destitution and strife."
Trades-unions ought to be doing for our workingmen what trades-unions have already done in England. * * * It has been by the power of combination among the workingmen, developed through the trades-unions, that this long list of beneficent legislation—factory acts, mines-regulation acts, education acts, tenant-right acts, employers' liability acts, acts against "truck," acts against cruelty to animals, etc.—has been secured. It has been wrested from reluctant parliaments by the manifestations of strength on the part of the laboring classes. * * *
Our trades unions ought to be the means of securing one of the great necessities of labor in this country—accurate and generally diffused information concerning the state of the labor-market. Were there any thorough combination in existence on the part of these unions in hard times, there could be diffused through the great centers of labor in the East regular reports of the labor-market in the different local centers of the country, such as would guide workingmen in their search for opportunities of work. * * *
Another action that our labor unions might take in the interest of the workingmen is in the development of co-operation. The story of European co-operation is one of the most encouraging tales of our modern industrial world. Germany, for example, had in 1877 some 2,830 credit societies; of which 806 reported 431,216 members; advances for the year, in loans to their members, $375,000,000, with a loss of one mark to every 416 thalers, or 23-4/5 cents on every $297—an indication of soundness in their financial operations that many capitalistic corporations might well envy. The rapid growth of these societies is bringing the omnipotence of credit to the aid of the workingmen in Germany.
We have within the past decade had a most encouraging growth of a somewhat similar form of co-operation in the building and loan associations, which are now estimated to number probably about 8,000 in the nation, with a membership of 450,000, and an aggregated capital of $75,000,000.
The co-operative stores have reached a wonderful development in England, with most beneficent results. There were 765 stores reporting to the congress in 1881, which showed aggregate sales of $65,703,990, with profits of $435,000; while Scotland reported 226 stores in the same year, representing sales of $17,423,170, and profits of $113,665.
Against this showing our workingmen have comparatively little to offer. We have, it is true, had a great deal more of experimenting in co-operative distribution than is ordinarily supposed. Co-operative stores began among us between 1830 and 1840. The Workingmen's Protective Union developed a great many stores at this time, which together did a business in their best days ranging from $1,000,000 to $2,000,000 per annum. In the decade 1860-70 there was an extensive revival of co-operative stores; plans for wholesale agencies being even discussed. A few of these earlier stores still live. Two great national orders have arisen, seeking to build up co-operative stores, among other aims.
The Grangers had in 1876 twenty State purchasing agencies, three of which did a business annually of $200,000, and one of which did an annual business of $1,000,000. They claimed to have, about the same time, five steamboat or packet lines, fifty societies for shipping goods, thirty-two grain elevators, twenty-two warehouses for storing goods. In 1876 one hundred and sixty Grange stores were recorded. In he same year it was officially stated that "local stores are in successful operation all over the country."
The Sovereigns of Industry also developed co-operative distribution largely. In 1877 President Earle reported that "ninety-four councils, selected from the whole, report a membership of 7,273, and with an average capital of only $884 did a business last year of $1,089,372.55. It is safe to assume that the unreported sales will swell the amount to at least $3,000,000."
There have been numerous stores started apart from these orders. The finest success won is by the Philadelphia Industrial Co-operative Society. Starting in 1875 with one store, it has now six stores. Its sales for the quarter ending February 18, 1882, were $51,413.63. A considerable increase of interest in such stores marks the opening of our decade. Stores are starting up in various parts of the country. The Grangers claim to have now hundreds of co-operative stores, upon the Rochdale plan, in successful operation. Texas reports officially (1881) seventy-five co-operative societies connected with this order. * * *
We had an epoch of brilliant enthusiasm over co-operative agriculture in 1840-50, but little has been left from it. One form of agricultural co-operation, a lower form, has been astonishingly successful—the cheese-factories and creameries. It is estimated that there are now 5,000 of them in the country. In co-operative manufactures we have had many experiments, but few successes, from 1849 onward. Massachusetts reported twenty-five co-operative manufactories in 1875. All of them, however, were small societies.
Now, co-operation has its clearly marked limitations. It is of itself no panacea for all the ills that labor is heir to. But it can ameliorate some of the worst of those ills. It can effect great savings for our workingmen, and can secure them food and other necessaries of the best quality. If nothing further arises, the spread of co-operation may simply induce a new form of competition between these big societies; but no one can study the history of the movement without becoming persuaded that there is a moral development carried on which will, in some way as yet not seen to us, lead up the organization of those societies into some higher generalization, securing harmony. It is constantly and rightly said that business can never dispense with that which makes the secret of capital's success in large industry and trade, namely, generalship. Co-operation can, it is admitted, capitalize labor for the small industries, in which it is capable of making workingmen their own employers, but it is said it can never, through committees of management, carry on large industries or trade. I can, however, see no reason why hereafter it may not enable large associations to hire superior directing ability at high salaries, just as paid generals give to republics the leadership which kings used to supply in monarchies. There are in the savings-banks of many manufacturing centers in our country amounts which if capitalized would place the workingmen of those towns in industrial independence; moneys which, in some instances, are actually furnishing the borrowed capital for their own employers. In such towns our workingmen have saved enough to capitalize their labor, but for lack of the power of combination, let the advantage of their own thrift inure to the benefit of men already rich. They save money and then loan it to rich men to use in hiring them to work on wages, while the profits go to the borrowers of labor's savings.
But the chief value of co-operation, in my estimate, is its educating power. It opens a training school for labor in the science and art of association.
Labor once effectively united could win its dues, whatever they may be. The difficulties of such association have lain in the undeveloped mental and moral condition of the rank and file of the hosts of labor. * * *
Now, of this effort at co-operation I find scarcely any trace in the trade organizations of our workingmen. Trades-unions have until very lately passed the whole subject by in utter silence. What has been done by workingmen in this country in the line of co-operation has been done outside of the great trade associations, which form the natural instrumentalities for organizing such combination. They offer the mechanism, the mutual knowledge, the preliminary training in habits of combination, which together should form the proper conditions for the development of co-operation. Is it not a singular thing, considering the manifold benefits that would come to labor from such a development, that the attention of these great and powerful organizations has not heretofore been seriously called to this matter. * * *
The story of such attempts as have already been made in this direction is one of a sad and discouraging nature to all who feel the gravity of this problem. Again and again great organizations have risen on our soil, seeking to combine our trade associations and promising the millennium to labor, only to find within a few years suspicion, distrust, and jealousy eating the heart out of the order, and disintegration following rapidly as a natural consequence. The time must soon come let us hope, when the lesson of these experiences will have been learned.
These are some of the salient faults of labor—faults which are patent to all dispassionate observers. The first step to a better state of things lies through the correction of these faults. Whatever other factors enter into the problem, this is the factor which it concerns labor to look after if it would reach the equation of the good time coming. No reconstruction of society can avail for incompetent, indifferent, thriftless men who cannot work together. Self-help must precede all other help. Dreamers may picture utopias, where all our present laws are suspended, and demagogues may cover up the disagreeable facts of labor's own responsibility for its pitiful condition, but sensible workingmen will remember that, as Renan told his countrymen after the Franco-Prussian war, "the first duty is to face the facts of the situation." There are no royal roads to an honest mastery of fortune, though there seem to be plenty of by-ways to dishonest success. Nature is a hard school-mistress. She allows no makeshifts for the discipline of hard work and of self-denial, for the culture of all the strengthful qualities. Her American school for workers is not as yet overcrowded. The rightful order of society is not as yet submerged on our shores. There are the rewards of merit for all who will work and wait. No man of average intelligence needs to suffer in our country if he has clear grit in him. "The stone that is fit for the wall," as the Spanish proverb runs, "will not be left in the road."
II
faults of capital
But—for there is a very large "but" in the case—when all this is said, only the thorough going doctrinaire will fail to see that merely half the case has been presented. There is a shallow optimism which, from the heights of prosperity, throws all the blame of labor's sufferings on labor's own broad shoulders; steels the heart of society against it because of these patent faults, and closes the hand against its help, while it sings the gospel of the Gradgrinds—"As it was and ever shall be. Amen."
Labor itself is not wholly responsible for its own faults. These faults spring largely out of the defective social conditions amid which the workingman finds himself placed. Before we proceed to administer to him the whole measure of the "whopping" due for his low estate, we had better look back of him, to see why it is that he is as he is.
The inefficiency of labor is by no means the fault of the individual laborer alone. Heredity has bankrupted him before he started on his career. His parents were probably as inefficient as he is—and most likely their parents also. One who sees much of the lower grades of labor ceases to wonder why children turn out worthless, knowing what the parents were. General Francis A. Walker, in opening the Manufacturers' and Mechanics' Institute at Boston lately, said:
"There is great virtue in the inherited industrial aptitudes and instincts of the people. You can no more make a first-class dyer or a first-class machinist in one generation than you can in one generation make a Cossack horseman or a Tartar herdsman. Artisans are born, not made."
Our incompetents may plead that they were not born competent. It does not readily appear what we are going to do about this working of heredity against labor, except as by the slow and gradual improvement of mankind these low strata of existences are lifted up to a higher plane. Meanwhile we must blame less harshly and work a little more earnestly to better the human stock.
The environment of labor handicaps still further this organic deficiency. In most of our great cities the homes of the workingmen are shockingly unwholesome; unsunned, badly drained, overcrowded. The tenements of New York are enough alone to take the life out of labor. City factories often are not much better. The quality of the food sold in the poorer sections of our cities—meat, bread, milk, etc.—is defectively nutritious, even where it is not positively harmful. The sanitary conditions are thus against labor.
This could be largely reflected by the State and city authorities, and ought to be rectified in simple justice to society at large, which is now so heavily burdened by the manifold evils bred under such conditions. Government guards carefully the rights both of land and capital by an immense amount of legislation and administration. Has not labor a fair claim to an equal solicitude on the part of the State? Health is the laborer's source of wealth, but it is by no means so farefully looked after as are the resources of the other two factors of production. It is only within the last three years that in New York we have had a satisfactory tenement-house law or a fair administration of any law bearing on this evil. There ought to be the exercise of some such large wisdom as led the city of Glasgow to spend $7,000,000 in reconstructing three thousand of the worst tenements of that city, with a consequent reduction of the death rate from 54 per thousand to 29 per thousand, and with a corresponding decrease in pauperism and crime.
To this end our municipal governments should be taken out of party politics and made the corporation business that they are in German cities.
We have in none of the States of our Union any such legislation as that of the thorough system of factory laws in England, and we ought to supply the lack promptly. Whatever may be said as to interference on the part of legislation with the rights of capital, the sufficient answer is that the whole advance of society has been a constant interference on the part of legislation with the merely natural action of the law of supply and demand; and that only thus has England, for example, secured the immense amelioration in the condition of the problem of labor and capital which marks her state to-day.
It can be said also in this connection that if Government has one business more peculiarly her own than another, it is to look after the class that most needs looking after; and that not simply from the interest of the class itself, which would rarely supply a basis for governmental interference, but in the interests of society at large—of the State itself. The State's first concern is to see her citizens healthful, vigorous, wealth-producing factors; and to this end bad sanitary conditions, which undermine the "health-capital" of labor, imperatively demand correction.
The deeper seated the roots of labor's inefficiency in heredity and environment, the greater the need for an education that will develop whatever potencies may lie latent. Inefficiency will rarely correct itself. Superior ability must train it into better power. Where is there any proper provision for such an education?
State governments and our National Government have for a number of years been fostering certain branches of industrial education, chiefly in the line of agriculture. The late report of the Bureau of Education upon industrial education presents a very encouraging summary of what is thus being done under the guidance of the State. It reports concerning forty-three colleges aided by State grants to give agricultural and mechanical training, besides a large number of technical departments in other colleges, industrial schools, evening classes for such instruction, etc. Probably the finest example of industrial education that the country possesses is found in the Hampton schools in Virginia. Of attempts, however, to combine general and intellectual education with practical training and handicrafts we have few examples. The Hampton schools, already alluded to, present one of the best. Professor Adler's school in this city is very interesting in this respect.
Our common schools have until lately signally passed by the whole field of practical education. Drawing is at last being generally introduced, and sewing is also being introduced to a small extent, I believe, especially in New England. But the schools which are supposed to be intended for the mass of the people, and which are supplied at the public cost, have made next to no provision for the practiced training of boys and girls to become self-supporting men and women—wealth-producing citizens; while the whole curriculum of the school-system tends to a disproportionate intellectuality, and to an alienation from all manual labor. * * *
The necessity of the State's entering the educational field is disputed by no one; but if it is to educate children at the public cost it is bound, I think, to so educate its wards that they shall return to society the taxation imposed for their education. Its justification in becoming school-master lies in the necessity of making out of the raw material of life citizens who shall be productive factors in the national wealth and conservators of its order. If, therefore, it is justified in teaching the elementary branches of education, if it is justified in adding to those elementary branches departments that may be considered in the nature of luxuries, how much more is it justified in training the powers by which self-support shall be won and wealth shall be added to society! * * *
That such efforts to encourage industrial education would pay our Government is best seen in the example of England. The International Exhibition of 1851 revealed to England its complete inferiority to several continental countries in art-industries, and the cause of that inferiority in the absence of skilled workmen. The Government at once began to study the problem, and out of this study arose the Kensington Museum, with its art-schools, and similar institutions throughout the country, which have already made quick and gratifying returns in the improvement of the national art-industries, and in the vast enrichment of the trade growing therefrom.
Concerning the uninterestedness of labor and its too common lack of any identification with capital, we must also look beyond labor itself to find the full responsibility of this evil.
The whole condition of industrial labor has changed in our century. Contrast the state of such labor a century ago with what it is now. Then the handicraftsman worked in his own home, surrounded by his family, upon a task all the processes of which he had mastered, giving him thus a sense of interest and pride in the work being well and thoroughly done. Now he leaves his home early and returns to it late, working during the day in a huge factory with several hundred other men. The subdivision of labor gives him now only a bit of the whole process to do, where the work is still done by hand, whether it be the making of a shoe or a piano. He cannot be master of a craft, but only master of a fragment of the craft. He cannot have the pleasure or pride of the old-time workman, for he makes nothing. He sees no complete product of his skill growing into finished shape in his hands. What zest can there be in this bit of manhood? Steam machinery is slowly taking out of his hands even this fragment of intelligent work, and he is set at feeding and watching the great machine which has been endowed with the brains that once were in the human toiler. Man is reduced to being the tender upon a steel automaton which thinks and plans and combines with marvelous power, leaving him only the task of supplying it with the raw material, and of oiling and cleansing it.
Some few machines require a skill and judgment to guide them proportioned to their own astonishing capacities, and for the elect workmen who manage and guide them there is a new sense of the pleasure of power.
But, for the most part, mechanism takes the life out of labor as the handicraft becomes the manufacture—or, more properly, the machino-facture; and the problem of to-day is, how to keep up the interest of labor in its daily task, from which the zest has been stolen.
Manufacturers ought to see this problem and hasten to solve it. Those who profit most by the present factory system ought, in all justice, to be held responsible to those who suffer most from it. They ought to be held morally bound to make up to them in some way the interest in life that has gone out with the old handicrafts. They could interest their hands out of the working hours, and in ways that would give them a new interest in their working hours. * * *
Not a few of our manufacturers are already opening their eyes to the facts of the industrial problem, and, with far-seeing generosity and human brotherliness that will, according to the eternal laws, return even the good things of this world unto them, they are providing their workingmen with libraries, reading-rooms, and halls for lectures and entertainments. They are encouraging and stimulating the formation of literary and debating societies, bands, and clubs, and such other things as give social fellowship and mental interest. All this can be done at comparatively small cost. The men in the employ of a great establishment can be taught a new interest in their task as they learn to understand its processes and the relation of these processes to society at large, which can easily be done by lectures, etc. Such work as this is a work that demands the leadership, the organizing power, which the employer can best furnish. At the last session of the Social Science Association an interesting paper sketched some of these efforts. In what wiser way could our wealthy manufacturers use a portion of the money won for them by the labor which has exhausted its own interest in its task?
Such personal interest on the part of employers in their employees leads up to a clue to that other branch of the uninterestedness of labor—its lack of identification with the welfare of capital—its lack of any feeling of loyalty toward the capitalist. How can anything else be fairly expected in our present state of things from the average workingman under the average employer? I emphasize the "average" because there are employees of exceptional intelligence and honor, as there are employers of exceptional conscientiousness, anxious to do fairly by their men. The received political economy has taught the average workingman that the relations of capital and labor are those of hostile interests; that profits and wages are in an inverse ratio; that the symbol of the factory is a see-saw, on which capital goes up as labor goes down. As things are, there is unfortunately too much ground for this notion, as the workman sees.
Mr. Carroll D. Wright, in the fourteenth annual report of the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor (1883), shows that in 1875 the percentage of wages paid to the value of production, in over 2,000 establishments, was 24.68; and that in 1880 it was 20.23. This means that the workingmen's share of the returns of their own labor, so far from increasing, has decreased one sixth in five years.
The workingman is disposed to believe in the light of such figures that the large wealth accumulated by his employer represents over and above a fair profit the increased wages out of which he naturally regards himself as being mulcted. He may be thick-headed, but he can see that in such a see-saw of profits versus wages the superior power of capital has the odds all in its favor. He learns to regard the whole state of the industrial world as one in which might makes right, and feebleness is the synonym of fault.
How, in the name of all that is reasonable, can the average man take much interest in his employer or identity himself with that employer under such a state of things as the economy sanctioned by the employer has taught him? This is aggravated by the whole character of our modern industrial system.
The factory system is a new feudalism, in which a master rarely deals directly with his hands. Superintendents, managers, and "bosses" stand between him and them. He does not know them; they do not know him. The old common feeling is disappearing. And—this is a significant point that it behooves workingmen to notice—the intermediaries are generally workingmen who have risen out of the ranks of manual labor and have lost all fellow-feeling with their old comrades, without gaining the larger sympathy with humanity which often comes from better culture. The hardest men upon workingmen are ex-workingmen. It is stated, on what seems to be good authority, that the general superintendent of the great corporation which lately has shown so hard a feeling towards its operatives when on a strike was himself only ten years ago a telegraph-operator.
A further aggravating feature of this problem is the increasing tendency of capital to associated action. What little knowledge of his employees or sympathy with them the individual manufacturer might have is wholly lost in the case of the corporation. To the stockholders of a great joint-stock company, many of whom are never on the spot, the hundreds of laborers employed by the company are simply "hands"—as to whose possession of hearts or minds or souls the by-laws rarely take cognizance. Here there is plainly a case where capital—the party of brains and wealth—the head of the industrial association, should lead off in a systematic effort and renew, as far as may be, the old human tie, for which no substitute has ever been devised.
To conciliate the interests of the classes, and identify labor with capital, individual employers must re-establish personal relationships between themselves and their men. What might be done in this way, and how, this being done, the present alienation of feeling on the part of our working-men would largely disappear, must be evident to any one who has watched some of the beautiful exemplifications of this relationship which have already grown into being on our shores. I know of one large manufacturer, in a city not a hundred miles from this, who started to enter the ministry as a young man, but found to his intense disappointment that he had no aptitude for the work of a preacher, and turned his attention, on the insistent advice of those nearest to him, to active business. He took up the business which his father had left him at his death and had left largely involved. His first task was to pay off, dollar for dollar, all the debts which his father had bequeathed him, although in most instances they had been compromised by his creditors. He then threw the energy of his being into development of the business, and, in the course of a few years, put it at the forefront of that line in his native city. Into his business he breathed the spirit of love to God and man which had moved him originally to take up the work of the ministry. He felt himself ordained to be what Carlyle would have called a "captain of industry." From the start he established personal, human, living relationships with his men. He taught them by deed rather than by word to consider him their friend. He was in the habit of calling in upon their families in a social and respecting way. In all their troubles and adversities he trained them to counsel with him, and gave them the advantage of his riper judgment and larger vision. In cases of exigency his means were at their service in the way of loans to tide them over the hard times. His friends have seen, more than once, coming from his private office some of the hard-fisted men of toil in his employ, with tears streaming down their faces. He had called them into the office on hearing of certain bad habits into which they had fallen, and so impressive had been his talk with them, that they left his presence with the most earnest resolves to do better in the future. The result of all this relationship has been that during some fifteen years of the management of this large business he has rarely changed his men, and while strikes have abounded around him he has never known a strike.
I hold in my possession a letter from one of our leading iron-manufacturers in this country, who, in response to an appeal for participation in a charity of this city, gave answer that it had been a practice of the firm to invest a certain portion of their profits in developing the comforts of their workingmen, and that they were obliged to limit their desire to give in charity in order that they might be able to build homes, club-rooms, reading-rooms, and all the et ceteras of a really civilized community in their work-village. These are examples, in our own country, of what might be done.
One of the most beautiful models that I know of in modern history is furnished by the town to which reference has already been made—the town of Mulhouse, where, after some thirty years, the spirit of brotherliness has so entered into the relationships of capital and labor that a firm would be disreputable which there attempted to carry on business as business is ordinarily done here. All the manufacturers plan out, organize, and carry on what to most of us would seem impossible schemes for the amelioration and uplifting of the condition of their working people. No one wonders that, as he walks through the town which his large hearted philanthropy imbued with this fine spirit, the workingmen salute the originator of these schemes as "Father Peter."
In addition to this personal, human relationship, capital might and should, in all justice and humanity, identify the pecuniary interests of labor with its own interests. What is known as industrial partnership is simply a solution of this branch of the problem. The principle is simply that of giving labor a pecuniary interest in the profits of the establishment pro rata with his own wages. A bonus is set on frugality and industry and conscientiousness of work by making the hands small partners in the concern. * * *