WESTWARD!
How the pink-hued morning clouds
Go sailing into the west!
And the pearl-white breath of noon,
Or the mists round the silver moon,
In silent, sheeny crowds
Go sailing into the west!
The glowing, fire-eyed sun
In glory dies in the west;
And the bird with dreamy crest,
And soft, sun-loving breast,
When throbbing day is done,
Floats slowly into the west.
Oh, everything lovely and fair
Is floating into the west.
'Tis an unknown land, where our hopes must go,
And all things beautiful, fluttering slow;
Our joys all wait for us there,—
Far out in the dim blue west.
Is Cotton Our King?
By A Cotton-Spinner.
No falsehood has been so persistently adhered to by the Southern planters and their advocates, and so successfully forced upon the credulity of the North, as the statement that white men can not perform field labor in the cotton States, coupled with the equally false assertion that the emancipated negro lapses into barbarism, and ceases to be an industrious laborer.
It is one of the chief points of weakness in a bad cause, that, although a single advocate may succeed in rendering it plausible, many are certain to present utterly irreconcilable arguments. An impartial man, examining De Bow's Review for a series of years, would arrive at conclusions in regard to the economy of slave labor, and the necessity of colored laborers in the Southern States, the very reverse of what the writers have intended to enforce.
It is constantly asserted that white men can not labor in the tropics, which we may freely admit; but the inference that the climate of the Southern States is tropical we have the best authority for denying: firstly, from the testimony of all Southern writers when describing their own section of country, and not arguing upon the slavery question; and, secondly, from Humboldt's isothermal lines, by which we find that the temperature of the cotton States is the same as that of Portugal, the south of Spain, Italy, and Australia. Do we find Australian emigrants writing home to their friends not to come out because they will not be able to work? We know they do not; and yet the mean annual temperature of Australia is 70°—greater by five to six degrees than that of Texas; and, from the best accounts we can get, the extreme of heat is very much greater.
Examine De Bow's analysis of the census of 1850, and we find him compelled to admit that one-ninth of the force then cultivating cotton were white men. If one-ninth were white men in 1850, when the price of cotton was much less and the crop much smaller than of late years, how many are there now?
One of the most reliable witnesses to the cultivation of cotton by free labor is a Quaker gentleman in Philadelphia, who conducts a cotton factory supplied entirely with free-grown cotton, the goods being sold to the Quakers, who will not use the product of slave labor of any kind. This gentleman writes:—
I learned by correspondence with several intelligent Germans in Texas, that their experiment of raising cotton by their own labor, without the help of slaves, was a complete success. One planter offered to supply me at once with one hundred and forty bales raised in this way. The ground taken by thee that cotton can be raised by white men, as well as by colored men, is entirely correct. A very large portion is every year so raised. I have had particular information of its being thus raised in Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and North Carolina. In some neighborhoods thousands of bales are thus raised within the limits of two or three adjacent counties.
It may be urged that this is upon uplands almost exclusively, and that upon bottom lands it is not possible, on account of their being unhealthy.
Two statements will be made to disprove this latter assertion, and we will then admit it to be true, and prove it to be of no consequence.
The cotton planters, deserting the rolling land, are fast pouring in upon the 'swamp.' Indeed, the impression of the sickliness of the South generally has been rapidly losing ground (i.e. among the whites of the South), and that blessing, health, is now sought with as much confidence on the swamp lands of the Yazoo and the Mississippi, as among the hills and plains of Carolina and Virginia.—De Bow's Resources of the South and West.
Dr. Barton, of New Orleans, in a paper read before the Academy of Science, says:
The class of diseases most fatal at the South are mainly those of a preventable nature. In another place I have shown that the direct temperature of the sun is not near so great in the South during the summer as in the North. In fact, the climate is much more endurable, all the year round, with our refreshing breezes, and particularly in some of the more elevated parts of it, or within one hundred miles of the coast.
Dr. Barton had forgotten that white men can not perform field labor in the South.
But admit that white men had better work upon uplands,—the crop is surer, owing to the less liability to frost and overflow; and good cultivation will give an equal crop. Intelligent Northern men have taken up exhausted plantations upon the uplands of North Carolina, and, by the application of moderate quantities of guano, phosphate of lime, etc., have carried the crop from two hundred up to eight hundred pounds of clean cotton per acre; and for the last three years the writer has been in the habit of selecting the North Carolina guano-grown cotton, in the New York market, where it has been shipped via Wilmington or Norfolk, on account of its good staple, good color, and extra strength.
There is nothing in the cultivation of cotton involving harder work than that of corn. In the early stages of its growth it is more tender than corn, and requires more care,—which it does not get, since we find Southern writers deploring that the cut-worm and the louse are charged with many sins which are caused by careless cultivation and the bruises inflicted by the clumsy negro hoes. The soil is very light, and most of the work might be done by the plow and cultivator. Except upon very poor soil there is only one plant allowed to eight and even ten square feet. By the admission of Texas planters themselves, in the accounts of their country which they have written to induce emigration and sell their surplus land, there is very little work to be done during the hottest part of the summer; the cultivation taking place in the spring, and the picking in the fall and winter. Dr. J.S. Wilson, of Columbus, Ga., writing upon the diseases of negroes, says there is no article of clothing so needful to them, and so seldom supplied, as an overcoat. Should some shrewd Yankee, starting South to go into the business of raising cotton, lay in a large supply of flannel shirts, thick Guernsey frocks, and woolen stockings, for his field hands, how many of his neighbors would remind him of Lord Timothy Dexter's noted shipment to the West Indies, and ask him why he did not take some warming-pans; and yet, for his supply of thick, warm clothing he would have the authority of all Southern physicians.
Examine the directions given for the cultivation of cotton, and see how much labor could be saved, provided slaves could be induced to use good tools; planting the seed and covering it requiring one horse or mule and four hands,—one to smooth the ground, one to open the furrow, one to plant, and one to cover. All of these operations can be performed by one man with a planting machine. But the negro can not be trusted with one; for the moment you begin to teach him the reasons for using it, you begin to teach him the benefit of using another complicated machine, which he has not before known much about—his own head and arms, and, worse than all, his own legs, all of which you have stolen from him; and then he will misapply his knowledge, as an old fugitive once told me he had done: 'I took my own legs for security, and walked off.'
I know a fugitive slave who was taught the trade of a blacksmith, and who stole the art of writing; and a sad use he made of his accomplishments; he forged free papers with his pen, and the sacred seal of the State of Alabama with his tools, and then started North. In Tennessee he got out of money, and stopped to work at his trade, was suspected, brought before a court, his papers examined and pronounced genuine, and he passed on to Canada or elsewhere. Surely this man did not know how to take care of himself!
There is no great reason why the slave should exert himself very much, and why he should not, cannot be better stated than by the Rev. Mr. McTeyire, the son of a large planter in South Carolina. 'Men,' he says, 'who own few slaves, and who share the labors of the field or workshop with them, are very liable to deceive themselves by a specious process of reasoning: they say, "I carry row for row with my negroes, and I put no more on them than I take on myself." But the master who thus reasons is forgetful or ignorant of the great truth that the negroes' powers of endurance are less than his, while in the case of the latter there are wanting those incentives which animate and actually strengthen the master. This labor is for him, the gains of this excess of industry are to make him rich. What is the servant bettered by the additional bale of cotton extorted from exhausted nature, only that next year he shall have more companions in the field, and the field be enlarged?' This is extremely well put; but Rev. Mr. McTeyire, of South Carolina, must have been unaware of the fact that it is not possible for a white man to work row for row on cotton!
But Southern planters are not without some ingenious machines. In a premium essay upon the cultivation of cotton, read before the Georgia Agricultural Society, the Hon. Mr. Chambers thus describes one invented by himself for covering the seed: 'I would cover with a board made of some hard wood, an inch or an inch and a half thick, about eight inches broad, beveled on the lower edge to make it sharp, slightly notched in the middle so as to straddle the row, and screwed on the foot of a common shovel.' Very safe for negroes to use, not being complicated.
But in the protests of intelligent Southern men, when they occasionally wake up to the terrible results of their mode of cultivation, may be found their own condemnation.
Dr. Cloud, of Alabama, editor of the 'Cotton Plant,' mourning the want of pasturage in his own State, writes thus: 'Our climate is remarkably favorable to rich and luxuriant pasturage. The red man of the forest and the pioneer white man that came here in advance of our scratching plow, tell us they found the wild oat and native grasses waving thick, as high as a man's head, and so entwined with the wild pea-vine as to make it difficult to ride among it, all over this country. Every cotton planter has heard of these fine primitive pasture ranges, and many have seen them. If the country or the climate has been cursed in our appearance as planters here, it has been in the wasting system, that we introduced and continue to practice.'
Gov. Wise, in an address upon the agriculture of Virginia, condenses the whole case in an epigram,—' The negroes skin the land, and the white men skin the negroes.'
The limit to the production of cotton is in the capacity of the plantation force to pick the amount cultivated by the field hands; but the whole available force is insufficient, and large quantities are lost. The policy of the planters being to buy out the small landholders in their neighborhood, they have no extra force upon which to draw. Olmsted says: 'I much doubt if the harvest demand of the principal cotton districts of Mississippi adds five per cent. to their field-hand force. I observed the advantage of the free-labor system exemplified in Western Texas, the cotton-fields in the vicinity of the German village of New Braunfils having been picked far closer than any I had before seen,—in fact perfectly clean. One woman was pointed out to me who had, in the first year she had seen a cotton field, picked more cotton in a day than any slave in the county.'
'Substitute the French system (that of small allotment or parcellement) for the Mississippi system in cotton-growing, and who can doubt that the cotton supply of the United States would be greatly increased?'
Dr. Cloud, the most intelligent writer upon cotton cultivation I have been able to find, is urgent in his advice to manure the land, practice rotation of crops, and produce larger crops upon fewer acres. But the universal practice is precisely the reverse; the process of exhaustion is followed year after year; cotton is planted year after year; the seed—which Northern men would cultivate for oil alone, and which exhausts the land ten times faster than the fibre—is mostly wasted; in the words of a Southern paper, 'The seed is left to rot about the gin-house, producing foul odors, and a constant cause of sickness.' The land is cropped until it is literally skinned, and then the planter migrates to some new region, again to drive out the poor whites, monopolize the soil, and leave it once more to grow up to 'piney woods.'
Note again the warning words of Dr. Cloud: 'With a climate and soil peculiarly adapted to the production of cotton, our country is equally favorable to the production of all the necessary cereals, and as remarkably favorable to the perfect development of the animal economy, in fine horses, good milch cows, sheep and hogs; and for fruit of every variety, not tropical, it is eminently superior. Why is it, then, that we find so many wealthy cotton planters, whose riches consist entirely of their slaves and worn-out plantations?'
No crop would be more remunerative to a small farmer, with a moderate family to assist in the picking season, than cotton.
Upon the fertile lands of Texas, which produce one to two bales of cotton to the acre, ten acres of cotton is the usual allotment to each hand, with also sufficient land in corn and vegetables to furnish food for the laborer and his proportion of the idle force upon the plantation, which are two to one, without reckoning the planter and overseer and their families. Now, upon the absurd supposition that a free man, with a will in his work, would do no more work than a slave, what would be the result of his labor? 1st, food for his family; 2d, 10 acres of cotton, at 500 pounds to the acre, 5000 pounds, at 10 cents per pound, or $500. But the result would be much greater, for, as a Southern man has well said, 'the maximum of slave labor would be the minimum of free labor;' and the writer can bring proof of many instances where each field hand has produced 13, 15, and even 18 bales of cotton in a year. With the denser population which would follow the emancipation of the slaves and the breaking up of the plantation system, a harvest force for the picking season would be available, and one man would as easily cultivate 20 to 25 acres of cotton, with assistance in the picking season, as he could thirty acres of corn, the usual allotment to each hand upon the corn land of Texas.
The very expense of slave labor is a proof of the profit which must be derived from it. The writer has elsewhere estimated the cost of slave labor at $20 per month, which statement has been questioned, because no allowance was made for the increase of the live stock. Now it is well understood that where the women are worked in the fields in such a manner as to make their labor pay, the increase of live stock is much smaller, and the business of breeding is left to the first families in Virginia and other localities where the land has been exhausted (readers will pardon a plain statement,—it will cause them to realize the full horror of the business). The slaves in the cotton States increased from 1850 to 1860 33-88/100 per cent., in all the other slave States 9-61/100 per cent. The surplus increase in the cotton States, above the average, was 190,632. Where did they come from?[3] At $900 each, this surplus represents a capital of $171,568,800. How was this sum earned, and to whom was it paid?
Let us examine the estimate of $20 per month, and, although it is admitted that female field hands do not bear many children, take the average increase of the country, or 2-335/1000 per cent. per annum.
The standard of value for an A 1 field hand is $100 for each cent per pound of the price of cotton, say ten cents per pound, $1000, and the standard of value for all the slaves upon a plantation is one-half the value of a field hand.