The negro houses stand in the middle of the field; for on modern plantations it is very rare to gather the hands in quarters near the great house; their cabins are distributed all over the estate. On the main road is a manager’s house, distinctly better than any of the negro cabins. Near by a white family is moving in where a black family has moved out, for this plantation (though the thing is uncommon) has a few white hands working alongside the Negroes. In this free open, in the breadth of the fields and the width of the turbid streams, alongside the endless procession of scenic forests in the background, one forgets the long hot days of toil, the scanty living, the ignorance and debasement. It may all be as sordid as the mines or the iron works, but it is in pure air. These thousands of broad acres with their mealy brown soil bearing the “cotton-weed” (the common name for the stalk after the cotton is picked) are a type of the lowland South from Texas to North Carolina.
A plantation of somewhat different type is “Sunny Side” in Arkansas, nearly opposite the city of Greenville, Miss. “Sunny Side” is supposed by some people to be extravagantly conducted because there are three or four good managers’ houses on the estate, and because there is twenty-three miles of light railway track. Considering that the plantation runs eight and a half miles along the river, and that all its products and supplies would otherwise need to be hauled, there is a reason for the railroad, whose one little locomotive fetches and carries like a well-trained dog; and it is a special privilege of all the people employed on the estate and of visitors to ride back and forth as their occasions require. “Sunny Side,” with an adjacent estate under the same management, comprises about 12,000 acres, of which 4,700 acres, including broad hay lands and extensive corn fields, are under cultivation, and the remainder is in timber; considerable areas have been cleared in recent years. The annual cotton crop is about 2,500 bales. As on most plantations, the houses of the hands are distributed so that nobody has far to go to his work. Twenty to thirty acres is commonly assigned to a family; more to a large family, and the lands rented at from $6 to $8 an acre, according to quality, with the usual plantation privileges of firewood, a house, and pasture for draft animals.
Here comes in one of the most important complications in cotton culture. Northern wheat is usually grown by farmers tilling moderate-sized farms, either as owners or as money renters; a third or more of the cotton is raised in the same way by farmers or small planters who till for themselves or employ a few families of hands; and like the wheat farmers they look on the land as a tool. On the large plantations, where perhaps as many as a thousand people are busied on the crop, the manager looks upon the laborer simply as an element of production; you must have seed, rain, and the niggers in order to get a crop. Even the most kind-hearted and conscientious plantation owner cannot avoid this feeling that the laborers are, like the live-stock, a part of the implements; he houses them, and if humane and far-sighted, he houses them better than the mules; he “furnishes them”—that is, he agrees to feed them and allow them necessities while the crop is making. All this is practically the factory system, with the unfavorable addition that the average plantation hand comes near the category of unskilled labor. A Negro brought up on one plantation can do just as well in a plantation ten or a thousand miles away; and there is no subdivision of labor except for the few necessary mechanics. That is, cotton planting on a large plantation is an industrial enterprise requiring considerable capital, trained managers, and a large plant of buildings, tools, animals and Negroes.
A characteristic of cotton culture is that it requires attention and keeps the hands busy during the greater part of the year. The first process is to break the ground, which begins as early as January 1st, then about March or April the seed is dropped in long rows, and during the seeding season the rural schools are likely to stop so as to give the children the opportunity to help. In the seed there is great room for improvement; as yet the Southern agricultural colleges seem to have made less impression on the cotton grower than their brethren in the Northwestern states have made on the corn and wheat farming, for some large and otherwise intelligent planters make very little effort to select their seed.
When the cotton is once up, it needs the most patient care, for it must be weeded and thinned and watched, and is gone over time after time. The “riders” or assistant managers are in the saddle all day long, and a prudent manager casts his eye on every plot of cultivated ground on his plantation every day; for it is easy to “get into the grass,” and all but the best of the hands need to be kept moving.
Then comes the picking of the cotton, which lasts from August into February. It is a planter’s maxim that no negro family can pick the cotton that it can raise, and extra help has to be found. Here is one of the large items of expense in raising cotton, for the fields have to be gone over two, three, and sometimes four times, inasmuch as the cotton does not all mature at the same time, and if it did, no machine has ever been invented which is practical for picking cotton. It is hand work to the end of the year. There is a plantation saying that it takes thirteen months to make a cotton crop, and it is true that plowing for the next crop begins on some parts of the plantation before the last of the two or three pickings is completed on other parts. When picked, the cotton goes into little storehouses or into the cabins, until enough accumulates to keep the gin busy.
Everybody in the great cotton districts talks about “A bale to the acre” as a reasonable yield, but one of the richest counties of Mississippi averages only half a bale, and the whole South averages about a third of a bale. What is a bale? The “seed cotton,” so called, as it comes from the field, has the brown seeds in the midst of the fiber, and the first process is to gin it—that is to take out the seed, and at the same time to make it into the standard package for handling. This requires machinery, originally invented by that ingenious Yankee schoolmaster, Eli Whitney. There are about 38,000 of these ginneries, some having one poor little old gin, others five or six of the latest machines side by side, with air suction and other labor-saving devices. It is an interesting sight to see the fluffy stuff wafted up into the gin with its row of saw-teeth, and then blown to the press, where a plunger comes down time after time until the man who runs it judges that about five hundred pounds have accumulated; then another plunger comes up from below; the rectangular mass thus formed is enveloped in rough sacking and fastened with iron cotton ties. The completed bale is then turned out, weighed, numbered, stamped, and recorded; and becomes one of the thirteen million units of the year’s crop; but the number identifies it, and any particular bale of cotton may be traced back to the plantation from which it came and even to the negro family that raised it. Sea Island cotton has a much woodier plant, and the seed cotton contains less lint and more numerous although smaller seeds; hence it requires special picking, a special gin, cannot be so compressed, and must be much more carefully bagged. Sea Island cotton at 23 cents a pound is thought to be no more profitable than the short staple at less than half the price.
About 1897 a great effort was made to substitute a round bale, weighing about half as much as the standard bale, and in 1902 the output reached nearly a million. It is still a question whether that package is not an improvement, but the machinery was more expensive, complaints were made that the round bale was harder to stow for export; the railroad companies refused to give any advantage in freight rates; and the compressor companies, who are closely linked in with the railroads, were opposed to it altogether; and the round bale has almost disappeared from the South. Only two per cent of the cotton is thus baled.
One of the things remarked by Duke Bernhard of Saxe Weimar, when he visited the South in 1824, was that the people seemed unaware that there was any value in cotton seed. Some planters put it on the field as a fertilizer, where it has some value; others threw it away. During the last twenty years, however, the cotton seed has become a great factor in the production. About one third the weight of the seed cotton is seed, and its value is over one tenth that of the baled cotton. In the high cotton year of 1906 the cotton seed was thought to be worth nearly ninety millions. Immense quantities go to the oil mills which are scattered through the South. Besides the clear oil they produce oil cake which is used as a food for animals or a fertilizer. The seed practically adds something more than a cent a pound to the value of the product.