The Southern South

by Albert Bushnell Hart

CHAPTER XIX

COTTON HANDS

So far cotton cultivation has been considered as though it were a crop which came of itself, like the rubber of the Brazilian forests, but during a whole century the cultivation of cotton has had a direct influence on the labor system and the whole social organization of the South. Such close relations sometimes exist in other commodities; for instance, the election of President McKinley, in 1896, seems to have been determined by a sudden rise in the price of wheat; but cotton is socially and politically important every year, because upon it the greater part of the negro labor is employed, and to it a large portion of the white management and capital is devoted.

Furthermore, the conditions of the old slavery times are more nearly reproduced in the cotton field than anywhere else in the South. The old idea that the normal function of the African race is field labor is still vital; and the crude and unskilled mass of Negroes still find employment in which they succeed tolerably well. As in slavery times, the cotton hands are more fixed in their locality than in other pursuits; they are less ambitious to move about, and find their way more close hedged in if they try to go elsewhere. The relation of the white man as task-master to the Negro as a deferential class is still distinctly maintained; while the system of advances to laborers resembles the old methods of feeding the hands.

The Negro is not the sole cotton maker; fully one third of the cotton in the South is never touched by a black hand, being raised by small white farmers both in the lowlands and in the hill regions, who produce one, two, or more bales a year and depend upon that crop to pay their store bills. Something like one sixth of the crop is raised by independent negro land owners or renters working for themselves; this leaves nearly or quite one half the crop to negro labor under the superintendence of white owners or managers.

Even where the Negro is employed on wages, he looks on himself as part of the concern and expects due consideration in return for what Stone calls the “proprietary interest he feels in the plantation at large, his sense of being part and parcel of a large plantation. Then, too, there is his never-failing assurance of ability to pay his account, no matter how large, by his labor, when it is not too wet or too cold, his respect, and his implicit and generally cheerful obedience.”

Inasmuch as more than half the Negroes are raising cotton, and most of the others are working on farms, it is important to know what kind of laborers they make. It is the opinion of their greatest leader, Booker Washington, that the best place for the Negro is in the rural South, and that he is not fitted for the strife of the great cities South or North. Is he perfectly fitted for any service? Is it true, as one of the employers of Negroes alleges, that “their actions have no logical or reasonable basis, that they are notional and whimsical, and that they are controlled far more by their fancies than by their common sense?”

In cotton culture there is little to elevate a man. One of the numerous errors flying about is that the slave in the cotton fields was a skilled laborer, and that there is intellectual training in planting, weeding, and picking. The owner or renter must of course accustom his mind to consider the important questions of the times of plowing and seeding, and he must submit to the anxiety which besets the farmer all over the world; but cotton culture is a monotonous thing, the handling of the few tools is at best a matter of dexterity, and the only man who gets an intellectual training out of it is the manager. When cotton is high, a plantation is a more or less speculative investment, and many people who save money put it into land and hire a manager. Cotton broking and banking firms sometimes carry on plantations of their own. City bankers and heavy men get plantations on mortgage, or by purchase; and banks sometimes own too much of this kind of property.

Of course many planters run their own plantations; but on all large estates, and many small ones, there is a manager who is virtually the old overseer over again. Commonly he is a good specimen of the lower class of the white population; in a very few cases he is a Negro. Successful managers command a salary as high as $3,000 a year or more, and have some opportunity to plant on their own account; business sense such a man must have, but above all he must be able to “handle niggers,” an art in which, by common consent, most Northern owners of cotton land are wanting. On a large plantation there will also be one or more assistant managers, commonly called “riders”; a bookkeeper, who may be an important functionary; a plantation doctor, sometimes on contract, sometimes times taking patients as they come and charging their bills on the books of the plantation. On one plantation employing a hundred and thirty Italian families there is even a plantation priest.