The Southern South

by Albert Bushnell Hart

The manager subdivides the estate into plots, or “plows”—you hear the expression “he has a fifteen-plow farm”—of from ten to thirty-five acres, according to the number of working hands in the squad that takes it. A “one-mule farm” is about thirty acres. He settles what crop shall be grown; some insist that part of the acreage be planted in corn, others raise all the corn for the estate on land worked by day hands. The secret of success is unceasing watchfulness of all the details, and especially of the labor of the hands.

Outside of the administrative force and their families there are commonly no white people on a cotton plantation. The occasional white hands make the same kind of contracts, live in the same houses, and accept the same conditions as the Negroes; but their number is small and they are likely to drift out either into cotton mills or into sawmill and timber work. The foreign agricultural laborers, as has been shown in the chapter on immigration, are few in number. The Germans, the so-called Austrians, the few Bulgarians, Greeks, Syrians, and Italians, all taken together, are probably less than 10,000, and there seems little reason to suppose that their number will soon increase. The main source of plantation labor has always been the Negroes who furnish about two million workers on other people’s land, and with their families make up more than half of all the Negroes in the United States.

With their families—for the unit on the plantation is not a hand, but a family, or where three or four unmarried men or unmarried women work together, a gang. This practice, combined with the child labor in cotton mills, accounts for the large number of persons under fifteen years old—more than half the boys in some states—who are employed in gainful occupations. This is one of the most striking divergences from any kind of Northern farming where plenty of farmers’ wives ride the mowing machine, and farmers’ sisters pick fruit, and farmers’ children drop potatoes, where foreign women often work in garden patches, but where people do not habitually employ women and children at heavy field labor.

The best Negroes, unless they own land of their own, seek the form of contract most advantageous to themselves, paying either a money rent of two dollars to eight dollars an acre, or an equivalent cotton rent. It is generally believed that the renters are the people most likely to save money and buy property for themselves. In Dunleith, Mississippi, a crew of seven people came in with a hundred dollars’ worth of property, and three years later went away with more than a thousand dollars’ worth of accumulated stock, tools and personal property. A renter must have animals of his own, and is obliged to feed them and to keep up his tools. Some planters find that renters leave them just as they are doing well, and that the land is skinned by them. In general, however, a Negro who has the necessary mules can always find a chance to rent land.

The share hand or cropper is next in point of thrift; the planter furnishes him house, wood, seed, animals, and implements; and at the end of the year the value of the crop is divided between owner and tenant, either half and half or “three fifths and four fifths,” which means that the Negro gets three fifths of the cotton and four fifths of the corn.

A third class is the wage hands, who in general have not the ability to rent land on any terms; they receive a house and fuel, and wages, from fifteen dollars a month up to a dollar a day. Where steady wage hands can be found, this is considered the best arrangement for the planter.

Renters and croppers may be supplemented by extra work, paid for by them, or charged to them. If they get into a tight place with their cotton, the manager sends wage hands to their aid, and at picking time all available help of all ages is scraped together and sent out according to the needs of the plantation. Of course, a renter or a “cropper” may allow members of his family to work for others, if he cannot keep them busy. On some plantations tenants pay on an average nearly a hundred dollars a year for this extra help.

During the five years from 1903 to 1907 there was a phenomenal demand for cotton hands, and planters were eager to get anybody that looked like work; hence the Negro had the agreeable sensation of seeing people compete for him. Of course, if, at the “change of the year” (January 1st), the Negro moves to one planter, he moves away from another, and the man thus left behind has gloomy view of the fickleness and instability of the negro race. One of the best managed plantations in the Delta of Mississippi, supposed to be very profitable, has seen such a shift that at the end of five years hardly one of the original hands was on the place. Other planters in that region equally successful in making money say that they have little or no trouble with negro families moving, and there seems no good reason to believe that they are more restless than any other laborers. It is, of course, highly discouraging for a planter who has made every effort by improved houses, just treatment and clear accounts, to satisfy his people, to see them slipping away to neighbors who are notoriously hard, unjust, and shifty. While he remains on a plantation, the Negro feels, says a planter, “the certainty, in his own mind, that he himself is necessary to its success.”

It is this dissatisfaction with the negro laborer which has led to the efforts, described above, to bring in foreigners, efforts which have been so far quite unsuccessful, first, because the number of people that could be induced to come is too small to affect the South, and secondly, because few of them mean to remain as permanent day laborers. Since the South seems better fitted than any other part of the earth for the cultivation of cotton, since at any price above six cents a pound there is some profit in the business, and at the prices prevailing during the last five years a large profit, it seems certain that the Negro will be steadily desired as a cotton hand; and the question comes down to that suggested by Nicholas Worth: “There ought to be a thousand schools, it seemed to me, that should have the aim of Hampton. Else how could the negroes—even a small percentage of them—ever be touched by any training at all? And if they were not to be trained in a way that would make the cotton fields cleaner and more productive, how should our upbuilding go on? For it must never be forgotten that the very basis of civilization here is always to be found in cotton.”

If the master sometimes is dissatisfied with the laborer, the Negro in his turn has his own complaints, which Booker Washington has summed up as follows: “Poor dwelling-houses, loss of earnings each year because of unscrupulous employers, high-priced provisions, poor schoolhouses, short school terms, poor school-teachers, bad treatment generally, lynchings and whitecapping, fear of the practice of peonage, a general lack of police protection, and want of encouragement.” In this list several of the items refer to the plantation system of accounts, which cannot be understood without some explanation of the advance system.