An Alabama farmer said:
"I own sixty-seven acres of land. I got it by working hard and living close. I did not eat at any big tables. I often lived on bread and milk. I have five rooms to my house. I started with one, and that was made of logs. I add a room every year. I was lucky in marrying a woman whose father gave her a cow. I ain't got no fine clock or organ. I did once own a buggy, but it was a shabby one, and now we ride in a wagon, or I go horse-back on a horse I raised that is worth two hundred and fifty dollars. I have seven children in school."
"I started plowing with my pants rolled up and barefoot," said a Georgia man. "I saved five hundred dollars and bought a home in Albany, Georgia. I bought two hundred acres for seven dollars an acre, and paid for it in three years. I made that pay for two hundred acres more. After awhile I bought thirteen hundred acres. I live on it, and it is all paid for. I have twenty-five buildings and they all came out of my pocketbook. That land is now worth twenty-five dollars an acre. For a distance of four or five miles from my settlement, there has not been a man in the chain-gang for years. I work forty-seven head of mules. The only way we will ever be a race is by getting homes and living a virtuous life. I don't give mortgages. I take mortgages on black and white. I have put the first bale of cotton on the market in Georgia every year for eight years."
A widow from Alabama told her story, which shows among other things how a dog may be useful:
"There are three in my family, and I am the boss. I save about a hundred dollars a year. I give no mortgages. I plant everything that a farmer can plant. I raise my own syrup, meat, pease, corn, and everything we need to eat. I have three cows. You have got to go low down to get up high. I traded a little puppy with my brother for a pig. From this one pig I raised eight pigs, and for seven years I have not bought a pound of meat. I am living on the strength of that little puppy yet. I own forty acres, and sometimes rent more land."
A coloured minister from Alabama said that he farmed as well as preached. He was a renter for seven years. In nine years he paid for four hundred acres, and now owns ten hundred and fifteen acres. He raises horses, cows, mules, and hogs and has fifty persons dependent upon him. He owns the land where he used to live as a renter, and lives in the house of the man from whom he rented. There are few white people in his neighbourhood. Most of the coloured people own their own homes, and they have lengthened the annual school term two months at their own expense. This man said that, when he first bought land, he split rails to fence it during the day and carried them around at night, and his wife built the fence.
A South Carolinian, who was never before so far from home, said that he was a slave for twenty years. "I used to work six days for my master, and Sunday for myself," he said. "God introduced ten commandments, but our people have added another, 'Thou shalt not work Saturdays or Sundays, either.' I stick to the Ten Commandments and put in six days a week, and in that way have bought three hundred acres and paid for it. I have a large house for my own family of ten, and fourteen other buildings on the place, six of them rented. No man is a farmer excepting the man who lives on the produce of his farm."
A visitor from Louisiana told how he had borrowed two hundred and fifty dollars from his father and bought twenty-five acres of land in 1877. He used to begin work at four o'clock in the morning. For a year his wife ground all their meal, three ears at a time, in a small hand-mill. Now he owns three hundred acres of sugar land, worth a hundred dollars an acre, and has twenty-seven white and forty-eight coloured people working for him.
"I would like to set a big table for you," said one of these farmers whom I visited at his home, "but, professor, you-all is teachin' us to 'conermise an' save, an' dats what I'se tryin' to do." When you remember how anxious the good farmers and their wives are always to set a good table for the visiting "professors" and "revrums," this man had a good deal of courage in departing from old customs.
I say to the farmers: "If feeding the 'brutherins' is a strain on you, feed no more of them. Cut down on all expenses that can be trimmed without injury to yourself."