“Yes, it would.”
“Some fellows take as much delight in it as in runnin’ a fox. Always seemed to me a kind o’ barbarous sport.” [A pause.] “It’s necessary, though.”
“I suppose it is. Slavery is a custom of society which has come to us from a barbarous people, and, naturally, barbarous practices have to be employed to maintain it.”
“Yes, I s’pose that’s so. But niggers is generally pretty well treated, considering. Some people work their niggers too hard, that’s a fact. I know a man at ——; he’s a merchant there, and I have had dealings with him; he’s got three plantations, and he puts the hardest overseers he can get on them. He’s all the time a’ buying niggers, and they say around there he works ’em to death. On these small plantations, niggers ain’t very often whipped bad; but on them big plantations, they’ve got to use ’em hard to keep any sort of control over ’em. The overseers have to always go about armed; their life wouldn’t be safe, if they didn’t. As ’tis, they very often get cut pretty bad.” (Cutting is knifing; it may be stabbing, in south-western parlance).
He went on to describe what he had seen on some large plantations which he had visited for business purposes—indications, as he thought, in the appearance of “the people,” that they were being “worked to death.” “These rich men,” he said, “are always bidding for the overseer who will make the most cotton; and a great many of the overseers didn’t care for anything but to be able to say they’ve made so many bales in a year. If they make plenty of cotton, the owners never ask how many niggers they kill.”
I suggested that this did not seem quite credible; a negro was a valuable piece of property. It would be foolish to use him in such a way.
“Seems they don’t think so,” he answered. “They are always bragging—you must have heard them—how many bales their overseer has made, or how many their plantation has made to a hand. They never think of anything else. You see, if a man did like to have his niggers taken care of, he couldn’t bear to be always hearing that all the plantations round had beat his. He’d think the fault was in his overseer. The fellow who can make the most cotton always gets paid the best.”
Overseers’ wages were ordinarily from $200 to $600, but a real driving overseer would very often get $1,000. Sometimes they’d get $1,200 or $1,500. He heard of $2,000 being paid one fellow. A determined and perfectly relentless man—I can’t recall his exact words, which were very expressive—a real devil of an overseer, would get almost any wages he’d ask; because, when it was told round that such a man had made so many bales to the hand, everybody would be trying to get him.
The man who talked in this way was a native Alabamian, ignorant, but apparently of more than ordinarily reflective habits, and he had been so situated as to have unusually good opportunities for observation. In character, if not in detail, I must say that his information was entirely in accordance with the opinions I should have been led to form from the conversations I heard by chance, from time to time, in the richest cotton districts. That his statements as to the bad management of large plantations, in respect to the waste of negro property, were not much exaggerated, I find frequent evidence in southern agricultural journals. The following is an extract from one of a series of essays published in The Cotton Planter, the chief object of which is to persuade planters that they are under no necessity to employ slaves exclusively in the production of cotton. The writer, Mr. M. W. Phillips, is a well-known, intelligent, and benevolent planter, who resides constantly on his estate, near Jackson, Mississippi:—
“I have known many in the rich planting portion of Mississippi especially, and others elsewhere, who, acting on the policy of the boy in the fable, who ‘killed the goose for the golden egg,’ accumulated property, yet among those who have relied solely on their product in land and negroes, I doubt if this be the true policy of plantation economy. With the former everything has to bend, give way to large crops of cotton, land has to be cultivated wet or dry, negroes to work, cold or hot. Large crops planted, and they must be cultivated, or done so after a manner. When disease comes about, as, for instance, cholera, pneumonia, flux, and other violent diseases, these are more subject, it seemeth to me, than others, or even if not, there is less vitality to work on, and, therefore, in like situations and similar in severity, they must sink with more certainty; or even should the animal economy rally under all these trials, the neglect consequent upon this ‘cut and cover’ policy must result in greater mortality. Another objection, not one-fourth of the children born are raised, and perhaps not over two-thirds are born on the place, which, under a different policy, might be expected. And this is not all: hands, and teams, and land must wear out sooner; admitting this to be only one year sooner in twenty years, or that lands and negroes are less productive at forty than at forty-two, we see a heavy loss. Is this not so? I am told of negroes not over thirty-five to forty-five, who look older than others at forty-five to fifty-five. I know a man now, not short of sixty, who might readily be taken for forty-five; another on the same place full fifty (for I have known both for twenty-eight years, and the last one for thirty-two years), who could be sold for thirty-five, and these negroes are very leniently dealt with. Others, many others, I know and have known twenty-five to thirty years, of whom I can speak of as above. As to rearing children, I can point to equally as strong cases; ay, men who are, ‘as it were,’ of one family, differing as much as four and eight bales in cropping, and equally as much in raising young negroes. The one scarcely paying expenses by his crop, yet in the past twenty-five years raising over seventy-five to a hundred negroes, the other buying more than raised, and yet not as many as the first.