“No, sir; they just carry a piece of bread and meat in their pockets and they eat it when they can, standin’ up. They have a hard life on ’t, that’s a fact. I reckon you can get along about as well withouten slaves as with ’em, can’t you, in New York?”
“In New York there is not nearly so large a proportion of very rich men as here. There are very few people who farm over three hundred acres, and the greater number—nineteen out of twenty, I suppose—work themselves with the hands they employ. Yes, I think it’s better than it is here, for all concerned, a great deal. Folks that can’t afford to buy niggers get along a great deal better in the Free States, I think; and I guess that those who could afford to have niggers get along better without them.”
“I no doubt that’s so. I wish there warn’t no niggers here. They are a great cuss to this country, I expect. But ’twouldn’t do to free ’em; that wouldn’t do nohow!”
“Are there many people here who think slavery a curse to the country?”
“Oh, yes, a great many. I reckon the majority would be right glad if we could get rid of the niggers. But it wouldn’t never do to free ’em and leave ’em here. I don’t know anybody, hardly, in favour of that. Make ’em free and leave ’em here and they’d steal everything we made. Nobody couldn’t live here then.”
These views of slavery seem to be universal among people of this class. They were repeated to me at least a dozen times.
“Where I used to live [Alabama], I remember when I was a boy—must ha’ been about twenty years ago—folks was dreadful frightened about the niggers. I remember they built pens in the woods where they could hide, and Christmas time they went and got into the pens, ’fraid the niggers was risin’.”
“I remember the same time where we was in South Carolina,” said his wife; “we had all our things put up in bags, so we could tote ’em, if we heerd they was comin’ our way.”
They did not suppose the niggers ever thought of rising now, but could give no better reason for not supposing so than that “everybody said there warn’t no danger on ’t now.”
Hereabouts the plantations were generally small, ten to twenty negroes on each; sometimes thirty or forty. Where he used to live they were big ones—forty or fifty, sometimes a hundred on each. He had lived here ten years. I could not make out why he had not accumulated wealth, so small a family and such an inexpensive style of living as he had. He generally planted twenty to thirty acres, he said; this year he had sixteen in cotton and about ten, he thought, in corn. Decently cultivated, this planting should have produced him five hundred dollars’ worth of cotton, besides supplying him with bread and bacon—his chief expense, apparently. I suggested that this was a very large planting for his little family; he would need some help in picking time. He ought to have some now, he said; grass and bushes were all overgrowing him; he had to work just like a nigger; this durnation rain would just make the weeds jump, and he didn’t expect he should have any cotton at all. There warn’t much use in a man’s trying to get along by himself; every thing seemed to set in agin him. He’d been trying to hire somebody, but he couldn’t, and his wife was a sickly kind of a woman.