“This calculation is considered by the most experienced cotton-growers in the country a fair and liberal estimate; and from it you may estimate the profit on any sized tract, as the difference in the amount of land tilled will not materially change the figures.
“Very respectfully,” etc.
Here the cost of some articles is placed too low. Two hundred dollars each for mules would be nearer the actual price. The cotton-seed to be replaced by the crop should also be thrown out of the consideration if you expect to close up business at the end of the year, for although seed this season brought one dollar and upwards, it has no merchantable value in ordinary times. This you will take into account if intending to undertake a plantation next year.
But suppose we call the total expenditure for this year twenty-four thousand dollars. And suppose a full crop is produced,—five hundred acres yielding an equal number of bales. Taking twenty-five cents a pound as a safe estimate, you have for each bale (of five hundred pounds) $125; for five hundred bales, $62,500. From this gross amount deduct the total expenditure, and you have remaining $38,500. If you go to the uplands where less cotton is produced, you employ fewer hands, and have less rent to pay,—perhaps not more than four or five dollars for good land. Should cotton be as low as twenty cents, you have still a fair margin for profits; and should it be as high as fifty, as many confidently maintain it will be, the resulting figures are sufficiently exciting.
In 1850 Mississippi produced 484,292 bales, of 400 pounds each; in 1860, more than twice that quantity. The present year, notwithstanding the scarcity of labor and the number of unprotected and desolated plantations, there is a prospect of two thirds of an average crop,—say half a million bales. The freedmen are working well; and cotton is cultivated to the neglect of almost everything else. If we have a good cotton season, there will be a large yield. If there is a small yield, the price will be proportionately high. So that in either case the crop raised in Mississippi this year bids fair to produce forty or fifty million dollars.
CHAPTER LIV.
DAVIS’S BEND.—GRAND GULF.—NATCHEZ.
Descending the Mississippi, the first point of interest you pass is Davis’s Bend, the former home of the President of the Confederacy.
A curve of the river encircles a pear-shaped peninsula twenty-eight miles in circumference, with a cut-off across the neck seven hundred yards in length, converting it into an island. There is a story told of a man who, setting out to walk on the levee to Natchez, from Mr. Joe Davis’s plantation, which adjoins that of his brother Jeff, unwittingly made the circuit of this island, and did not discover his mistake until he found himself at night on the spot from which he had started in the morning.
About a mile from the river stands the Jeff Davis Mansion, with its wide verandas and pleasant shade-trees. The plantation comprises a thousand acres of tillable land, now used as a Home Farm for colored paupers, under the superintendence of a sub-commissioner of the Bureau. Here are congregated the old, the orphaned, the infirm, and many whose energies of body and mind were prematurely worn out under the system which the Confederacy was designed to glorify and perpetuate.
Here you find the incompetent and thriftless. Some have little garden-spots, on which they worked last season until their vegetables were ripe, when they stopped work and went to eating the vegetables. The government cultivates cotton with their labor; and once, at a critical period, it was necessary to commence ejecting them from their quarters in order to compel them to work to keep the grass down.