The next point of interest is Grand Gulf; the only place that offered any resistance to our gun-boats between Vicksburg and Port Hudson. It had before the war a thousand inhabitants, three churches, and several steam-mills. Water and fire appear to have conspired against it. The Yankees burned every vestige of the village, and the river has torn away a large section of the bank on which it stood. A number of cheap whitewashed wooden buildings have taken its place on the shore; above and behind which rises a steep rocky bluff, covered with sparse timber, sedge, and cane-brakes, and crowned by Rebel batteries.
There was formerly an extensive whirlpool below the confluence of the Big Black with the Mississippi, which had worn a gulf six hundred feet deep, just above this place: hence its name, Grand Gulf. This immense chasm has been filled, since the beginning of the war, by the river that excavated it; and where the whirlpool was there is now a solid sand-bar overgrown with cotton-wood bushes. Opposite the town, on the Louisiana side, there is another sand-bar, bare and low, occupying the place of a fine plantation that flourished there before the war.
A hundred and twenty miles below Vicksburg is Natchez, one of the most romantically and beautifully situated cities in the United States. It is built on an almost precipitous bluff, one hundred and fifty feet above the river, which is overlooked by a delightful park and promenade along the city front. The landing is under the bluff.
The “Quitman” (in which I had taken passage) stopped several hours at Natchez getting on board a quantity of cotton. Above Vicksburg, I noticed that nearly all the cotton was going northward: below, it was going the other way, toward New Orleans. At every town, and at nearly every plantation landing, we took on board, sometimes a hundred bales and more, sometimes but two or three, until the “Quitman” showed two high white walls of cotton all round her guards, which were sunk to the water’s edge. She was constructed to carry forty-three hundred bales.
On the levee at Natchez I made the acquaintance of an old plantation overseer. He knew all about cotton raising. “I’ve overseed in the swamps, and I’ve overseed on the hills. You can make a bale to the acre in the swamps, and about one bale to two acres on the hills. I used to get ten to fifteen hundred dollars a year. I’m hiring now to a Northern man, who gives me three thousand. A Northern man will want to get more out of the niggers than we do. Mine said to me last night, ‘I want you to get the last drop of sweat and the last pound of cotton out of my niggers;’ and I shall do it. I can if anybody can. There’s a heap in humbuggin’ a nigger. I worked a gang this summer, and got as much work out of ’em as I ever did. I just had my leading nigger, and I says to him, I says, ‘Sam, I want this yer crop out by such a time; now you go ahead, talk to the niggers, and lead ’em off right smart, and I’ll give you twenty-five dollars.’ Then I got up a race, and give a few dollars to the men that picked the most cotton, till I found out the extent of what each man could pick; then I required that of him every day, or I docked his wages.”
As we were talking, the mate of the “Quitman” took up an oyster-shell and threw it at the head of one of the deck-hands, who did not handle the cotton to suit him. It did not hurt the negro’s head much, but it hurt his feelings.
“Out on the plantations,” observed my friend the overseer, “it would cost him fifty dollars to hit a nigger that way. It cost me a hundred and fifty dollars just for knocking down three niggers lately,—fifty dollars a piece, by ——!”
He thought the negroes were going to be crowded out by the Germans; and went on to say, with true Southern consistency,—
“The Germans want twenty dollars a month, and we can hire the niggers for ten and fifteen. The Germans will die in our swamps. Then as soon as they get money enough to buy a cart and mule, and an acre of land somewhar, whar they can plant a grape-vine, they’ll go in for themselves.”