“The niggers you’ve set free by this abolition war.”
“This abolition war you brought upon yourselves; and paying you for your slaves would be like paying a burglar for a pistol lost on your premises. No, my friend, believe me, you will never get the first cent, as long as this government lasts.”
He looked deeply anxious. But he still cherished a hope. “I’ve been told by a heap of our people that we shall get our pay. Some are talking about buying nigger claims. They expect, when our representatives get into Congress, there’ll be an appropriation made.”
He went on: “I did one mighty bad thing. To save my niggers, I run ’em off into Texas. It cost me a heap of money. I came back without a dollar, and found the Yankees had taken all my stock, and everything, and my niggers was free, after all.”
Jim B——, from Warren County, ten miles from Vicksburg, was a Mississippi planter of a different type,—jovial, generous, extravagant in his speech, and, in his habits of living, fast. “My niggers are all with me yet, and you can’t get ’em to leave me. The other day my boy Dan drove me into town; when we got thar, I says to him, ‘Dan, ye want any money?’ ‘Yes, master, I’d like a little?’ I took out a ten-dollar bill and give him. Another nigger says to him, ‘Dan, what did that man give you money for?’ ‘That man?’ says Dan; ‘I belongs to him.’ ‘No, you don’t belong to nobody now; you’re free.’ ‘Well,’ says Dan, ‘he provides for me, and gives me money, and he’s my master, any way.’ I give my boys a heap more money than I should if I just hired ’em. We go right on like we always did, and I pole ’em if they don’t do right. This year I says to ’em, ‘Boys, I’m going to make a bargain with you. I’ll roll out the ploughs and the mules and the feed, and you shall do the work; we’ll make a crop of cotton, and you shall have half. I’ll provide for ye, give ye quarters, treat ye well, and when ye won’t work, pole ye like I always have. They agreed to it, and I put it into the contract that I was to whoop ’em when I pleased.”
Jim was very enthusiastic about a girl that belonged to him. “She’s a perfect mountain-spout of a woman!” (if anybody knows what that is.) “When the Yankees took me prisoner, she froze to a trunk of mine, and got it out of the way with fifty thousand dollars Confederate money in it.”
He never wearied of praising her fine qualities. “She’s black outside, but she’s white inside, shore!” And he spoke of a son of hers, then twelve years old, with an interest and affection which led me to inquire about the child’s father. “Well,” said Jim, with a smile, “he’s a perfect little image of me, only a shade blacker.”
An Arkansas planter said: “I’ve a large plantation near Pine Bluff. I furnish everything but clothes, and give my freedmen one third of the crop they make. On twenty plantations around me, there are ten different styles of contracts. Niggers are working well; but you can’t get only about two thirds as much out of ’em now as you could when they were slaves” (which I suppose is about all that ought to be got out of them). “The nigger is fated: he can’t live with the white race, now he’s free. I don’t know one I’d trust with fifty dollars, or to manage a crop and control the proceeds. It will be generations before we can feel friendly towards the Northern people.”
I remarked: “I have travelled months in the South, and expressed my sentiments freely, and met with better treatment than I could have expected five years ago.”
“That’s true; if you had expressed abolition sentiments then, you’d have woke up some morning and found yourself hanging from some limb.”