History of the Eighty-sixth Regiment, Illinois Volunteer Infantry, during its term of service

by John R. Kinnear

The whites and negroes are so sluggish, indolent and careless in their habits that their works are a fair prototype of themselves. There is a difference between a farm and a plantation, though they are carried on in nearly the same style; the main difference is that the one is gotten up on a larger scale than the other. What is usually called a farm is owned by a poor white man—while the plantation is owned by a wealthy planter, with his hundreds of negroes. The farm is known by its small area, by its improvements and its little old log house with its appendages; the plantation, by its vast area, its stately mansion and numerous negro shanties. The improvements are usually very poor, with but few conveniences. On every plantation you will see a cotton press and gin house, with the stable under the latter. The cotton press is the first thing you get your eyes on when you approach a plantation, and then the gin house next. And as for the farms or little plantations, you scarcely know anything about them until you have them suddenly spread before your view. There is hardly ever anything external to warn one of their presence.

It is, as it were, a swath mown in the deep pine forest—the labor of a poor ignorant being, who, like the parrot, can talk and palaver with simple unmeaningness, but ignorant of the world beyond a radius of ten miles. The people, for the most part, break up their ground with one horse or ox, as the case may be, their plows being suited to the purpose.

This small plow is made after the fashion of our large two-horse breaking plows, and is, as we are wont to say, right or left handed. Some farmers are too poor to afford a horse or mule; in this case they work an ox as if he were a horse, hitch him to the plow and drive him with ropes attached to his horns with as much precision as a horse or mule.

The oxen here may be of a more docile breed than found in our parts, and certainly are, for it would be dangerous with us to hitch one to a plow and start him on a row through a cornfield, for he would likely jump the fence before he reached the other end.

The rows of corn here are usually six feet apart, with a row of negro beans between. If one man can tend eight acres he thinks he is doing good business; the corn is hardly ever plowed, it being worked with the hoe for the most part.

The women work in the field as well as the men, they being used to it. They will not believe us when we tell them that our women do not work in the field. When an acre of ground yields twelve bushels of corn it is thought to be a fine crop. They gape with wonder when we tell them we break our ground with two horses, plow our corn with a plow on which we can ride; that one man can tend forty acres and raise forty bushels to the acre. When we tell them about our reapers, our vast fields of wheat, oats, etc., etc., they gape, and wonder what we do with it all. If we tell them about our large prairies, rich soil and productive land, they wonder why they had not heard of that before.

Their principal diet is corn bread, meat and negro beans. These nigger beans, by the way, are not so bad, just the thing for the soldier; many farmers raise them altogether, so to speak. It is a common thing to see cribs of these beans as you pass through the country; it takes them so short a time to cook, which adapts them to our use. Corn and beans are not their only productions, for they sometimes grow a little wheat, oats, tobacco and cotton. Many reap their grain with the sickle, not having known the existence of the cradle. There are no reapers to be seen, or if at all, but seldom.

As a people, they have no enterprise; they live only to eat, and even that is done in a poor, unhandy style.

There are a great many turpentine, rosin and tar factories in "the sunny land of Dixie." There are vast tracts of land here, covered with dense forests of pine, that can be put to no other use than the production of these things. In North Carolina these factories are most numerous. They are built on small streams of water, and for miles around the trees are hewn on two sides; the turpentine running out, gums on the tree where it is hewn. On our march we burned many of these factories; they made a grand, huge smoke, most sublime.

It is impossible for a person who has not seen the like to form a proper idea of the real grandeur and sublimity of these dense volumes of black, agitated smoke, brightened betimes with lofty flames of liquid fire that seem to lift themselves in the fury of their madness to the very skies.