III
I have endeavoured thus to give a picture of both sides of conditions in the black belt exactly as I saw them. I can now do no better in further illumination of the conditions I have described than by looking at them through the eyes and experiences of two exceptionally able white men of the South, both leaders in their respective walks of life, neither of them politicians and both, incidentally, planters.
At Jackson, Miss., I met Major R. W. Millsaps, a leading citizen of the state. He comes of a family with the best Southern traditions behind it; he was born in Mississippi, graduated before the war at Harvard College, and although his father, a slave owner, had opposed secession, the son fought four years in the Confederate army, rising to the rank of Major. He came out of the war, as he says, “with no earthly possessions but a jacket and a pair of pants, with a hole in them.” But he was young and energetic; he began hauling cotton from Jackson to Natchez when cotton was worth almost its weight in gold. He received $10 a bale for doing it and made $4,000 in three months. He is now the president of one of the leading banks in Mississippi, interested in many important Southern enterprises, and the founder of Millsaps College at Jackson: a modest, useful, Christian gentleman.
An Experiment in Trusting Negroes
Near Greenville, Miss., Major Millsaps owns a plantation of 500 acres, occupied by 20 tenants, some 75 people in all. It is in one of the richest agricultural sections—the Mississippi bottoms—in the United States. Up to 1890 he had a white overseer and he was constantly in trouble of one kind or another with his tenants. When the price of cotton dropped, he decided to dispense with the overseer entirely and try a rather daring experiment. In short, he planned to trust the Negroes. He got them together and said:
“I am going to try you. I’m going to give you every possible opportunity; if you don’t make out, I will go back to the overseer system.”
In the sixteen years since then no white man has been on that plantation except as a visitor. The land was rented direct to the Negroes on terms that would give both landlord and tenant a reasonable profit.
“Did it work?” I asked.
“I have never lost one cent,” said Major Millsaps, “no Negro has ever failed to pay up and you couldn’t drive them off the place. When other farmers complain of shortage of labour and tenants, I never have had any trouble.”
Every Negro on the place owns his own mules and waggons and is out of debt. Nearly every family has bought or is buying a home in the little town of Leland, nearby, some of which are comfortably furnished. They are all prosperous and contented.