An essential part of the share system was the custom of advancing supplies to the tenant with the future crop as security. The universal lack of capital after the war forced an extension of the old ante-bellum credit or supply system. The merchant, who was also a cotton buyer, advanced money or supplies until the crop was gathered. Before the war his security was crop, land, and slaves; after the war the crop was the principal security, for land was a drug in the market. Consequently, the crop was more important to the creditor. Cotton was the only good cash staple, and the high prices encouraged all to raise it. It was to the interest of the merchant, even when prices were low, to insist that his debtors raise cotton to the exclusion of food crops, since much of his money was made by selling food supplies to them. Before the war the planter alone had much credit, and a successful one did not make use of the system; but after the war all classes of cotton raisers had to have advances of supplies. The credit or crop lien system was good to put an ambitious farmer on the way to independence, but it was no incentive to the shiftless. Cotton became the universal crop under the credit system, and even when the farmer became independent, he seldom planted less of his staple crop, or raised more supplies at home.
Negro Farmers and White Farmers
At the end of the war everything was in favor of the negro cotton raiser; and everything except the high price of cotton was against the white farmer in the poorer counties. The soil had been used most destructively in the white districts, and it had to be improved before cotton could be raised successfully.[2063] The high price of cotton caused the white farmer, who had formerly had only small cotton patches, to plant large fields, and for several years the negro was not a serious competitor. The building of railroads through the mineral regions afforded transportation to the white farmer for crops and fertilizers,—an advantage that before this time had been enjoyed only by the Black Belt,—and improved methods gradually supplanted the wasteful frontier system of cultivation. The gradual increase[2064] of the cotton production after 1869 was due entirely to white labor in the white counties, the black counties never again reaching their former production, though the population of those counties has doubled. Governor Lindsay said, in 1871, that the white people of north Alabama, where but little had been produced before the war, were becoming prosperous by raising cotton, and at the same time raising supplies that the planter on the rich lands with negro labor had to buy from the West. This prosperity, he thought, had done more than anything else to put an end to Ku Klux disturbances. Somers reported, as early as 1871, that the bulk of the cotton crop in the Tennessee valley was made by white labor, not by black.[2065] As long as there was plenty of cheap, thin land to be had, the poor but independent white would not work the fertile land belonging to some one else; and before and long after the war there was plenty of practically free land.[2066] Therefore the tendency of the whites was to remain on the less fertile land. Dr. E. A. Smith, in the Alabama Geological Survey of 1881-1882, and in the Report on Cotton Production in Alabama (1884), shows the relation between race and cotton production, and race location, with respect to fertility of soil: (1) On the most fertile lands the laboring population was black; the farmers were shiftless, and no fertilizers were used; there the credit evil was worse, and the yield per acre was less than on the poorest soils cultivated by whites. (2) Where the races were about equal the best system was found; the soils were medium, the farms were small but well cultivated, and fertilizers were used. (3) On the poorest soils only whites were found. These by industry and use of fertilizers could produce about as much as the blacks on the rich soils.
The average product per acre of the fertile Black Belt is lower than the lowest in the poorest white counties. Only the best of soil, as in Clarke, Monroe, and Wilcox counties, is able to overcome the bad labor system, and produce an average equal to that made by the whites in Winston, the least fertile county in the state. In white counties, where the average product per acre falls below the average for the surrounding region, the fact is always explained by the presence of blacks, segregated on the best soils, keeping down the average product. For example, Madison County in 1880 had a majority of blacks, and the average product per acre was 0.28 bale, as compared with 0.32 bale for the Tennessee valley, of which Madison was the richest county; in Talladega, the most fertile county of the Coosa valley, the average production per acre was 0.32, as compared with 0.40 for the rest of the valley; in Autauga, where the blacks outnumbered the whites two to one, the average fell below that of the country around, though the Autauga soil was the best in the region. The average product of the rich prairie region cultivated by the blacks was 0.27 bale per acre; the average product in the poor mineral region cultivated by the whites was 0.26 to 0.28; in the short-leaf pine region the whites outnumber the blacks two to one, and the average production is 0.34 bale, while in the gravelly hill region, where the blacks are twice as numerous as the whites, the production is 0.30, the soil in the two sections being about equal. In general, the fertility of the soil being equal, the production varies inversely as the proportion of colored population to white. Density of colored population is a sure sign of fertile soil; predominance of white a sign of medium or poor soil. Outside of the Black Belt, white owners cultivate small farms, looking closely after them. The negro seldom owns the land he cultivates, and is more efficient when working under direction on the small farm in the white county. In the Black Belt, nearly all land is fertile and capable of cultivation, but in the white counties a large percentage is rocky, in hills, forests, mountains, etc. Many soils in southeast and in north Alabama, formerly considered unproductive, have been brought into cultivation by the use of fertilizers, hauled in wagons, in many cases, from twenty to a hundred miles. Fertilizers have not yet come into general use in the Black Belt. In the negro districts are still found horse-power gins and old wooden cotton presses; in the white counties, steam and water power and the latest machinery. In the white counties it has always been a general custom to raise a part of the supplies on the farm; in the Black Belt this has not been done since the war.[2067] Though many of the white farmers remained under the crop lien bondage, there was a steady gain toward independence on the part of the more industrious and economical. But not until toward the close of the century did emancipation come for many of the struggling whites.
In other directions the whites did better. They opened the mines of north Alabama, cut the timber of south Alabama, built the railroads and factories, and to some extent engaged in commerce.[2068] Market gardening became a common occupation. Negro labor in factories failed. It was the negro rather than slavery that prevented and still prevents the establishment of manufactures.[2069] The development of manufactures in recent years has benefited principally the poor people of the white counties. “For this mill people is not drawn from foreign immigrants, nor from distant states, but it is drawn from the native-born white population, the poor whites, that belated hill-folk from the ridges and hollows and coves of the silent hills.”[2070] The negro artisan is giving way to the white; even in the towns of the Black Belt, the occupations once securely held by the negro are passing into the hands of the whites.
In the white counties, during Reconstruction, the relations between the races became more strained than in the Black Belt. One of the manifestations of the Ku Klux movement in the white counties was the driving away of negro tenants from the more fertile districts by the poorer classes of whites who wanted these lands. For years immigration was discouraged by the northern press. Foreigners were afraid to come to the “benighted and savage South.”[2071] But in the ’80’s the railroad companies began to induce Germans to settle on their lands in the poorest of the white counties. Later there has been a slow movement from the Northwest. As a rule, where the northerners and the Germans settle the wilderness blossoms, and the negro leaves.
After ploughing their hilltops until the soil was exhausted, the whites, even before the war, decided that only by clearing the swamps in the poorer districts could they get land worth cultivating. This required much labor and money. After the war, with the increase of transportation facilities, fertilizers came into use, the swamps were deserted, and the farmers went back to the uplands. “By the use of commercial fertilizers, vast regions once considered barren have been brought into profitable cultivation, and really afford a more reliable and constant crop than the rich alluvial lands of the old slave plantations. In nearly every agricultural county in the South there is to be observed, on the one hand, this section of fertile soils, once the heart of the old civilization, now largely abandoned by the whites, held in tenantry by a dense negro population, full of dilapidation and ruin; while on the other hand, there is the region of light, thin soils, occupied by the small white freeholder, filled with schools, churches, and good roads, and all the elements of a happy, enlightened country life.”[2072]
The Decadence of the Black Belt
The patriarchal system failed in the Black Belt, the Bureau system of contracts and prescribed wages failed, the planter’s own wage system failed,[2073] and finally all settled down to the share system. In this there was some encouragement to effort on the part of the laborer, and in case of failure of the crop he bore a share of the loss. After a few years’ experience, the negroes were ready to go back to the wage system, and labor conventions were held demanding a return to that system.[2074] But whatever system was adopted, the work of the negro was unsatisfactory. The skilled laborer left the plantation, and the new generation knew nothing of the arts of industry. Labor became migratory, and the negro farmer wanted to change his location every year.[2075] Regular work was a thing of the past. In two or three days each week a negro could work enough to live, and the remainder of the time he rested from his labors, often leaving much cotton in the fields to rot.[2076] He went to the field when it suited him to go, gazed frequently at the sun to see if it was time to stop for meals, went often to the spring for water, and spent much time adjusting his plough or knocking the soil and pebbles from his shoes. The negro women refused to work in the fields, and yet did nothing to better the home life; the style of living was “from hand to mouth.” Extra money went for whiskey, snuff, tobacco, and finery, while the standard of living was not raised.[2077] The laborer would always stop to go to a circus, election, political meeting, revival, or camp-meeting. A great desolation seemed to rest upon the Black Belt country.[2078]
In the interior of the state, the negroes worked better during and after Reconstruction than where they were exposed to the ministrations of the various kinds of carpet-baggers.[2079] In the Tennessee valley, where the negroes had taken a prominent part in politics, and had not only seen much of the war, but many of them had enlisted in the Federal army, cotton raising almost ceased for several years. The only crops made were made by whites.[2080] In Sumter County, where the black population was dense, it was, in 1870, almost impossible to secure labor; those negroes who wished to work went to the railways.[2081] A description of a “model negro farm” in 1874 was as follows: The farmer purchased an old mule on credit and rented land on shares, or for so many bales of cotton; any old tools were used; corn, bacon, and other supplies were bought on credit, and a lien given on the crop; a month later, corn and cotton were planted on soil not well broken up; the negro “would not pay for no guano,” to put on other people’s land; by turns the farmer planted and fished, ploughed and hunted, hoed and frolicked, or went to “meeting.” At the end of the year he sold his cotton, paid part of his rent, and some of his debt, returned the mule to its owner, and sang:—