[2052] DeBow’s Review, Feb. and March, 1866; Montgomery Advertiser, March 21, 1866; N. Y. Herald, July 17, 1866. It was estimated that in the fall of 1865 the negro male population of the state was reduced by 50,000 able-bodied men, who were hanging around the cities and towns, doing nothing. At Mobile there were 10,000; at Meridian, Miss., 5000; at Montgomery, 10,000; at Selma, 5000; and at various smaller points, 20,000. Mobile Times, Oct. 21, 1865.
[2053] See also Reid, “After the War,” p. 221.
[2054] Trowbridge, “The South,” p. 431 et seq.
[2055] Trowbridge, “The South,” p. 431; Reports of General Swayne, Dec. 26, 1865, and Jan., 1866, in Ho. Ex. Doc., No. 70, 39th Cong., 1st Sess. General Swayne strongly approved the objects of these societies. He said there was not and never had been any question of the right of the negro to hold property. Free negroes had held property before the war.
[2056] DeBow’s Review, Feb., 1868.
[2057] Jan. 31, 1866.
[2058] I have this account from a planter of the district.
[2059] Somers, an English traveller, thought that the economic relations of planter and negro were startling, and that anywhere else they would be considered absurd. The tenant, he said, was sure of a support, and did not much care if the crop failed. Even his taxes, when he condescended to pay any, were paid by his master. For all work outside of his crop he had to be paid, and often he went away and worked for some one else for cash. And his privileges were innumerable. “The soul is often crushed out of labor by penury and oppression. Here a soul cannot begin to be infused into it through the sheer excess of privilege and license with which it is surrounded.” “Southern States since the War,” pp. 128, 129.
[2060] My father’s tenants, white and black, rented on all systems. The negroes usually began as wage laborers or as tenants “on halves,” for they had no supplies when they came. Then the more industrious and thrifty would save and rent farms for “third and fourth” or for “standing rent.” The whites usually obtained the highest grade, and the average white man would save enough of his earnings to purchase a team, wagon, buggy, farm implements, and a year’s supply and spend all else, though some saved enough to buy land of their own in cheaper districts or to support themselves for a year or two while opening up a homestead in the pine woods. The negro, as a rule, rented “on halves,” for he spent all his earnings and required supervision. The average negro stays only a year or two at one place before he longs for change and removes to another farm. About Christmas, or just before, the negroes and many of the whites begin to move to new homes. For a description of conditions in Mississippi, where the negro has somewhat better opportunities than in Alabama, see Mr. A. H. Stone’s article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Feb., 1905.
[2061] In the census each person cultivating a crop is counted as a farmer and the land he cultivates as a farm. Thus a plantation might be represented in the census statistics by from five to twenty-five farms.