“Let us trust that our Legislature will make short work of Ethiopia. Every real white man is sick of the negro, and the ‘rights’ of the negro. Teach the negro that if he goes to work, keeps his place, and behaves himself, he will be protected by our white laws; if not, this Southern road will be ‘a hard one to travel,’ for the whites must and shall rule to the end of time, even if the fate of Ethiopia be annihilation.”
CHAPTER XLI.
Cotton Speculations—Temper of the Mississippians.
Western men, seeking Southern speculations, mainly centered in New Orleans during the winter. Competition had already put up prices enormously. An army officer had recently leased a cotton plantation, above Miliken’s Bend, for seven dollars an acre! A few months earlier he might have bought such plantations at a similar figure; but in November he was able to sell out his lease at an advance of three dollars an acre! Within another month rents advanced to twelve and fourteen dollars an acre, for good plantations, fronting on the Mississippi. From Memphis down, wherever the river plantations were above overflow, they commanded prices that, compared with those of three months before, seemed extravagantly high, although they did not yet reach the average of prosperous times. Two-thirds of these plantations were fairly roofed in with mortgages, so that enforced sales were soon likely to become abundant. Scores of planters were already announcing their anxiety to borrow money on almost any conceivable terms, to carry on operations for the next year. Many sought to borrow on the security of the consignment of their crops. Others offered still higher inducements. Small planters from the interior of Mississippi, proposed to a heavy capitalist, in considerable numbers, to borrow severally ten to fifteen thousand dollars, to mortgage their plantations as security for the loan, and give the consignment of one-half the crop as interest for the year’s use of the money. Manifestly all such men were making a desperate venture, in the hope that a combination of good crops and high prices might enable them to hold on to their lands, and escape bankruptcy.
Everybody was overrun with “estimates,” presented by sanguine planters, as proof of their ability to repay the money they were borrowing. Here is a specimen of this speculative figuring, made out by a Lake Providence lessee, for his fifteen hundred acres of heavy, rich cotton land:
| Lease at $10 per acre | $15,000 |
| Cost of 100 mules, at $200, (best mules are required for these heavy lands) | 20,000 |
| Wages of 150 negroes, at $15 per month | 27,000 |
| Cost of supporting them, say $7 per month | 12,600 |
| Cotton seed and incidentals | 10,000 |
| Total expenditures | $84,600 |
| RECEIPTS. | |
| 1,500 bales, at 25c. per pound | $150,000 |
| Deduct expenditures | 84,600 |
| Net receipts | $65,400 |
With all deductions from such estimates, and all omissions, it was still manifest that, giving the two essentials of a bale to the acre and twenty-five cents per pound for it, and there could be little doubt about the lucrative results to be reasonably expected from free-labor cotton growing.
It was noticeable that planters from the Mississippi Valley, from the Red River country, and from Texas, were all much more hopeful of free negro labor than Georgians and Alabamians had been. Few apprehensions were expressed as to the labor question, and the only want concerning which much was said was the want of capital.
General Beauregard had become the President of the railroad connecting New Orleans with the capital of the State of Mississippi. He may be an admirable man for the post, but his road was a very bad one.
Between New Orleans and Jackson, one saw little to admire in the pine flats that lined the railroad for nearly its whole length. “The rossum heels live in thar,” a newsboy on the train informed me. Lands are cheap, and dear at the cheap rates. There are but few places where a Northern man in his senses would be disposed to make investments with a view to cultivating cotton. For anything else the land is generally regarded as worthless.