On the Payne plantation, the negroes about the quarters were pounding out rice in a little wooden mortar. Large stacks of rice stood near the stables. A little mill was pointed out as having been formerly used to hull rice sufficient for the use of the hands; and back toward the swamp, we were told, were excellent rice lands; on which, in old times, fine crops had always been made.
While the place was being slowly reset in cane, it would doubtless be profitable to grow rice; but the negroes were unwilling to undertake it. Here, as in the rice lands of South Carolina and Georgia, there was every prospect that free labor would prove absolutely fatal to the culture. Men would not work in rice swamps except under compulsion. There is a species of rice, which grows like wheat, on uplands; but it only yields about one-fourth of a crop. On good rice lands the yield per acre varies from thirty-five to fifty bushels. Exceptional crops have run up as high as ninety bushels. With good cultivation on good soil, one might reasonably hope for an average of forty bushels, or eighteen hundred pounds per acre—worth (with rice ranging from nine and a half to twelve cents per pound) about one hundred and eighty dollars. This is much more lucrative than cotton at twenty-five cents a pound; nearly as much so as cotton at fifty cents.
It is a golden opening—but the free laborers decline to step into it. Five years ago the rice crop of the United States was about a quarter of a million casks. Last year it was seven thousand!
[66]. The narrow belt of bottom land, reclaimed from the swamps on either side of the Mississippi for sugar plantations, is called “the Coast.” Above New Orleans, to the northern limit of sugar culture, is the Upper Coast. Between New Orleans and the mouth of the Mississippi is the Lower Coast.
[67]. About half of them, I believe, returned before the spring work had been fairly begun. The rest sought new homes, and in general fared no better than those who returned.
[68]. The sugar-cane is propagated from the stalks; the stalks from one acre being enough to plant four. They will then remain productive for three years; after which they must be replanted. In the warmer climate and dryer soil of Cuba, they last for ten years. Hence the advantage Cuban planters have in the sugar-culture. In Louisiana it is only an exotic, and but for the protection of a high tariff, would perish.
CHAPTER XLVII.
A Cotton Plantation—Work, Workmen, Wages, Expenses and Returns.
A few days afterward I embarked again upon a Mississippi packet, at New Orleans, to make a visit to some noted cotton plantations near Natchez.
A good steamboat should make the trip in about thirty hours; but the packets lengthen the time one-half by their frequent stoppages. Every few miles we ran into shore, the gang-plank was thrown out, and half-a-dozen barrels of pork, or double as many of flour, or a few bales of hay were rolled off. So wedded are most of the old residents to their old ways of doing business, that they see all these supplies steadily carried past their doors by the “up-river boats,” but wait until they reach New Orleans, pass through the hands of their old commission merchant, and thus return with double freights and double commissions, to be landed at the very places they passed the week before. Ask one why he does not buy above, and have the goods shipped direct to his plantation, and he will reply that Mr. So-and-so, in New Orleans, has sold all his cotton or sugar, and purchased all his supplies for the last ten or twenty years, and he doesn’t want to be bothered making a change.