Competition had driven the planters who needed hands the worst to offering extravagant wages. Twenty dollars per month, with rations, lodging, etc., was a common offer; and some went as high as twenty-five. Influential sergeants and corporals were offered thirty and forty dollars a month, on condition that they brought a certain number of men with them. In general, the more remote the plantation, the more backward the work upon it; and the less reliable the owner or lessee, the higher were the offered wages. The negroes displayed very little judgment, at last, in making their selections; and, as a rule, the men who made the most big promises, which they never meant to keep, got the most laborers.
About the same time the business of furnishing the labor for sugar and cotton plantations had assumed another phase in New Orleans. A regular system had been organized early in the year, by which agents, white or black, undertook to furnish negroes to the planters who needed them, at so much a head. This gradually degenerated until, in April, hundreds of negroes were within call of these agents, ready to reenact the rôle of the Northern bounty-jumpers. The agent would hire them to a planter, receive his twenty-five dollars a head, and turn them over. The planter would start with them to his plantation. Sometimes they escaped from the boat before it started; in other cases they even went to the plantation, drew their rations for a week, and then ran away. On their return they shared the proceeds of the little operation with the agent. In Vicksburg a similar process of swindling was carried on, but on a smaller scale.
A Missouri cooper, who had managed to make enough money on cotton during the war to secure a plantation, boasted of his better success in securing labor: “I jist went over to Montgomery, Alabama, and from there to Selma. I takes my landlord aside, and persuades him to jine me in a straight drink. Then I told him I was after niggers, and asked him what he thought of my chances. He tole me he had jist six men in the house on the same business already. None of ’em had had any luck, and they was a goin’ to Eufala by the Shamrock. All right, my covey, thinks I. So I jist steps down to the Shamrock, bargained awhile with the captain, and finally got the use of her yawl. He wasn’t agoin’ to start till Tuesday mornin’ and that was Sunday. I puts my nigger into the yawl, and we pulled down stream all night. Monday mornin’ we was in Eufala. I sends my nigger out to talk to the people. They had nothin’ to do; Georgians wanted to hire ’em for their board and clothes; and fifteen dollars a month seemed enormous. Wednesday mornin’ the Shamrock got down, and as the Selma nigger-hunters stepped off, I stepped on with sixty-five niggers.”
He said he had no trouble in getting as many as he wanted, except from the apprehension of the negroes throughout all that region, that any one who proposed to take them away anywhere to labor, really meant to run them over to Cuba and sell them. Several asked him, confidentially, whether Cuba wasn’t just across the Mississippi River. Even the white men entertained no doubt of his being a negro smuggler. One congratulated him on his remarkable luck, and “calculated that lot would about make his fortune by the time he got them over.”
I saw but one successful experiment with white laborers on a cotton plantation. This was in one of the northern parishes of Louisiana, where seventy or eighty Germans, picked up from sponging-houses in New York and elsewhere, had been engaged for the year. At first they worked very badly. The overseer treated them as he had been in the habit of treating the slaves; and, degraded as these Germans were, they would not submit to it. A new overseer was engaged; and, after a time, matters seemed to go on measurably well. But it was still too early (about the middle of April) to tell how they would succeed during the unhealthy summer months. None of the neighboring planters had any faith in the experiment. These Germans, they said, were not by any means as good as the niggers. If you sought Germans of a better class, they wouldn’t contract with you, unless they saw a chance to become, after a time, the owners of the soil they cultivated.
Against this, and indeed against any subdivision of the great river plantations, the feeling was very strong. That a German should buy a hundred or two acres from the edge of a large plantation, was a thing not to be tolerated. Even sales of entire tracts to new-comers were very unpopular. “Johnson has gone and sold his plantation to a Yankee,” exclaimed one. “Is it possible?” was the reply. “Why, I thought Johnson was a better citizen than that. If he had to sell, why didn’t he hunt up some Southern man who wanted to buy?”
The negroes were all anxious to purchase land. “What’s de use of being free,” said one, an old man of sixty, who was begging permission to plant cotton; “What’s de use of being free if you don’t own land enough to be buried in? Might juss as well stay slave all yo’ days.” “All I wants,” said another, explaining what he was going to do with his money, of which he had already saved four or five hundred dollars; “All I wants is to git to own fo’ or five acres ob land, dat I can build me a little house on and call my home.” In many portions of the Mississippi Valley the feeling against any ownership of the soil by the negroes is so strong, that the man who should sell small tracts to them would be in actual personal danger. Every effort will be made to prevent negroes from acquiring lands; and even the renting of small tracts to them is held to be unpatriotic and unworthy of a good citizen. Through such difficulties is it that the subject-race is called upon to prove, by its prosperity, its fitness for freedom.