“I stops at your plantation de oder day, but I not know tat you had goods of your own to sell mit your niggers. I vill not interfere mit no man’s trade.”
The speaker was a Jew peddler, who also kept up a little store in Natchez-under-the-hill. He had been peddling down the river on the Louisiana side, and had been driven away from the plantation, whose proprietor he was addressing, by the overseer. Once before, the owner said, the overseer had permitted him to stay all night and trade with the negroes. He had sold, in a few hours, goods to the amount of nearly two hundred dollars, and had received payment in full in greenbacks, from ragged-looking blacks who would never have been suspected of having a penny. Nearly all the negroes had money. Some saved it quite carefully. On this very plantation he had field hands, working at fifteen dollars a month, who had five or six hundred dollars hid away in old stockings. Of course it wouldn’t do to look too closely into the means by which they had acquired it. During the war, and especially in the confusion following the surrender, they had great opportunities for trade, and their master’s property constituted the stock from which they drew. He had one man who had made several hundred dollars by killing his hogs and selling the pork.
But, with the cunning that seemed natural to them, they would rarely acknowledge the possession of money. “I have had boys come to me with the sorriest stories of their necessities, to get an advance of a few dollars on their month’s wages, when I knew that they had as much money in their pockets as I had in mine. The worst of it was, that what they had rightfully belonged to me as much as that in my own pocket-book.”
“Vat you tinks about de overflow?” asked the peddler, with an anxious look at the river, which was then rapidly rising.
“Why, what business is it of yours about the overflow? So you can swindle my niggers, what do you care about the overflow?”
“Vy, I wants you to make a pig crop. If tere’s an overflow, tere’ll pe no monish in te country next fall, and my trade ish gone. But if you makes pig crop, monish ish plenty, and I does pig business.”
The planter subsequently explained, that this fellow had sold common unbleached muslins and the cheapest calicoes at from seventy-five cents to a dollar a yard; and that on the trinkets and gew gaws, with which his pack was liberally supplied, his profits were from five to eight hundred per cent.[[82]] The negroes bought readily, no matter what price he asked; and for the average plantation hand, the more worthless the article, the greater seemed, often, the desire to purchase it.
There could be no question of the zeal with which, through the exciting spring months, the people in the interior of the cotton States, supported the “President’s Policy” of Reconstruction; but it was rarely a zeal according to knowledge.
“Just think of the infamous lengths those cursed Radicals are going!” exclaimed a wealthy and by no means illiterate or unpolished Mississippi cotton-planter to me in April; “They’ve actually turned out Stockton, of Missouri, from the Senate!”