“Did you notice,” she continued, patting the woolly head of the child as it lay with its face buried in her lap, “that she called me ‘Missey,’ just now? All the niggers have been trying to break her of that, but they can’t. They tell her to call me Miss Lizzie, but she says ‘she may be your Miss Lizzie, but she’s my Missey.’ The other day she made quite a scene in church, by breaking away from the other servants and shouting out, ‘I will sit with my Missey to-day!’ You should have seen everybody’s head turning to see who it was, in these sorrowful times, that was still fortunate enough to be called Missey!”
On a Mississippi steamboat, one evening, I encountered an intelligent, substantial-looking Arkansas planter, hirsute, and clad in Confederate gray. The buttons had been removed from his military coat; but I soon discovered that the companion, with whom I was passing an idle evening in talk about planting and politics, was the Rebel General, E. C. Cahell.
He was giving the free-labor experiment a fair trial; and risking upon it pretty nearly all he was worth. He paid his first-class hands a dollar a day, and furnished them lodgings. They supplied themselves with clothing and provisions, which he sold—there being no village, or even store, within six miles of his landing—at a very slight advance on St. Louis prices, barely enough to cover freight and waste. He felt that he was paying very high wages; but he fixed upon this plan in preference to paying them fifteen dollars a month and rations, because a negro seemed to himself to be getting more for his work. “A dollar a day” was short and very easily understood; and the negroes thought it had a big sound.
Thus far he had less trouble with his laborers than he had anticipated. They worked well and seemed contented; but he was by no means certain that his hold upon them was secure enough to give him the slightest guaranty of being able to gather what he was planting. Now and then he found a troublesome negro; but, in the main, they had been unexpectedly open to reason. “The mistake we have generally made in the South has been that we have supposed nigger nature was something different from human nature. But I find that they are just as easily controlled, when sufficient motives are presented, as any other class of people would be.” He was getting along without the aid of the Freedman’s Bureau; and, indeed, without aid of any sort. He knew of no laws and of no officers; he was off in the woods by himself; and his only resource had been to try and do what was right, and then convince the negroes that he had done so.
On one point he had been closely pressed. His negroes all wanted to plant cotton on their own account, and made a dead-set at him for an acre of land apiece for that purpose. It would never do to tell them the truth—that he was afraid to let them grow any, lest, when picking-time came, they should steal from him to add to their own crops—but he had approached the delicate point diplomatically. “Of course, Jim, it would be all right with you; but then you know there are some of the boys here that will steal. They would bring a bad name on the whole of you, and get you all into trouble.” And, “nigger nature being very much like human nature,” his argument had been successful, and he had been relieved from the embarrassment.
He thought about three-fourths of the good cotton land directly fronting on the Mississippi, so far as his observation extended, was under cultivation and might be relied upon, with a favorable season, for an average crop. Back from the river, through Mississippi, Arkansas, and West Tennessee, he doubted whether one-fourth of the land was under cultivation.
Two or three days later, in another steamboat trip, I encountered a heavy planter, who came to this country originally from Illinois. He owned a fine plantation in Mississippi, fronting on the river, and with the cultivation of this he had always been contented. But this year he regarded as the golden opportunity. The free-labor project had not yet settled down into a steadily-working system. Half these old planters in the interior believed the niggers wouldn’t work, and were doing very little to find out. When all made the discovery that they would work, cotton would come down to nearly its old prices, and there would be no great speculation in it. But this year, the men who “went in” would make the money which the backward ones ought to make, as well as their own. So he had leased, right and left. He had three plantations near his own, in Mississippi, and three more across the river, in Louisiana. On all of them he had plenty of negroes. At that time (3d April) he had a little over seventeen hundred acres of cotton planted. With good weather, in another week, he should have over four thousand.
But this was the last year he would do anything of the sort. He didn’t believe there would be so much money in it another year; but, at any rate, he was kept forever running up and down the river, from one place to another, buying supplies and giving directions. He had no peace, day or night; and he meant to make enough this year to be able to retire and have some comfort.
He was trying all the different plans of paying negroes, and, next year, planters would be welcome to his experience. On one place he gave them fifteen dollars per month,[[83]] with rations, lodging, and medical attendance. On another he gave twelve dollars per month, and furnished clothing also. On one he gave a fifth of the crop, and supported the negroes; on another, a fourth of the crop, and required them to furnish a part of their own support. But on none would he permit any of the hands to plant a stalk of cotton on their own account. Nobody need tell him anything about niggers. He had owned them long enough to know all about them, and there wasn’t one in a hundred he would trust to pick cotton for himself (the negro) out of a patch adjacent to the cotton fields of his employer.