He could as yet perceive no marked difference in the work of his hands on the different plantations. None did as much as under the old system, but all did more than was expected. Much depended on the overseer. Where the hands thought he understood his business, and could tell when they were doing their duty, and was, at the same time, disposed to treat them justly, there was no trouble. But some of the old overseers made a good deal of mischief on a plantation. They thought they could knock and cuff niggers about as they used to; and by the time they discovered their mistake, the niggers were leaving, and keeping others from coming in their places.
“One o’ my niggers left, the other day, without saying a word to me about it. You couldn’t guess why. The cussed nigger had been lazy about mending a plow which was badly needed in the field, and the nigger-driver scolded him about it. He said he was a free man, and wasn’t going to be insulted; so off he started. There’s one consolation; he had only been paid half his wages at the end of each month; and so there’s a matter of twenty-five or thirty dollars which he lost and I gained by his running away.”
This man had but an indifferent education; he had seen little of society or the world; he knew nothing thoroughly, save cotton and the negro. But, coming down, raw, from Illinois, years ago, he had won the good opinions of the heiress to a plantation, and had married,——it rather than her, as an acquaintance expressed it. How he was wealthy, and, with a fair season, was sure of not less than five thousand bales of cotton, worth, at only twenty-five cents per pound, half a million dollars, as the profits of this year’s operations. How he would spend his money when he got it, it would be difficult to say. Horse-racing and hard drinking were the amusements most congenial to his class. Gambling was pleasant, but his business habits had given him a wholesome dread of it; and, after all, there seemed more probability that he would soon return to cotton, and end his days in worship at its kingly shrine.
[80]. Brother to General W. H. L. Wallace, whose death, while gallantly leading his division at Pittsburg Landing, was so widely lamented.
[81]. “I told a nigger officer,” said a very consequential planter in the vicinity of Jackson, Mississippi, to me in November, 1865, “that I’d give him thirty dollars a month just to stay on my plantation and wear his uniform. The fellow did it, and I’m havin’ no trouble with my niggers. They’re afraid of the shoulder-straps.”
[82]. I have myself seen earrings that cost fifty cents sold for six dollars.
[83]. The rate of wages named is that given first-class men. First-class women get, generally, about two-thirds as much. It is rarely the case that over one-third of the men and women on a place can be rated first-class. All the rest receive lower wages, in proportion to their value.
CHAPTER LIII.
Concluding Suggestions.
The President’s vetoes of the Freedman’s Bureau Bill and the Civil Rights Bill, with his Twenty-second of February speech and subsequent utterances, were received throughout the South-Western Cotton States with an exultation which drove the newspapers[[84]] to sad straits. To do justice to the occasion, the leading journal of New Orleans was forced to this: