Much of this success was due, of course, to the high prices produced by the war. But if the prices for the products were high, so were those for every item of the expenditures. It will be observed that the negroes were fed and lodged, but not clothed. Mr. May estimated the cost of food and lodging to be at least six dollars a month. Add this to the monthly wages, and we have two hundred and sixteen dollars as the actual annual cost of each field-hand to the planter, under the free-labor system. Before the war able-bodied negroes were commanding from fifteen hundred to three thousand dollars in the New Orleans market. Counting only ten per cent. interest on the investment, we find it nearly as cheap to hire the negroes, as it was in the old days to own them and get their labor for nothing. But, as yet, slaveholders will reply to all such calculations, “Free niggers can never be depended on to grow cotton.”
[35]. These negroes came out at the end of the year with enough cotton and sugar—after paying for their own support—to divide only a few dollars to each first-class hand. Even this result was better than one would have anticipated in June.
[36]. Since lost, by explosion of her boilers, with fearful sacrifice of life.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
The “Jeff. Davis Cotton Plantation.”
A few negro soldiers were standing guard on the river bank, one day, as our steamer touched to land our party at the lower side of the great bend below Vicksburg, for a visit to the adjacent cotton plantations. The officers sent off for ambulances for us. While we were awaiting their arrival, the relief guard came up, marching with a precision and erect, soldierly bearing that spoke well for their drill sergeants, and proved no small source of astonishment to the party of paroled rebels we had on board.
“A nigger’s just like a monkey,” growled one; “whatever he sees a white man do he’ll imitate; and he’ll study over it a cussed sight harder’n he will over his work. But how one o’ them black devils with muskets ’d run ef a white man was to start after him with a whip!” And with this he walked up to one of the soldiers, saying, rather harshly: “Boy, le’ me see your gun,” and offering to take hold of it. The soldier stepped hastily back, and brought his weapon into position for immediate use. “How the war has demoralized the cussed brutes!” muttered the discomfited scion of the master race, as he retired.
It was our first experience on the plantation of Mr. Jefferson Davis. Nearly all the nine thousand acres included in the bend of the river here had formerly belonged to Joseph Davis, brother to the President of the late Confederacy. Jefferson was a soldier and a politician, but no planter. He brought reputation and social position to the family, but no money. His brother balanced the account by giving him, from his own large estate, a plantation of a thousand acres. Here, down to the outbreak of the war, Mr. Davis was accustomed to spend a portion of his time, his brother and the late General Quitman being his only neighbors. Negro soldiers were now doing duty on the landing whence his cotton had been shipped, and “runaway niggers” were tilling his fertile fields on their own account.
The outer levee was damaged by the unusually high floods which had brought destruction to so many enterprising planters from the North; and for some hundreds of yards our ambulances cut deep into the rich mud over which the Mississippi had been depositing fresh alluvial soil. An inner levee had been hastily heightened, and when we passed this, the sodden, desolate aspect of the country changed. A few cabins, surrounded by small inclosures, seemed to have been used in the old times for trusty negroes sent to work or watch at the landing. Beyond these, the road led us through a broad field of cotton, unbroken by hill or valley, fence or tree, save here and there a single cotton-wood, whose position by the roadside had saved it. The whole face of the country, almost as far as the eye could reach, was plowed into what a Northern farmer would have taken for low sweet-potato ridges. On the tops of these ridges, in separate hills, grew the soft and still tender cotton-stalks, beginning to be well covered with the white and red flowers; for even cotton wore the Rebel colors. The petals were soft and flabby, and the flower was like a miniature hollyhock. For these “earliest blooms” planters keep eager watch, and to have the first in a neighborhood is a distinction, prized as a Northern farmer would prize a premium for the best crop of wheat in a county.