XXXVI A FAVORABLE VIEW OF THE SLAVE SYSTEM1 His plantation was considered a model one, and was visited by planters anxious to learn his methods. He was asked how he made his negroes do good work. His answer was that a laboring man could do more work and better work in five and a half days than in six. He used to give the half of Saturdays to his negroes, unless there was a great press of work; but a system of rewards was more efficacious than any other method. He distributed prizes of money among his cotton-pickers every week during the season, which lasted four or five months. One dollar was the first prize, a Mexican coin valued at eighty-seven and a half cents the second, seventy-five cents the third, and so on, down to the smallest prize, a small Mexican coin called picayune, which was valued at six and a quarter cents. The decimal nomenclature was not in use there. The coins were spoken of as "bits." . . . The master gave money to all who worked well for the prizes, whether they won them or not. When one person picked six hundred pounds in 2 day, a five-dollar gold-piece was the reward. On most other plantations four hundred pounds or three hundred and fifty or three hundred was considered a good day's work, but on the Burleigh place many picked five hundred pounds. All had to be picked free of trash. No one could do this who had not been trained in childhood. To get five hundred pounds a picker had to use both hands at once. Those who went into the cotton-fields after they were grown only knew how to pull out cotton by holding on to the stalk with one hand and picking it out with the other. Two hundred pounds a day would be a liberal estimate of what the most industrious could do in this manner. A very tall and lithe young woman, one of mammy's "Brer Billy's" chil 1 For introductory remarks see Selection XXVII. dren, was the best cotton-picker at Burleigh. She picked two rows at a time, going down the middle with both arms extended and grasping the cotton bolls with each hand. Some of the younger generation learned to imitate this. At Christmas Nelly's share of the prize money was something over seventeen dollars. Her pride in going up to the master's desk to receive it, in the presence of the assembled negroes, as the acknowledged leader of the cottonpickers, was a matter of as great interest to the white family as to her own race. Susan Dabney Smedes: A Southern Planter, pp. 3132. London, 1889. QUESTIONS What was the system of rewards used by Col. Dabney? How efficacious did it seem to be? Compare this with the statement quoted from Olmsted in regard to rewards and punishments. Selection XXXVII.) (See XXXVII A NORTHERNER'S VIEW OF SLAVERY To the generation that has grown up since the Civil War Frederick Law Olmsted is mainly known as a landscape architect. He made several trips through the South as a newspaper correspondent in the late fifties. His accounts of his experiences and observations collected in several books, besides the one from which this extract is taken, give us a picture of slavery and of social and economic conditions in the Slave States, as seen through the eyes of a Northern farm owner, who though hostile to slavery tried to see it as it was and to record its results fairly. In considering his conclusions allowance should be made for the effect of his pet theory, namely, that for cotton growing free labor would be more efficient all in all than slave labor. In choosing the following extracts, omission has been made of his accounts of what he saw of the seamy side of slavery. The title of the work quoted, The Cotton Kingdom, introduces us to American slavery in its last phase; the price of slaves and the conditions of slavery throughout the South depended in large measure on the degree of profit in growing cotton with slave labor on a comparatively few big plantations. Chapter I. The Present Crisis. My own observation of the real condition of the people of our Slave States, gave me, on the contrary, an impression that the cotton monopoly in some way did them more harm than good; and, although the written narration of what I saw was not intended to set this forth, upon reviewing it for the present publication, I find the impression has become a conviction. ... Coming directly from my farm in New York to Eastern Virginia, I was satisfied, after a few weeks' observation, that the most of the people lived very poorly; that the proportion of men improving their condition was much less than in any Northern community; and that the natural resources of the land were strangely unused, or were used with poor economy. I soon ascertained that a much larger number of hands, at much larger aggregate wages, was commonly reckoned to be required to accomplish certain results, than would have been the case at the North. I compared notes with every Northern man I met who had been living for some time in Virginia, and some I found able to give me quite exact statements of personal experience, with which, in the cases they mentioned, it could not be doubted that laborers costing, all things considered, the same wages, had taken four times as long to accomplish certain tasks of rude work in Virginia as at the North, and that in house service, four servants accomplished less, while they required vastly more looking after, than one at the North. . . . . The following conclusions to which my mind tended strongly in the first month, though I did not then adopt them altogether with confidence, were established at length in my convictions. . . . 3. Taking infants, aged, invalid, and vicious and knavish slaves into account, the ordinary and average cost of a certain task of labor is more than double in Virginia, what it is in the Free States adjoining. 4. The use of land and nearly all other resources of wealth in Virginia is much less valuable than the use of similar property in the adjoining Free States, these resources having no real value until labor is applied to them. (The Census returns of 1850 show that the sale value of farm lands by the acre in Virginia is less than one-third the value of farm lands in the adjoining Free State of Pennsylvania, and less than one-fifth than that of the farm lands of the neighboring Free State of New Jersey.) 5. Beyond the bare necessities of existence, poor shelter, poor clothing, and the crudest diet, the mass of the citizen class of Virginia earn very little and are very poor immeasurably poorer than the mass of the people of the adjoining Free States. 6. So far as this poverty is to be attributed to personal constitution, character, and choice, it is not the result of climate. 7. What is true of Virginia is measurably true of all the border Slave States, though in special cases the resistance of slavery to a competition of free labor is more easily overcome. In proportion as this is the case, the cost of production is less, the value of production greater, the comfort of the people is greater; they are advancing in wealth as they are in intelligence, which is the best form or result of wealth. I went on my way into the so-called Cotton States, within which I traveled over, first and last, at least three thousand miles of roads, from which not a cotton plant was to be seen, and the people living by the side of which certainly had not been made rich by cotton or anything else. And for every mile of roadside upon which I saw any evidence of cotton production, I am sure that I saw a hundred of forest or waste land, with only now and then an acre or two of poor corn half smothered in weeds; for every rich man's house, I am sure that I passed a dozen shabby and half-furnished cottages and at least a hundred cabins — nere hovels, such as none but a poor farmer would house his cattle in at the North. . . But, much cotton is produced in the Cotton States, and by the labour of somebody; much cotton is sold and somebody must be paid for it; there are rich people; there are good markets; there is hospitality, refinement, virtue, courage, and urbanity at the South. All this is proverbially true. Who produces the cotton? who is paid for it? where are, and who are, the rich and gentle people? I can answer in part at least. I have been on plantations on the Mississippi, the Red River, and the Brazos Bottoms, whereon I was assured that ten bales of cotton to each average prime field-hand had been raised. The soil was a perfect garden mold, well drained and guarded by levees against the floods; it was admirably tilled; I have seen but few Northern farms so well tilled; the laborers were, to a large degree, tall, slender, sinewy, young men, who worked from dawn to dusk, not with spirit, but with steadiness and constancy. . . . They had the best sort of gins and presses, so situated that from them cotton bales could be rolled in five minutes to steamboats, bound direct to the ports on the gulf. They were superintended by skilful and vigilant overseers. These plantations were all large, so large as to yet contain much fresh land, ready to be worked as soon as the cultivated fields gave out in fertility. If it was true that ten bales of cotton to the hand had been raised on them, then their net profit for the year had been, not less than two hundred and fifty dollars for each hand employed. Even at seven bales to the hand the profits of cotton planting are enormous. . . . And a great many large plantations do produce seven bales to the hand for years in succession. A |