CHAPTER LX.ALABAMA PLANTERS.
The Alabama River steamers resemble those of the Mississippi, although inferior in size and style. But one meets a very different class of passengers on board of them. The Alabamians are a plain, rough set of men, not so fast as the Mississippi-Valley planters, but more sober, more solid, more loyal. They like their glass of grog, however, and some of them are very sincere in their hatred of the government. I found the most contradictory characters among them, which I cannot better illustrate than by giving some specimens of their conversation.
Here is one of the despairing class. “The country is ruined; not only the Southern country, but the Northern country too. The prosperity of our people passed away with the institution of slavery. I shall never try to make another fortune. I made one, and lost it in a minute. I had a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in niggers. I am now sixty years old. I’ll bet a suit of clothes against a dime, there’ll be no cotton crop raised this year. If there’s a crop grown, the hands that raise it won’t pick it. Some few niggers go on, and do well, just as before; but they’re mighty scarce. They never will be as well off again as they have been, and some of ’em see it. A nigger drayman came to me the other day and asked me to buy him. He said, ‘I want a master. When I had a master, I had nothing to do but to eat and drink and sleep, besides my work. Now I have to work and think too.’ When I said the law wouldn’t allow me to buy him, he looked very much discouraged.”
I heard of a few such cases as this drayman’s, but theywere far less common than one would have expected. Poor fellow, he did not know that if he was ever to be anything but an animal, a beast of burden, it was necessary for him to begin to think.
Mr. J——, of Marengo County, also an old man, talked in a different spirit.
“The trouble with the freedmen is, they have not yet learned that living is expensive. They never before had any idea where their clothes came from, except that ‘Master gave ’em to me.’ In my county, I find them generally better disposed than the whites. I don’t know of a case where they have been treated kindly and justly, and have deserted their masters. A few restless ones are exceptions. I noticed one of my boys that I had asked to make a contract for the coming year, packing up his things; and I said to him, ‘Warren, what are you doing?’ He replied, ‘Master, they say if we make contracts now, we’ll be branded, and made slaves again.’ I had always treated him well. I don’t remember that I ever struck him, but he says I did strike him once, and he’s a truthful boy. Another old man that I was raised with, said, ‘Master, all the contract I want with you is that you shall bury me, or I’ll bury you.’ He said he would go on and work for me like he always had; and he’ll do it, for he’s an honest man.”
Mr. J—— related the case of one of his neighbors who contracted with his freedmen to furnish their supplies and give them one fifth of the crop. He gave them provisions for a year at the start; and deducted a dollar a day for lost time. “He raised the largest crop of corn he ever did; but when he came to harvest it, he owed them nothing, though he had kept his contract. He was honest, but he had managed badly. I give my hands a share of the crop,” added Mr. J——. “But I do not give them provisions any faster than they need them, for if I did they would call in their friends, make a great feast, and eat up everything,—they are so generous and improvident. I deduct a dollar a day for lost time, but instead of putting it into my own pocket, I give the lazy man’s dollarto those who do the lazy man’s work. I find that encourages them, and the consequence is, there are few lost days.”
This genial old gentleman, whom I found to be well known and highly esteemed throughout the country, justified the North in its course during the war, and expressed confidence in the future of the South under the free-labor system.
Mr. G——, one of the bitterest Yankee-haters I met, became nevertheless one of my most intimate steamboat acquaintances. I cull the following from many talks I had with him.
“I owned a cotton factory in Dallas County, above Selma. I had two plantations besides, and an interest in a tan-yard. Wilson’s Thieves came in, and just stripped me of everything. They burned eight hundred bales of cotton for me. That was because I happened to be running my mill for the Confederate government. I was making Osnaburgs for the government for a dollar a yard, when citizens would have paid me four dollars a yard; and do you imagine I’d have done that except under compulsion? But the Yankee rascals didn’t stop to consider that fact. They skipped my neighbors’ cotton and burned mine.
“In other respects they treated them as bad as they did me. They robbed our houses of everything they could find and carry away. I shouldn’t have had a thing left, if it hadn’t been for my niggers. Some of ’em run off my mules and saved ’em. I gave all my gold and silver to an old woman who kept it hid from the raiders. On one of my plantations a colored carpenter and his wife barrelled up three barrels of fine table crockery and buried it. One of the Yankee officers rode up and said to this woman, ‘Where’s your husband?’ ‘There’s my husband,’ she said, pointing to the mulatto. ‘You’re a sight whiter’n he is,’ he said,—for she is white as anybody, and he had taken her for the lady of the house. An old negro saved the tannery by pleading with the vandals, and lying to ’em a little bit.
“Three hundred and fifty thousand dollars in gold wouldn’t cover my losses. I never can feel towards this government like I once did. I got started to leave the country; I sworeI wouldn’t live under a government that had treated me in this way. I made up my mind to go to Brazil. I got as far as Mobile, and changed my mind. Now I’ve concluded to remain here, like any alien. I’m a foreigner. I scorn to be called a citizen of the United States. I shall take no oath, so help me God! Unless,” he added immediately, “it is to enable me to vote. I want to vote to give the suffrage to the negro.”
As I expressed my surprise at this extraordinary wish, he went on: “Because I think that will finish the job. I think then we’ll have enough of the nigger, North and South, and all will combine to put him out of the country.”
“It seems to me,” I said, “you are a little ungrateful after all you say your negroes have done for you.”
“There are a few faithful ones among them,” he replied. “If all were like some of mine I wouldn’t say anything. They’re as intelligent and well behaved as anybody. But I can’t stand free niggers, any how!”
“I notice,” said I, “that every man who curses the black race, and prays for its removal or extermination, makes exceptions in favor of negroes he has raised or owned, until I am beginning to think these exceptions compose a majority of the colored population.”
G—— made no reply to the remark, but resumed,—
“I want this country filled up with white men. I want the large plantations cut up, and manufactories established. We never had any manufactories for this reason: Southern capitalists all jammed their money into niggers and land. As their capital increased, it was a few more niggers, a little more land. The few factories we had were consequently one-horse concerns, that couldn’t compete with those at the North. They were patronized by men who wanted to buy on credit. If a man had cash, he went to the North to buy goods; if he was short, he bought here. Consequently, to carry on a business of a hundred thousand dollars, a capital of three hundred thousand dollars was necessary. Two thirds of it was sunk; below the water, like the guards of this boat.
“Now I want the old system played out. But,” continued G——, “if the Freedmen’s Bureau is withdrawn, things will work back again into their old grooves. The nigger is going to be made a serf, sure as you live. It won’t need any law for that. Planters will have an understanding among themselves: ‘You won’t hire my niggers, and I won’t hire yours;’ then what’s left for them? They’re attached to the soil, and we’re as much their masters as ever. I’ll stake my life, this is the way it will work. The country will be no better off than it ever was. To make a farming and manufacturing country, like you have at the North, we must put the nigger out of the way. For this reason, I hope the cotton crop this year will be a failure. And I not only hope, but I know it will. There a’n’t labor enough in the country; the planters are going to bid against each other, and make contracts they won’t be able to keep, and that’s going to put the Old Harry into the freedmen.”
I remarked that, as long as the demand for labor exceeded the supply, planters would continue to bid against each other, and that the plan he had suggested, by which the freedman was to be made a serf without the aid of legislation, would thus be defeated.
“Let the Bureau be taken away,” he replied, “and planters will come into the arrangement. That is, all honorable ones will; and if a man hasn’t honor enough to come in, he’ll be scared in. If he hires my niggers, or yours, he’ll be mobbed.”
Mr. H——, of Lowndes County, often joined in our conversation. “I don’t believe my friend G—— here believes half he says. I am sure the South is going to make this year a million bales,—probably much more. One thing planters have got to learn: the old system is gone up, and we must begin new. It won’t do to employ the old overseers; they can’t learn to treat the freedmen like human beings. I told my overseer the old style wouldn’t do,—the niggers wouldn’t stand it,—and he promised better fashions; but it wasn’t two days before he fell from grace, and went to whippingagain. That just raised the Old Scratch with them; and I don’t blame ’em.”
H—— went on to say that it was necessary now to treat the negroes like men. “We must deal justly with them;” he had a great deal to say about justice. “We must reason with them,—for they are reasonable beings;” and he repeated some of the excellent homilies with which he had enlightened their consciences and understandings.
“’Formerly,’ I said to them, ‘you were my slaves; you worked for me, and I provided for you. You had no thought of the morrow, for I thought of that for you. If you were sick, I had the doctor come to you. When you needed clothes, clothes were forthcoming; and you never went hungry for lack of meal and pork. You had little more responsibility than my mules.
“’But now all that is changed. Being free men, you assume the responsibilities of free men. You sell me your labor, I pay you money, and with that money you provide for yourselves. You must look out for your own clothes and food, and the wants of your children. If I advance these things for you, I shall charge them to you, for I cannot give them like I once did, now I pay you wages. Once if you were ugly or lazy, I had you whipped, and that was the end of it. Now if you are ugly and lazy, your wages will be paid to others, and you will be turned off, to go about the country with bundles on your backs, like the miserable low-down niggers you see that nobody will hire. But if you are well-behaved and industrious, you will be prosperous and respected and happy.”
“They all understood this talk,” added H——, “and liked it, and went to work like men on the strength of it. If every planter would begin that way with his freedmen, there’d be no trouble. There’s everything in knowing how to manage them.”
“If anybody knows how to manage them, you do,” said G——. Then turning to me: “H—— is the shrewdest manager in this country. There’s a good story about his managing a nigger and a horse;—shall I tell it, H——?”
“Go ahead,” said H——, laughing.
“An old nigger of his picked up a horse the Yankee raiders had turned loose in the country, and brought him home to H——’s plantation. The old nigger gave the horse to his son Sip, and died. The horse had been used up, but he turned out to be a mighty good one,—just such an animal as H—— wanted; so he laid claim to him, and Sip had to go to the Freedmen’s Bureau for an order to compel my friend here to give him up. He told his story, got the order, and brought it home, and showed it to H——, who looked at it, then looked at Sip, and said, ‘Do you know what this paper says?’ ‘It says I’m to have de hoss; dat’s what dey told me.’ ‘I’ll tell you what it says,’ and H—— pretended to read the order: ‘If this boy troubles you any more about that horse, give him a sound thrashing!’ ‘’Fore God,’ says Sip, ‘I done went to de wrong man!’”
I looked to see H——, the just man, who treated his freed people like rational beings, deny the truth of this story.
“G—— has told something near the fact; but there’s one thing he has left out.I just put my Spencer to Sip’s head, and told him if he pestered me any more about that horse, I’d kill him.He knew I was a man of my word, and he never pestered me any more.”
I thought G—— must have intended the story as a hard hit at H——’s honesty; but I now saw that he really meant it as a compliment to his “shrewd management,” and that as such H—— received it with satisfaction.
“But,” said I, “as you relate the circumstance, it seems to me the horse belonged to Sip.”
“A nigger has no use for a horse like that,” replied H——.
“He had been brought on to the plantation and fed there at H——’s expense,” explained G——.
“Hadn’t he done work enough to pay for his keeping?”
“Yes, and ten times over,” said H——, frankly. “I foresaw in the beginning there was going to be trouble about the ownership of that horse. So I told my driver to kill him,—with hard work, I mean. He tried his best to do it; but hewas such a tough beast, he did the work and grew fat all the time.”
I was still unable to see why the horse did not belong rightfully to Sip, instead of his master. But one thing I did see, more and more plainly: that it was impossible for the most honorable men who had been bred up under the institution of slavery to deal at all times and altogether honorably with those they had all their lives regarded as chattels. Mr. H—— was one of the fairest and most sensible men in his speech whom I chanced to meet; and I believe that he was sincere,—or at least meant to be sincere. I made inquiries concerning him of his neighbors fifty miles around,—for every large planter knows every other, at least by reputation, within a circuit of several counties,—and all spoke of him as a just and upright man. No doubt if I had had dealings with him I should have found him so. He meant to give the freedmen their rights, but he was only beginning dimly to perceive that they had any rights; and when it came to treating a black man with absolute justice, he did not know the meaning of the word.
Mr. B——, of Monroe County, was a good sample of the hopeful class.
“We’re brushed out, and must begin new. I’ve lost as much as any other man, but it’s foolish to sit down and complain of that. I believe if Southern men will only take courage, and do their best, in five years the country will be more prosperous than ever. When you hear it said the country is ruined, and the niggers won’t work, the trouble is in them that make the complaint, and not in the niggers. My niggers say to me, ‘Massa Joe, we ought to work mo’e ’n we ever did befo’e; for once, we just worked for our victuals and clothes, and now we’re getting wages besides.’ And they’ll do it,—theyaredoing it. If you want a freedman to do what he promises, you’ve only to set him the example, and do by him just what you promise. I’ve a negro foreman on my plantation that has been with me twenty years; and I can trust him to manage just as far as I can trust myself.
“Talk about the country being ruined!” B—— went on: “I’m sick of such nonsense. Just look at it. I hire my freedmen by the year; I give four and five dollars a month to women, and seven and eight to men. A woman will do about two thirds as much work ploughing, hoeing, and picking as a man. For two months now I shall keep my women spinning and making clothes, and my men cutting and hauling wood to the steamboats, for which I get four dollars a cord. That will pay their wages and more. Then what have we got to do the rest of the year? Make a crop of cotton. If we don’t make more than a quarter of a crop, it will pay handsomely, at present prices; but it’s my opinion we shall make a good crop. I used to find it profitable to pay a hundred and fifty dollars a year for slaves, with cotton at ten cents a pound; and if I can’t make money now, I’m a fool.”
A Mobile merchant, overhearing this talk, remarked: “You are the most hopeful man, Mr. B——, I ever saw. I don’t know but what you say is true; but it won’t do to talk it very loud, so they’ll hear it on the other side of the water. It’s our policy to talk the other way, and keep the prices up.”
B—— assured me that the majority of the planters in Monroe County were of his way of thinking. They had formed an Agricultural Association, the object of which was “to protect and preserve the colored population, by furnishing them employment and ministering to their wants and necessities.” The constitution adopted by this association breathes such a different spirit from the serf-codes of Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina, that it is refreshing and encouraging to refer to it. I quote some of its provisions:—
“Article6th. It shall be the duty of the Executive Committee to look after the welfare of the freedmen, in their respective beats, to inspect and sanction each and every contract made between the freedmen and their employers, and to see that said freedmen are not deceived or overreached in any contract made with the employer.... And when any contract, as aforesaid, shall be fairly and understandingly made, it shall be the law between the parties thereto, and when any difficulty arises between any freedman and his white employer,relative to the construction or performance of any contract, said committeeman may act as arbitrator between the parties, and his decision shall be final, unless one or both of the parties desire an appeal.
“Art.8th. It shall be the duty of all the officers of this Association, to see that the freedman shall receive from his employer his wages or earnings, and in case such employer refuses to pay promptly such wages and earnings, to aid the freedman by their full power in the collection of the same.
“Art.9th. It shall also be the duty of this Association, and particularly the officers thereof, to see that the freedman shall comply with his contracts with his employer unless he can show some good or reasonable excuse for the non-performance.
“Art.13th. It shall be the duty of the said Association to provide a home for the aged and helpless freedmen of the county, and for such others as are unable to make an honest support, and to see that they are provided with the necessaries of life,—to devise ways and means for their permanent relief and support.
“Art.15th. It shall be the duty of this Association, and all the officers thereof, to favor, as much as possible, the education and schooling of the colored children in said county, and to aid in devising ways and means, and making arrangements for having said children properly taught and their general morals taken care of.”
The association taxed itself for the purpose of carrying out the provisions of its constitution. Every planter in Monroe County had joined it. General Swayne, Assistant-Commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau for Alabama, had approved its action, and appointed its president superintendent of freedmen for that county. “The thing is working admirably,” said B——. “The planters are encouraged, and the freedmen are contented and at work.”
I said to him: “If all the members of the association are as sincere as yourself, and will perform what they promise; if all the counties in the State will follow the example of Monroe; and if other States will follow the example of Alabama, there will be no longer any trouble about reconstruction: the great problem of the country will be solved.”
He said he believed so, and was sure the association would act in good faith. And I heard afterwards that Conecuh County had already followed the example of Monroe.