Journeys and Explorations in the Cotton Kingdom: American Slavery Through Foreigner's Eyes. Frederick Law Olmsted
over the world, where a few very large prizes are promised and many very small ones, and the number of tickets is limited; these are always speculated on, and men will buy them at third and fourth hand at prices which, it is useless to demonstrate to them, must be extravagant. They go to the Jews and pledge the clothes on their back to get another biacchi to invest; they beggar themselves; they ruin their families; they risk damnation in their passionate eagerness to have a chance, when they know perfectly well that the average of chances is not worth a tithe of what they must pay for it.
The area of land on which cotton may be raised with profit is practically limitless; it is cheap; even the best land is cheap; but to the large planter it is much more valuable when held in large parcels, for obvious reasons, than when in small; consequently the best land can hardly be obtained in small tracts or without the use of a considerable capital. But there are millions of acres of land yet untouched, which if leveed and drained and fenced, and well cultivated, might be made to produce with good luck seven or more bales to the hand. It would cost comparatively little to accomplish it — one lucky crop would repay all the outlay for land and improvements — if it were not for " the hands." the supply of hands is limited. It does not increase in the ratio of the increase of the cotton demand. If cotton should double in price next year, or become worth its weight in gold, the number of negroes in the United States would not increase four per cent. Unless the African slave-trade were re-established. Now step into a dealer's "Jail" in Memphis, Montgomery, Vicksburg, or New Orleans, and you will hear the Mezzano of the cotton lottery crying his tickets in this way: "There's a cotton nigger for you! Genuine! Look at his toes! Look at his fingers! There's a pair of legs for you! If you have got the right sile and the right sort of overseer, buy him, and put your trust in providence! He's just as good for ten bales as I am for a julep at eleven o'clock." and this is just as true as that any-named horse is sure to win the derby. And so the price of good labourers is constantly gambled up to a point, where, if they produce ten bales to the hand, the purchaser will be as fortunate as he who draws the high prize of the lottery; where, if they produce seven bales to the hand, he will still be in luck; where, if rot, or worm, or floods, or untimely rains or frosts occur, reducing the crop to one or two bales to the hand, as is often the case, the purchaser will have drawn a blank.
That, all things considered, the value of the labour of slaves does not, on an average, by any means justify the price paid for it, is constantly asserted by the planters, and it is true. At least beyond question it is true, and I think that I have shown why, that there is no difficulty in finding purchasers for all the good slaves that can be got by traders, at prices considerably more than they are worth for the production of cotton under ordinary circumstances. The supply being limited, those who grow cotton on the most productive soils, and with the greatest advantages in all other respects, not only can afford to pay more than others, for all the slaves which can be brought into market, but they are driven to a ruinous competition among themselves, and slaves thus get a fictitious value like stocks "In a corner." the buyers indeed are often "Cornered," and it is only the rise which almost annually has occurred in the value of cotton that has hitherto saved them from general bankruptcy. Nearly all the large planters carry a heavy load of debt from year to year, till a lucky crop coincident with a rise in the price of cotton relieves them.
The whole number of slaves engaged in cotton culture at the census of 1850 was reckoned by De Bow to be 1,800,000, the crops at 2,400,000 bales, which is a bale and a third to each head of slaves. This was the largest crop between 1846 and 1852. Other things being equal, for reasons already indicated, the smaller the estate of slaves, the less is their rate of production per head; and, as a rule, the larger the slave estate the larger is the production per head. The number of slaves in cotton plantations held by owners of fifty and upwards is, as nearly as it can be fixed by the census returns, 420,000.
If these produce on an average only two and a half bales per head (man, woman, and child), and double this is not extraordinary on the large plantations of the south-west, it leaves an average for the smaller plantations of seven-eighths of a bale per head. These plantations are mostly in the interior, with long haulage and boatage to market. To the small planter in the interior, his cotton crop does not realize, as an average plantation price, more than seven cents a pound, or thirty dollars the bale. those who plant cotton in this small way usually raise a crop of corn, and some little else, not enough, take the country through, one year with another, to supply themselves and their slaves with food; certainly not more than enough to do so, on an average. To this the southern agricultural periodicals frequently testify. They generally raise nothing for sale, but cotton. And of cotton their sale, as has been shown, amounted in 1849 — a favourable year — to less than the value of twenty-five dollars for each slave, young and old, which they had kept through the year. deducting those who hold slaves only as domestic servants from the whole number of slaveholders returned by the census, more than half of all the slaveholders, and fully half of all the cotton-sellers, own each, not more than one family, on an average, of five slaves of all ages. the ordinary total cash income, then, in time of peace, of fully half our cotton-planters, cannot be reckoned at more than one hundred and twenty-five dollars, or, in extraordinary years, like the last, at, say, one hundred and fifty dollars. From this they must purchase whatever clothing and other necessaries they require for the yearly supply of an average of more than ten persons (five whites and five slaves), as well as obtain tools, mechanics' work and materials, and whatever is necessary for carrying on the work of a plantation, usually of some hundred acres, and must yet save enough to pay the fees of doctors, clergy, and lawyers, if they have had occasion to employ them, and their county and state taxes (we will say nothing of the education of their children, or of accumulations for the war expenses of the confederation). My personal experience of the style of living of the greater number of cotton-planters leads me to think this not an unfair estimate. It is mainly based upon the official returns and calculations of the united states census of 1850, as prepared by Mlr. De Bow, a leading secessionist, and it assumes nothing which is not conceded in the article on cotton in his resources of the south. A majority of those who sell the cotton crop of the united states must be miserably poor — poorer than the majority of our day-labourers at the North.
A similar calculation will indicate that the planters who own on an average two slave families each, can sell scarcely more than three hundred dollars' worth of cotton a year, on an average; which also entirely agrees with my observations. I have seen many a workman's lodging at the north, and in England too, where there was double the amount of luxury that I ever saw in a regular cotton-planter's house on plantations of three cabins.
The next class of which the census furnishes us means of considering separately, are planters whose slaves occupy, on an average, seven cabins, lodging five each on an average, including the house servants, aged invalids, and children. The average income of planters of this class, I reckon from similar data, to be hardly more than that of a private of the New York metropolitan police force. It is doubtless true that cotton is cultivated profitably, that is to say, so as to produce a fair rate of interest on the capital of the planter, on many plantations of this class; but this can hardly be the case on an average, all things considered.
It is not so with many plantations of the next larger class even, but it would appear to be so with these on an average; that is to say, where the quarters of a cotton plantation number half a score of cabins or more, which method of classification I use that travellers may the more readily recall their observations of the appearance of such plantations, when I think that their recollections will confirm these calculations. There are usually other advantages for the cultivation, cleaning, pressing, shipping, and disposing of cotton, by the aid of which the owner obtains a fair return for the capital invested, and may be supposed to live, if he knows how, in a moderately comfortable way. The whole number of slaveholders of this large class in all the slave states is, according to De Bow's compendium of the census, 7,929, among which are all the great sugar, rice, and tobacco-planters. Less than seven thousand, certainly, are cotton-planters.
A large majority of these live, when they live on their plantations at all, in districts, almost the only white population of which consists of owners and overseers of the same class of plantations with their own. The nearest other whites will be some sand-hill vagabonds, generally miles away, between whom and these planters, intercourse is neither intimate nor friendly.
It is hardly worth while