COTTON HANDS

So far cotton cultivation has been considered as though it were a crop which came of itself, like the rubber of the Brazilian forests, but during a whole century the cultivation of cotton has had a direct influence on the labor system and the whole social organization of the South. Such close relations sometimes exist in other commodities; for instance, the election of President McKinley, in 1896, seems to have been determined by a sudden rise in the price of wheat; but cotton is socially and politically important every year, because upon it the greater part of the negro labor is employed, and to it a large portion of the white management and capital is devoted.

Furthermore, the conditions of the old slavery times are more nearly reproduced in the cotton field than anywhere else in the South. The old idea that the normal function of the African race is field labor is still vital; and the crude and unskilled mass of Negroes still find employment in which they succeed tolerably well. As in slavery times, the cotton hands are more fixed in their locality than in other pursuits; they are less ambitious to move about, and find their way more close hedged in if they try to go elsewhere. The relation of the white man as task-master to the Negro as a deferential class is still distinctly maintained; while the system of advances to laborers resembles the old methods of feeding the hands.

The Negro is not the sole cotton maker; fully one third of the cotton in the South is never touched by a black hand, being raised by small white farmers both in the lowlands and in the hill regions, who produce one, two, or more bales a year and depend upon that crop to pay their store bills. Something like one sixth of the crop is raised by independent negro land owners or renters working for themselves; this leaves nearly or quite one half the crop to negro labor under the superintendence of white owners or managers.

Even where the Negro is employed on wages, he looks on himself as part of the concern and expects due consideration in return for what Stone calls the “proprietary interest he feels in the plantation at large, his sense of being part and parcel of a large plantation. Then, too, there is his never-failing assurance of ability to pay his account, no matter how large, by his labor, when it is not too wet or too cold, his respect, and his implicit and generally cheerful obedience.”

Inasmuch as more than half the Negroes are raising cotton, and most of the others are working on farms, it is important to know what kind of laborers they make. It is the opinion of their greatest leader, Booker Washington, that the best place for the Negro is in the rural South, and that he is not fitted for the strife of the great cities South or North. Is he perfectly fitted for any service? Is it true, as one of the employers of Negroes alleges, that “their actions have no logical or reasonable basis, that they are notional and whimsical, and that they are controlled far more by their fancies than by their common sense?”In cotton culture there is little to elevate a man. One of the numerous errors flying about is that the slave in the cotton fields was a skilled laborer, and that there is intellectual training in planting, weeding, and picking. The owner or renter must of course accustom his mind to consider the important questions of the times of plowing and seeding, and he must submit to the anxiety which besets the farmer all over the world; but cotton culture is a monotonous thing, the handling of the few tools is at best a matter of dexterity, and the only man who gets an intellectual training out of it is the manager. When cotton is high, a plantation is a more or less speculative investment, and many people who save money put it into land and hire a manager. Cotton broking and banking firms sometimes carry on plantations of their own. City bankers and heavy men get plantations on mortgage, or by purchase; and banks sometimes own too much of this kind of property.

Of course many planters run their own plantations; but on all large estates, and many small ones, there is a manager who is virtually the old overseer over again. Commonly he is a good specimen of the lower class of the white population; in a very few cases he is a Negro. Successful managers command a salary as high as $3,000 a year or more, and have some opportunity to plant on their own account; business sense such a man must have, but above all he must be able to “handle niggers,” an art in which, by common consent, most Northern owners of cotton land are wanting. On a large plantation there will also be one or more assistant managers, commonly called “riders”; a bookkeeper, who may be an important functionary; a plantation doctor, sometimes on contract, sometimes times taking patients as they come and charging their bills on the books of the plantation. On one plantation employing a hundred and thirty Italian families there is even a plantation priest.

The manager subdivides the estate into plots, or “plows”—you hear the expression “he has a fifteen-plow farm”—of from ten to thirty-five acres, according to the number of working hands in the squad that takes it. A “one-mule farm” is about thirty acres. He settles what crop shall be grown; some insist that part of the acreage be planted in corn, others raise all the corn for the estate on land worked by day hands. The secret of success is unceasing watchfulness of all the details, and especially of the labor of the hands.

Outside of the administrative force and their families there are commonly no white people on a cotton plantation. The occasional white hands make the same kind of contracts, live in the same houses, and accept the same conditions as the Negroes; but their number is small and they are likely to drift out either into cotton mills or into sawmill and timber work. The foreign agricultural laborers, as has been shown in the chapter on immigration, are few in number. The Germans, the so-called Austrians, the few Bulgarians, Greeks, Syrians, and Italians, all taken together, are probably less than 10,000, and there seems little reason to suppose that their number will soon increase. The main source of plantation labor has always been the Negroes who furnish about two million workers on other people’s land, and with their families make up more than half of all the Negroes in the United States.

With their families—for the unit on the plantation is not a hand, but a family, or where three or four unmarried men or unmarried women work together, a gang. This practice, combined with the child labor in cotton mills, accounts for the large number of persons under fifteen years old—more than half the boys in some states—who are employed in gainful occupations. This is one of the most striking divergences from any kind of Northern farming where plenty of farmers’ wives ride the mowing machine, and farmers’ sisters pick fruit, and farmers’ children drop potatoes, where foreign women often work in garden patches, but where people do not habitually employ women and children at heavy field labor.

The best Negroes, unless they own land of their own, seek the form of contract most advantageous to themselves, paying either a money rent of two dollars to eight dollars an acre, or an equivalent cotton rent. It is generally believed that the renters are the people most likely to save money and buy property for themselves. In Dunleith, Mississippi, a crew of seven people came in with a hundred dollars’ worth of property, and three years later went away with more than a thousand dollars’ worth of accumulated stock, tools and personal property. A renter must have animals of his own, and is obliged to feed them and to keep up his tools. Some planters find that renters leave them just as they are doing well, and that the land is skinned by them. In general, however, a Negro who has the necessary mules can always find a chance to rent land.

The share hand or cropper is next in point of thrift; the planter furnishes him house, wood, seed, animals, and implements; and at the end of the year the value of the crop is divided between owner and tenant, either half and half or “three fifths and four fifths,” which means that the Negro gets three fifths of the cotton and four fifths of the corn.

A third class is the wage hands, who in general have not the ability to rent land on any terms; they receive a house and fuel, and wages, from fifteen dollars a month up to a dollar a day. Where steady wage hands can be found, this is considered the best arrangement for the planter.

Renters and croppers may be supplemented by extra work, paid for by them, or charged to them. If they get into a tight place with their cotton, the manager sends wage hands to their aid, and at picking time all available help of all ages is scraped together and sent out according to the needs of the plantation. Of course, a renter or a “cropper” may allow members of his family to work for others, if he cannot keep them busy. On some plantations tenants pay on an average nearly a hundred dollars a year for this extra help.

During the five years from 1903 to 1907 there was a phenomenal demand for cotton hands, and planters were eager to get anybody that looked like work; hence the Negro had the agreeable sensation of seeing people compete for him. Of course, if, at the “change of the year” (January 1st), the Negro moves to one planter, he moves away from another, and the man thus left behind has gloomy view of the fickleness and instability of the negro race. One of the best managed plantations in the Delta of Mississippi, supposed to be very profitable, has seen such a shift that at the end of five years hardly one of the original hands was on the place. Other planters in that region equally successful in making money say that they have little or no trouble with negro families moving, and there seems no good reason to believe that they are more restless than any other laborers. It is, of course, highly discouraging for a planter who has made every effort by improved houses, just treatment and clear accounts, to satisfy his people, to see them slipping away to neighbors who are notoriously hard, unjust, and shifty. While he remains on a plantation, the Negro feels, says a planter, “the certainty, in his own mind, that he himself is necessary to its success.”

It is this dissatisfaction with the negro laborer which has led to the efforts, described above, to bring in foreigners, efforts which have been so far quite unsuccessful, first, because the number of people that could be induced to come is too small to affect the South, and secondly, because few of them mean to remain as permanent day laborers. Since the South seems better fitted than any other part of the earth for the cultivation of cotton, since at any price above six cents a pound there is some profit in the business, and at the prices prevailing during the last five years a large profit, it seems certain that the Negro will be steadily desired as a cotton hand; and the question comes down to that suggested by Nicholas Worth: “There ought to be a thousand schools, it seemed to me, that should have the aim of Hampton. Else how could the negroes—even a small percentage of them—ever be touched by any training at all? And if they were not to be trained in a way that would make the cotton fields cleaner and more productive, how should our upbuilding go on? For it must never be forgotten that the very basis of civilization here is always to be found in cotton.”

If the master sometimes is dissatisfied with the laborer, the Negro in his turn has his own complaints, which Booker Washington has summed up as follows: “Poor dwelling-houses, loss of earnings each year because of unscrupulous employers, high-priced provisions, poor schoolhouses, short school terms, poor school-teachers, bad treatment generally, lynchings and whitecapping, fear of the practice of peonage, a general lack of police protection, and want of encouragement.” In this list several of the items refer to the plantation system of accounts, which cannot be understood without some explanation of the advance system.

In slavery times plantation owners got into the habit of spending their crop before it was grown, and that is still the practice of by far the greater number of cotton planters and farmers, large and small. In flush times agents of large cotton brokers and wholesale establishments literally press check books into the hands of planters and invite them to use credit or cash to their hearts’ content. There is some justification in the system as applied to cotton culture, which over large areas is the only sale crop; and under which (for the same system runs down to the very bottom) the planters themselves are in the habit of making advances to their tenants and hands. The white and negro land owner commonly make arrangements “to be furnished” by the nearest country storekeeper; or by a store or bank, or white friend in the nearest city. On the plantation, the planter himself commonly furnishes his own hands, and has a store or “commissary” for that purpose. Neither banker nor planter expects to lose money; both are subject to heavy deductions by the failure of planters and the departure of hands, and hence they recoup themselves from those who will pay. The effect is, of course, that when the cotton is sold and accounted for, the planter and his hand alike may not have any surplus to show, and begin the new year in debt. And the same round may be gone over again year by year during a lifetime.

The system is enforced by lien loans, through which the crop is the security for the loan, and in addition it is customary for the small farmer to mortgage mules, tools, and whatever else he may have. As Stone explains: “The factor’s method of self-protection is to take a deed of trust on the live stock and prospective crop, and is the same whether the applicant be a two-mule Negro renter, or the white owner of a thousand acres of land, wanting ten thousand dollars of advances.... There is, however, this difference: the white man gets his advances in cash, available at stated intervals, while the Negro gets the most of his in the shape of supplies.” Many people believe that the whole crop lien system is an incentive to debt, that if it were abolished people would have to depend upon their character and credit; and hence a determined effort was made in South Carolina in 1908 to repeal the lien law outright.

The obvious defects of this system, the tendency to extravagance, the not knowing where you stand, the prevention of saving habits, are aggravated for the Negro because the white man keeps the books. The Negro is accustomed to be charged prices which in many cases are a half higher than the cash price of the same article in the nearby stores; he knows that there will be an interest charge at the rate of from ten per cent to forty per cent on his running account, and he suspects (sometimes with reason) that the bookkeeping is careless or fraudulent. Some planters make a practice of ending the settlement of every account with a row, and the consequent frame of mind of the Negro is illustrated by a stock story. A Negro has been trading with a local merchant and goes to a new store because they offer twelve pounds of sugar for a dollar instead of ten. On his way back he passes the old place, where they ask him in, weigh up his sugar, and show him that he has actually only nine pounds instead of twelve. “Yes, boss, dat’s so, but after all, perhaps he didn’t get the best of it; while he was weighing out that sugar, I slips dis yere pair of shoes into my basket.”The story precisely illustrates the futility of cheating the Negro; for whenever he thinks his accounts are juggled, he will see to it that his labor is no more conscientious than the bookkeeper’s. Many of the really long-headed planters see that the less the relations of employer and hand are matters of favor, and the more they become affairs of business, the easier it will be to get on with their hands. Many of them have a fixed basis for advances, not more than about fifteen dollars a month for a family, and that in provisions only; others keep no book accounts for such advances, but issue coupon books of say fifteen dollars every month. A few pay their wage hands and give out the advances in cash, allowing people to buy where they will. A very few decline to have anything to do with advances in any form; but inasmuch as the Negroes must eat, in such cases the hands usually get somebody else to furnish them. Some planters close up their accounts at the end of the year, compelling the Negroes to turn in whatever they have in property to close out their accounts, and then start in afresh.

All these are only palliatives; the net effect of the system of advances to hands is to accentuate the industrial character of the cotton plantation. A big plantation in central Alabama or the Delta of Mississippi cannot be compared with any Northern farms, nor even with the great ranches of California; it is very like a coal mine back in a cove of the mountains of Pennsylvania; the same forlorn houses, the same company store, the same system of store orders and charges; only the coal mine sells its product from day to day and pays any differences in cash at the end of the month, while the cotton hand must wait till his particular bale is sold at the end of the season, before he can draw his profit. The Negro is therefore less likely than the miner to lay tip money, and is even more at the mercy of the company’s bookkeeper.

Here is an actual annual account of a plantation family in the Delta of Mississippi, two adults and one child, poor workers:

These people got their living and sixty-six dollars in cash and credit during the year; but the charge for extra labor shows that they were shiftless and did not work out their own crop. On the same plantation an industrious family of three adults and one child earned in a year $974, of which $450 was net cash.

An examination of various plantation accounts reveals the fact that the actual earnings of the negro hands, if industrious, are considerably greater than the average for the Pennsylvania miners, but of course the whole family works in the fields. The renters could do still better if they had money enough to carry them through the year; on a prosperous plantation in Arkansas, only about one fortieth of all the negro gangs kept off the books of the company and drew their earnings in cash at the end of the year, while two thirds of the Italians employed on the same plantation had no store accounts. In fact there is some complaint that the Italians club together and buy their provisions at wholesale.

The advance system is complicated by a system of “Christmas Money.” You hear planters bitterly cursing the Negroes who have demanded $25, $50, or $100 to spend at Christmas time, as though the money were not charged against the Negro to be deducted at the end of the year; and as though it were not so advanced in order to induce the Negro to make a contract with them. Many planters refuse to give Christmas money and yet fill up their plantation houses. It is all part of a vicious system; the wage hands have to be paid somehow, though often not completely paid up till the end of the year; the share hands and renters are carried by the planter because they always have been carried; and because bad planters can take advantage of this opportunity to squeeze their hands. The difficulty is one known in other lands; in Ceylon, for instance, the laborers on tea and rubber estates draw advances, carry debts which have to be assumed by a new employer, trade at a “caddy,” which is the same thing as a commissary, and complain of the accounts.

The system is just as vicious for the small land owners both negro and white. Most Southern states under their crop lien law allow the growing crop to be mortgaged for cash or advances, and hence any farmer has credit for supplies or loans up to the probable value of the crop when marketed. That value is variable, the advances are clogged with interest and overcharges, and the whole system is a heavy draft on the country. There are money sharks in the Southern country as well as in the Northern cities, and many scandalous transactions. One man in Alabama has 2,500 Negroes on his books for loans, in some cases for a loan of $5 with interest charges of $1.50 a month. Cases have been known where a Negro brought to a plantation his mules and stock, worked a season, and at the end saw all his crop of cotton taken, and his property swept up, including the mules, which are exempt by law. Many back plantations take the seed for the ginning—that is, they exact more than twice what the service is worth. A Negro has been known to borrow say $200; when it was not paid, the white lender seized on all his possessions, and without going through any legal formality gave him credit for $100, leaving the balance of the debt hanging over his head. A peddler has been known to insist on leaving a clock at the house of a poor colored woman who protested that she did not want a clock, could not afford a clock and would not take a clock. The man drove off, returned some months later, demanded payment for the clock which was just where he left it, never having been started, and when the money was not forthcoming proceeded to take away the woman’s chickens—her poor little livelihood. She ran to a white neighbor, who came back with her and turned the scoundrel out. There is first and last much of this advantage taken of the ignorance and poverty of the Negro; a certain type of planter declares that he can make more money out of an ignorant black than out of an educated one. As one of the white friends of the colored race in the South says, the Negroes must receive at least sufficient education to enable them to protect themselves against such exaction.

Considering the immense importance of cotton to the South, it is amazing how wasteful is its culture and its distribution. Experts say that a great part of the cost of fertilizers could be saved by cultivating the cow pea. About six per cent of the value of the fiber—a trifle of forty million dollars—is seriously injured by ginning. Comparatively few farmers or planters select their seed, though several of the Southern agricultural colleges have set up cotton schools, and the president of the Mississippi Agricultural and Mechanical College has actually begun to hold farmers’ institutes for the negro farmers. The cotton bale is probably the most careless package used for a valuable product. It sometimes literally drops to pieces before it reaches the consumer; and of course the grower, in the long run, loses by the poor quality or the poor packing of his product. The grading of cotton requires that a large quantity be brought together in one place, and the small grower gets little advantage out of improvement in his staple.

What the South most needs in cotton is the improvement of the labor. As President Hardy, of the Mississippi Agricultural College, says: “So many of our negroes are directing their own work that their efficiency must be preserved and increased or great injury will result to our whole economic system. The prosperity of our section as a whole is affected by the productive capacity of every individual in our midst. The negro’s inefficiency is a great financial drain on the South, and I believe this farmers’ institute work for the negro is the beginning of a permanent policy that will be very far-reaching in its results. There is no doubt that this is one of the ways of increasing the cotton production of the country that has heretofore received very little attention.”

It remains to consider the relation of the race question to cotton manufacture. Long before the Civil War it was seen that the Southern staple was being sent to foreign countries and to the North to be manufactured, and that the South was buying back its own material in cotton goods; therefore some cotton mills were constructed in the South. The labor in these mills seems to have been entirely white, but their product, which was of the coarser qualities, was never large enough to control the market. About 1880 came a new era of cotton manufacture, aided first by the extension of the railway system, second by the development of water power, and third by the discovery that the poor whites make a tolerable mill population. Hence grew up a chain of flourishing factory towns, most of them on or near the “fall line,” so as to take advantage of the water powers, and there has been a steady growth of Southern manufactures. In 1887 the Southern mills worked up only 400,000 bales, which was one fifth of the staple used for manufactures in the United States. Twenty years later they were making up 2,400,000 bales, which was one half the consumption. The state of South Carolina alone in 1905 produced manufactures to the amount of $79,000,000.

The first thing to notice in this manufacture is that the mill hands are still exclusively white. Several efforts have been made in Columbia, Charleston, and elsewhere to carry on cotton mills with negro labor, and a few negro capitalists have built mills in which they expected to employ people of their own race; but every one of these experiments seems to have been a failure, partly because of the ignorance of the average Negro who could be drawn into the industry, and partly because of his irregularity. The Poor Whites do not make by any means the best mill help, and their output of yards per hand is considerably less than that in the Northern states. The supply of white labor also shows signs of depletion, though Mountain Whites are being brought down; it is still a question whether they will settle in the new places, or whether after they have saved money they will return to their mountains. Hence the frantic efforts to bring in mill hands from outside the South. Northern hands will not accept a lower wage scale and do not like the social conditions. It is plain that the Southern cotton manufacture is entirely dependent upon the supply of native white labor.

Notwithstanding the great growth of cotton manufacture in the South, the fine qualities are still made elsewhere; and the capital employed, the total wages paid, and the value of output are much greater in the North. The value of the product in South Carolina rose between 1890 and 1905 from $10,000,000 to $50,000,000, but in the same period the value in Massachusetts rose from $100,000,000 to $130,000,000. The output of cotton goods in Columbia, $5,000,000 is less than half the output of Nashua, New Hampshire. The New England states still furnish nearly one half the output of cotton manufactures, measured by value. The Northern states as a whole pay $65,000,000 a year for wages against $27,000,000 in the South; and their product is $270,000,000 against $268,000,000 in the South. It is evident, therefore, that the scepter for cotton manufacture has not yet passed into the hands of the South.

The discussion of the economic forces and tendencies of the South in the last three chapters may now be briefly recapitulated. The South is a prosperous and advancing region on the highway to wealth, but advancing rather more slowly than other agricultural sections of the country, and in material wealth far behind the West and farther behind the Middle states and New England. It will be several decades before the South can possibly have as much accumulation as that now in possession of the region which most resembles it in the United States, the Middle West and Far West. Of its sources of wealth, the timber is temporary, mining and iron making limited in area. The chief employment must always be agriculture, and particularly cotton. Cotton culture on a large scale, as now carried on, is an industrial enterprise in which the laborer is likely to be exploited. The advance system is a curse to the South, inciting to extravagance and leading to dreams of wealth not yet created; it is especially bad for the Negro, who is at his best as a renter, or still more as the owner of land. Economically the progress of the negro laborer is very slow, but he is absolutely necessary to the welfare of the South, for no substitute can be discerned.