MAKING COTTON

“The South holds a call upon the world’s gold to the extent of $450,000,000 to $500,000,000 for the cotton which it will this year furnish to Europe.... This money, whether paid in actual gold or in other ways, will so strengthen the financial situation, not only of the South, but of New York and the country at large, as to make the South the saving power in American financial interests. No other crop on earth is of such far-reaching importance to any other great country as cotton is to the United States.”

This extract from the Manufacturers’ Record is a somewhat grandiloquent statement of the conviction of the South that it possesses a magnificent cotton monopoly which no other part of the world can ever rival; that with proper foresight and with courage, the South may corner the world’s market in the staple, and fix a price which will insure prosperity. In a country full of natural resources of many kinds, with a soil on which corn may be grown almost as good as in Indiana, where cattle can be raised and dairies may be established, the chief aim and object of life is to “make cotton.” The talk of small farmers is cotton; every country merchant of any standing is a cotton buyer; and most of the large wholesale houses and banks are interested in cotton.

In all the large cities and some of the small ones are cotton exchanges at which are posted on immense blackboards the day’s data for “Receipts at Ports,” “Overland to Mills and Canada,” “Current Stock,” “Southern Mill Takings,” “Total in Sight to Date,” “World’s Possible Supply,” and so on. The federal Census Bureau publishes from time to time estimates of the acreage and condition of cotton, which so affect the markets that great efforts have sometimes been made to bribe the officials to reveal the figures before they are published. The Census Office issues periodical reports showing the number of bales of cotton ginned throughout the South.

This is the more remarkable because cotton is not the principal product of the South, nor even the major crop of the rural sections; but the size and public handling of the crop carry away men’s imagination. Timber, turpentine, mining, and iron making, taken together, produce a larger annual value than cotton. The total value of all other crops in 1907 was $758,000,000, which was about $90,000,000 more than the value of the cotton crop. The corn alone was over $485,000,000, or over two thirds the value of the cotton. Hay ($92,000,000), wheat, tobacco, oats, and potatoes make up $272,000,000 more. Though the Lower South grew only 9,000,000 bushels of wheat, rice, cultivated on rather a small scale in South Carolina, is a crop of growing importance in Louisiana and Texas. The South raises no sugar beets, little flaxseed, and not a twentieth of the wool; but the sugar and molasses are worth nearly $20,000,000. Trucking or the raising of vegetables, chiefly for the Northern market, is said to employ 700,000 freight cars in the season. The South has also about 15,000,000 cattle, 6,000,000 sheep, and 15,000,000 pigs, all of which are independent of cotton except that to some degree cotton seed is the food for stock.When all has been said, however, the typical Southern industry is cotton, upon the raising of which certainly nearly half of the population is concentrated, and it constitutes about a fourth of the whole annual product of the South. The field of the cotton industry extends from the foot of the mountains to the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts; and the Southern social problem is to a very large degree the problem of cotton raising under a system by which one race includes practically all the masters, and the other furnishes almost all the laborers for hire.

The history of cotton is in itself romantic. In 1790, about 4,000 bales were raised; in 1800, 150,000; in 1820, 600,000; in 1840, over 2,000,000. In 1860 there was a tremendous crop of nearly 5,000,000 bales, a figure not reached again until 1879. In 1904 the crop was 13,700,000 bales—an amount not equaled since. The price of cotton has of late ruled much lower than in the first half of the century, when it sometimes ran up as high as 30 cents a pound. The 1860 crop brought about 11 cents. In 1898 the average price was about 6 cents, and some cotton sold as low as 3 cents, but the enormous crop of 1904 brought about 12 cents, and it has ruled higher since. In 1908 the slackening of the world’s demand caused the price to drop, but it has risen again to the highest point for thirty years.

The significance of the cotton crop is to be calculated not by the Liverpool market, but by its remarkable effect on the life of the South. One reason for its importance is that it can be grown on a great variety of land. Most of the best American long staple, the Sea Island, comes from a limited area off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, in which a seed trust has been formed by the local planters to prevent anybody outside their narrow limits from raising that grade; for if the seed is renewed every few years, the fiber can be profitably raised on land now covered by the piney woods. Another variety of the long staple, the Floradora, is raised inland. The river bottoms and deltas of the numerous streams flowing into the Gulf of Mexico are a rich field for cotton, especially along the Mississippi river; but the Black Belt of the interior of Georgia and Alabama is almost equally productive; and the piney woods district and considerable parts of the uplands may be brought under cotton cultivation.

Northerners do not understand the significance of the fertilizer in cotton culture. George Washington was one of the few planters of his time who urged his people to restore the vitality of their land as fast as they took it out; but rare was the planter up to the Civil War who raised cattle, and the imported guano from the rocky islets of the Gulf and Pacific was little used. Then in the seventies discoveries were made of phosphate rocks in the estuaries of the Carolina rivers; and later, inland deposits in Tennessee. From these, with some admixture of imported materials, are made commercial fertilizers which have become indispensable to a large number of the cotton farmers, so that they are now spending 20 millions a year on that alone, every dollar of which is expected to add at least a dollar and a half to the value of the crop.

The word “plantation” has come to have a special meaning in Northern ears. It brings to the mind the great colonnaded mansion house with trim whitewashed negro quarters grouped about it, the pickaninnies running to open the gate for the four-in-hand bringing the happy guests, while back in the cotton field the overseer rides to and fro cracking his blacksnake whip. That kind of plantation is not altogether a myth. For instance, at Hermitage, just outside of Savannah, you see a brick mansion of a few large rooms, built a hundred years ago, surrounded by attractive sunken gardens, and one of the most superb groves of live oaks in the South; and near it are the original little brick slave cabins of one room and a chimney.

That kind of elaborate place was rare; in most cases the ante-bellum planter’s house was a modest building, and nowadays very few large planters live regularly on the plantation. If the place is profitable enough, the family lives in the nearest town or city; if it is unprofitable, sooner or later the banks get it and the family goes down; even where the old house is preserved, it is likely to be turned over to the manager, or becomes a nest for the colored people. Inasmuch as cotton raising is an industrial enterprise, plantations are apt to change hands, or the owners may put in new managers; so that the ante-bellum feeling of personal relation between the owner and the field hand plays little part in modern cotton making.

The modern plantation can more easily be described than analyzed; the term is elastic; a young man will tell you that he has “bought a plantation” which upon inquiry comes down to a little place of less than a hundred acres with two houses. The distinction between a “farm” and a “plantation” seems to be that the latter term is applied to a place on which there is a body of laborers (almost universally Negroes) managed, with very few exceptions, by white men and devoted principally to one crop.

Individual plantation holdings vary in size from the thirty thousand acres of Bell, the central Alabama planter, down to fifty acres. Many large owners have scattered plantations, sometimes as many as twenty or thirty, each carried on by itself; or two or three adjacent groups under one manager. You are informed that the X brothers “own thirty-three plantations,” which probably means thirty-three different large farms, ranging from two hundred to two thousand acres each. Three to five thousand acres of land under cultivation is as large a body of land as seems advantageous to handle together.

A fair example of the large plantation in the best cotton lands is the estate managed by Mr. Dayton near Jonesville, La., on the Tensas and Little rivers. It is an expanse of that incredibly rich land, of which there are millions of acres in this enormous delta, land which has in many places produced fifty to seventy-five successive crops of cotton without an ounce of fertilizer. Between the rivers, which are fenced off by levees, lie the fields, originally all wooded, but in these old plantations even the roots have disappeared from the open fields, although wherever the plantation is enlarged the woods have to be cleared, and the gaunt and fire-scarred dead trunks mark the progress of cultivation.

The negro houses stand in the middle of the field; for on modern plantations it is very rare to gather the hands in quarters near the great house; their cabins are distributed all over the estate. On the main road is a manager’s house, distinctly better than any of the negro cabins. Near by a white family is moving in where a black family has moved out, for this plantation (though the thing is uncommon) has a few white hands working alongside the Negroes. In this free open, in the breadth of the fields and the width of the turbid streams, alongside the endless procession of scenic forests in the background, one forgets the long hot days of toil, the scanty living, the ignorance and debasement. It may all be as sordid as the mines or the iron works, but it is in pure air. These thousands of broad acres with their mealy brown soil bearing the “cotton-weed” (the common name for the stalk after the cotton is picked) are a type of the lowland South from Texas to North Carolina.

A plantation of somewhat different type is “Sunny Side” in Arkansas, nearly opposite the city of Greenville, Miss. “Sunny Side” is supposed by some people to be extravagantly conducted because there are three or four good managers’ houses on the estate, and because there is twenty-three miles of light railway track. Considering that the plantation runs eight and a half miles along the river, and that all its products and supplies would otherwise need to be hauled, there is a reason for the railroad, whose one little locomotive fetches and carries like a well-trained dog; and it is a special privilege of all the people employed on the estate and of visitors to ride back and forth as their occasions require. “Sunny Side,” with an adjacent estate under the same management, comprises about 12,000 acres, of which 4,700 acres, including broad hay lands and extensive corn fields, are under cultivation, and the remainder is in timber; considerable areas have been cleared in recent years. The annual cotton crop is about 2,500 bales. As on most plantations, the houses of the hands are distributed so that nobody has far to go to his work. Twenty to thirty acres is commonly assigned to a family; more to a large family, and the lands rented at from $6 to $8 an acre, according to quality, with the usual plantation privileges of firewood, a house, and pasture for draft animals.

Here comes in one of the most important complications in cotton culture. Northern wheat is usually grown by farmers tilling moderate-sized farms, either as owners or as money renters; a third or more of the cotton is raised in the same way by farmers or small planters who till for themselves or employ a few families of hands; and like the wheat farmers they look on the land as a tool. On the large plantations, where perhaps as many as a thousand people are busied on the crop, the manager looks upon the laborer simply as an element of production; you must have seed, rain, and the niggers in order to get a crop. Even the most kind-hearted and conscientious plantation owner cannot avoid this feeling that the laborers are, like the live-stock, a part of the implements; he houses them, and if humane and far-sighted, he houses them better than the mules; he “furnishes them”—that is, he agrees to feed them and allow them necessities while the crop is making. All this is practically the factory system, with the unfavorable addition that the average plantation hand comes near the category of unskilled labor. A Negro brought up on one plantation can do just as well in a plantation ten or a thousand miles away; and there is no subdivision of labor except for the few necessary mechanics. That is, cotton planting on a large plantation is an industrial enterprise requiring considerable capital, trained managers, and a large plant of buildings, tools, animals and Negroes.

A characteristic of cotton culture is that it requires attention and keeps the hands busy during the greater part of the year. The first process is to break the ground, which begins as early as January 1st, then about March or April the seed is dropped in long rows, and during the seeding season the rural schools are likely to stop so as to give the children the opportunity to help. In the seed there is great room for improvement; as yet the Southern agricultural colleges seem to have made less impression on the cotton grower than their brethren in the Northwestern states have made on the corn and wheat farming, for some large and otherwise intelligent planters make very little effort to select their seed.

When the cotton is once up, it needs the most patient care, for it must be weeded and thinned and watched, and is gone over time after time. The “riders” or assistant managers are in the saddle all day long, and a prudent manager casts his eye on every plot of cultivated ground on his plantation every day; for it is easy to “get into the grass,” and all but the best of the hands need to be kept moving.

Then comes the picking of the cotton, which lasts from August into February. It is a planter’s maxim that no negro family can pick the cotton that it can raise, and extra help has to be found. Here is one of the large items of expense in raising cotton, for the fields have to be gone over two, three, and sometimes four times, inasmuch as the cotton does not all mature at the same time, and if it did, no machine has ever been invented which is practical for picking cotton. It is hand work to the end of the year. There is a plantation saying that it takes thirteen months to make a cotton crop, and it is true that plowing for the next crop begins on some parts of the plantation before the last of the two or three pickings is completed on other parts. When picked, the cotton goes into little storehouses or into the cabins, until enough accumulates to keep the gin busy.

Everybody in the great cotton districts talks about “A bale to the acre” as a reasonable yield, but one of the richest counties of Mississippi averages only half a bale, and the whole South averages about a third of a bale. What is a bale? The “seed cotton,” so called, as it comes from the field, has the brown seeds in the midst of the fiber, and the first process is to gin it—that is to take out the seed, and at the same time to make it into the standard package for handling. This requires machinery, originally invented by that ingenious Yankee schoolmaster, Eli Whitney. There are about 38,000 of these ginneries, some having one poor little old gin, others five or six of the latest machines side by side, with air suction and other labor-saving devices. It is an interesting sight to see the fluffy stuff wafted up into the gin with its row of saw-teeth, and then blown to the press, where a plunger comes down time after time until the man who runs it judges that about five hundred pounds have accumulated; then another plunger comes up from below; the rectangular mass thus formed is enveloped in rough sacking and fastened with iron cotton ties. The completed bale is then turned out, weighed, numbered, stamped, and recorded; and becomes one of the thirteen million units of the year’s crop; but the number identifies it, and any particular bale of cotton may be traced back to the plantation from which it came and even to the negro family that raised it. Sea Island cotton has a much woodier plant, and the seed cotton contains less lint and more numerous although smaller seeds; hence it requires special picking, a special gin, cannot be so compressed, and must be much more carefully bagged. Sea Island cotton at 23 cents a pound is thought to be no more profitable than the short staple at less than half the price.

About 1897 a great effort was made to substitute a round bale, weighing about half as much as the standard bale, and in 1902 the output reached nearly a million. It is still a question whether that package is not an improvement, but the machinery was more expensive, complaints were made that the round bale was harder to stow for export; the railroad companies refused to give any advantage in freight rates; and the compressor companies, who are closely linked in with the railroads, were opposed to it altogether; and the round bale has almost disappeared from the South. Only two per cent of the cotton is thus baled.

One of the things remarked by Duke Bernhard of Saxe Weimar, when he visited the South in 1824, was that the people seemed unaware that there was any value in cotton seed. Some planters put it on the field as a fertilizer, where it has some value; others threw it away. During the last twenty years, however, the cotton seed has become a great factor in the production. About one third the weight of the seed cotton is seed, and its value is over one tenth that of the baled cotton. In the high cotton year of 1906 the cotton seed was thought to be worth nearly ninety millions. Immense quantities go to the oil mills which are scattered through the South. Besides the clear oil they produce oil cake which is used as a food for animals or a fertilizer. The seed practically adds something more than a cent a pound to the value of the product.