American Negro Slavery by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

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Within two or three weeks, as soon as the young plants had put forth three
or four leaves, thinning and cultivation was begun. Hoe hands, under
orders to chop carefully, stirred the crust along the rows and reduced the
seedlings to a "double stand," leaving only two plants to grow at each
interval of twelve or eighteen inches. The plows then followed, stirring
the soil somewhat deeply near the rows. In another fortnight the hoes gave
another chopping, cutting down the weaker of each pair of plants, thus
reducing the crop to a "single stand"; and where plants were missing they
planted fresh seed to fill the gaps. The plows followed again, with broad
wings to their shares, to break the crust and kill the grass throughout the
middles. Similar alternations of chipping and plowing then ensued until
near the end of July, each cultivation shallower than the last in order
that the roots of the cotton should not be cut.[4]

[Footnote 4: Cotton Culture is described by M.W. Philips in the _American
Agriculturist_, II (New York, 1843), 51, 81, 117, 149; by various writers
in J.A. Turner, ed., _The Cotton Planter's Manual_ (New York, 1856), chap.
I; Harry Hammond, _The Cotton Plant_ (U.S. Department of Agriculture,
Experiment Station, _Bulletin_ 33, 1896); and in the U.S. Census, 1880,
vols. V and VI.]

When the blossoms were giving place to bolls in midsummer, "lay-by time"
was at hand. Cultivation was ended, and the labor was diverted to other
tasks until in late August or early September the harvest began. The
corn, which had been worked at spare times previously, now had its blades
stripped and bundled for fodder; the roads were mended, the gin house and
press put in order, the premises in general cleaned up, and perhaps a few
spare days given to recreation.

The cotton bolls ripened and opened in series, those near the center of the
plant first, then the outer ones on the lower branches, and finally the
top crop. If subjected unduly to wind and rain the cotton, drooping in the
bolls, would be blown to the ground or tangled with dead leaves or stained
with mildew. It was expedient accordingly to send the pickers through the
fields as early and as often as there was crop enough open to reward the
labor.

Four or five compartments held the contents of each boll; from sixty to
eighty bolls were required to yield a pound in the seed; and three or four
pounds of seed cotton furnished one pound of lint. When a boll was wide
open a deft picker could empty all of its compartments by one snatch of
the fingers; and a specially skilled one could keep both hands flying
independently, and still exercise the small degree of care necessary to
keep the lint fairly free from the trash of the brittle dead calyxes. As
to the day's work, a Georgia planter wrote in 1830: "A hand will pick or
gather sixty to a hundred pounds of cotton in the seed, with ease, per day.
I have heard of some hands gathering a hundred and twenty pounds in a day.
The hands on a plantation ought to average sixty-five pounds," [5] But
actual records in the following decades made these early pickers appear
very inept. On Levin Covington's plantation near Natchez in 1844, in a
typical week of October, Bill averaged 220 pounds a day, Dred 205 pounds,
Aggy 215, and Delia 185; and on Saturday of that week all the twenty-eight
men and boys together picked an average of 160 pounds, and all the eighteen
women and girls an average of 125.[6] But these were dwarfed in turn by the
pickings on J.W. Fowler's Prairie plantation, Coahoma County, Mississippi,
at the close of the ante-bellum period. In the week of September 12 to 17,
1859, Sandy, Carver and Gilmore each averaged about three hundred pounds a
day, and twelve other men and five women ranged above two hundred, while
the whole gang of fifty-one men and women, boys and girls average 157
pounds each.[7]

[Footnote 5: _American Farmer_, II, 359.]

[Footnote 6: MS. in the Mississippi Department of History and Archives,
Jackson, Miss.]

[Footnote 7: MS. in the possession of W.H. Stovall, Stovall, Miss.]

The picking required more perseverance than strength. Dexterity was at a
premium, but the labors of the slow, the youthful and the aged were all
called into requisition. When the fields were white with their fleece and
each day might bring a storm to stop the harvesting, every boll picked
might well be a boll saved from destruction. Even the blacksmith was called
from his forge and the farmer's children from school to bend their backs in
the cotton rows. The women and children picked steadily unless rains drove
them in; the men picked as constantly except when the crop was fairly under
control and some other task, such as breaking in the corn, called the whole
gang for a day to another field or when the gin house crew had to clear the
bins by working up their contents to make room for more seed cotton.

In the Piedmont where the yield was lighter the harvest was generally ended
by December; but in the western belt, particularly when rains interrupted
the work, it often extended far into the new year. Lucien Minor, for
example, wrote when traveling through the plantations of northern Alabama,
near Huntsville, in December, 1823: "These fields are still white with
cotton, which frequently remains unpicked until March or April, when the
ground is wanted to plant the next crop."[8] Planters occasionally noted in
their journals that for want of pickers the top crop was lost.

[Footnote 8: _Atlantic Monthly_, XXVI, 175.]

As to the yield, an adage was current, that cotton would promise more and
do less and promise less and do more than any other green thing that grew.
The plants in the earlier stages were very delicate. Rough stirring of the
clods would kill them; excess of rain or drought would be likewise fatal;
and a choking growth of grass would altogether devastate the field.
Improvement of conditions would bring quick recuperation to the surviving
stalks, which upon attaining their full growth became quite hardy; but
undue moisture would then cause a shedding of the bolls, and the first
frost of autumn would stop the further fruiting. The plants, furthermore,
were liable to many diseases and insect ravages. In infancy cut-worms might
sever the stalks at the base, and lice might sap the vitality; in the full
flush of blooming luxuriance, wilt and rust, the latter particularly on
older lands, might blight the leaves, or caterpillars in huge armies reduce
them to skeletons and blast the prospect; and even when the fruit was
formed, boll-worms might consume the substance within, or dry-rot prevent
the top crop from ripening. The ante-bellum planters, however, were exempt
from the Mexican boll-weevil, the great pest of the cotton belt in the
twentieth century.

While every planter had his fat years and lean, and the yield of the belt
as a whole alternated between bumper crops and short ones, the industry was
in general of such profit as to maintain a continued expansion of its area
and a never ending though sometimes hesitating increase of its product. The
crop rose from eighty-five million pounds in 1810 to twice as much in 1820;
it doubled again by 1830 and more than doubled once more by 1840. Extremely
low prices for the staple in the early 'forties and again in 1849 prompted
a campaign for crop reduction; and in that decade the increase was only
from 830,000,000 to 1,000,000,000 pounds. But the return of good prices in
the 'fifties caused a fresh and huge enlargement to 2,300,000,000 pounds in
the final census year of the ante-bellum period. While this was little more
than one fourth as great as the crops of sixteen million bales in 1912 and
1915, it was justly reckoned in its time, at home and abroad, a prodigious
output. All the rest of the world then produced barely one third as much.
The cotton sent abroad made up nearly two thirds of the value of the gross
export trade of the United States, while the tobacco export had hardly a
tenth of the cotton's worth. In competition with all the other staples,
cotton engaged the services of some three fourths of all the country's
plantation labor, in addition to the labor of many thousands of white
farmers and their families.

The production and sale of the staple engrossed no less of the people's
thought than of their work. A traveler who made a zig-zag journey from
Charleston to St. Louis in the early months of 1827, found cotton "a
plague." At Charleston, said he, the wharves were stacked and the stores
and ships packed with the bales, and the four daily papers and all
the patrons of the hotel were "teeming with cotton." At Augusta the
thoroughfares were thronged with groaning wagons, the warehouses were
glutted, the open places were stacked, and the steamboats and barges hidden
by their loads. On the road beyond, migrating planters and slaves bound
for the west, "'where the cotton land is not worn out,'" met cotton-laden
wagons townward bound, whereupon the price of the staple was the chief
theme of roadside conversation. Occasionally a wag would have his jest. The
traveler reported a tilt between two wagoners: "'What's cotton in Augusta?'
says the one with a load.... 'It's cotton,' says the other. 'I know that,'
says the first, 'but what is it?' 'Why,' says the other, 'I tell you it's
cotton. Cotton is cotton in Augusta and everywhere else that I ever heard
of,' 'I know that as well as you,' says the first, 'but what does cotton
bring in Augusta?' 'Why, it brings nothing there, but everybody brings
cotton,'" Whereupon the baffled inquirer appropriately relieved his
feelings and drove on. At his crossing of the Oconee River the traveler saw
pole-boats laden with bales twelve tiers high; at Milledgeville and Macon
cotton was the absorbing theme; in the newly opened lands beyond he "found
cotton land speculators thicker than locusts in Egypt"; in the neighborhood
of Montgomery cotton fields adjoined one another in a solid stretch for
fourteen miles along the road; Montgomery was congested beyond the capacity
of the boats; and journeying thence to Mobile he "met and overtook nearly
one hundred cotton waggons travelling over a road so bad that a state
prisoner could hardly walk through it to make his escape." As to Mobile, it
was "a receptacle monstrous for the article. Look which way you will you
see it, and see it moving; keel boats, steamboats, ships, brigs, schooners,
wharves, stores, and press-houses, all appeared to be full; and I believe
that in the three days I was there, boarding with about one hundred cotton
factors, cotton merchants and cotton planters, I must have heard the word
cotton pronounced more than three thousand times." New Orleans had a
similar glut.

On the journey up the Mississippi the plaint heard by this traveler from
fellow passengers who lived at Natchitoches, was that they could not get
enough boats to bring the cotton down the Red. The descending steamers and
barges on the great river itself were half of them heavy laden with cotton
and at the head of navigation on the Tennessee, in northwestern Alabama,
bales enough were waiting to fill a dozen boats. "The Tennesseeans," said
he, "think that no state is of any account but their own; Kentucky, they
say, would be if it could grow cotton, but as it is, it is good for
nothing. They count on forty or fifty thousand bales going from Nashville
this season; that is, if they can get boats to carry it all." The fleet
on the Cumberland River was doing its utmost, to the discomfort of the
passengers; and it was not until the traveler boarded a steamer for
St. Louis at the middle of March, that he escaped the plague which had
surrounded him for seventy days and seventy nights. This boat, at last,
"had not a bale of cotton on board, nor did I hear it named more than twice
in thirty-six hours...I had a pretty tolerable night's sleep, though I
dreamed of cotton."[9]

[Footnote 9: _Georgia Courier_ (Augusta, Ga.), Oct. 11, 1827, reprinted in
_Plantation and Frontier_, I, 283-289.]

This obsession was not without its undertone of disquiet. Foresighted men
were apprehensive lest the one-crop system bring distress to the cotton
belt as it had to Virginia. As early as 1818 a few newspaper editors[10]
began to decry the regime; and one of them in 1821 rejoiced in a widespread
prevalence of rot in the crop of the preceding year as a blessing, in that
it staved off the rapidly nearing time when the staple's price would fall
below the cost of production.[11] A marked rise of the price to above
twenty cents a pound at the middle of the decade, however, silenced these
prophets until a severe decline in the later twenties prompted the sons of
Jeremiah to raise their voices again, and the political crisis procured
them a partial hearing. Politicians were advocating the home production
of cloth and foodstuffs as a demonstration against the protective tariff,
while the economists pleaded for diversification for the sake of permanent
prosperity, regardless of tariff rates. One of them wrote in 1827: "That we
have cultivated cotton, cotton, cotton and bought everything else, has long
been our opprobrium. It is time that we should be aroused by some means or
other to see that such a course of conduct will inevitably terminate in
our ultimate poverty and ruin. Let us manufacture, because it is our best
policy. Let us go more on provision crops and less on cotton, because we
have had everything about us poor and impoverished long enough.... We have
good land, unlimited water powers, capital in plenty, and a patriotism
which is running over in some places. If the tariff drives us to this,
we say, let the name be sacred in all future generations."[12] Next year
William Ellison of the South Carolina uplands welcomed even the low price
of cotton as a lever[13] which might pry the planters out of the cotton rut
and shift them into industries less exhausting to the soil.

[Footnote 10: Augusta _Chronicle_, Dec. 23, 1818.]

[Footnote 11: _Georgia Journal_ (Milledgeville), June 5, 1821.]

[Footnote 12: _Georgia Courier_ (Augusta), June 21, 1827.]

[Footnote 13: _Southern Agriculturist_, II, 13.]

But in the breast of the lowlander, William Elliott, the depression of the
cotton market produced merely a querulous complaint that the Virginians, by
rushing into the industry several years before when the prices were high,
had spoiled the market. Each region, said he, ought to devote itself to
the staples best suited to its climate and soil; this was the basis of
profitable commerce. The proper policy for Virginia and most of North
Carolina was to give all their labor spared from tobacco to the growing of
corn which South Carolina would gladly buy of them if undisturbed in her
peaceful concentration upon cotton.[14] The advance of cotton prices
throughout most of the thirties suspended the discussion, and the regime
went on virtually unchanged. As an evidence of the specialization of the
Piedmont in cotton, it was reported in 1836 that in the town of Columbia
alone the purchases of bacon during the preceding year had amounted to
three and a half million pounds.[15]

[Footnote 14: _Southern Agriculturist_, I, 61.]

[Footnote 15: _Niles' Register_, LI, 46.]

The world-wide panic of 1837 began to send prices down, and the specially
intense cotton crisis of 1839 broke the market so thoroughly that for five
years afterward the producers had to take from five to seven cents a pound
for their crops. Planters by thousands were bankrupted, most numerously in
the inflated southwest; and thoughtful men everywhere set themselves afresh
to study the means of salvation. Edmund Ruffin, the Virginian enthusiast
for fertilizers, was employed by the authority of the South Carolina
legislature to make an agricultural survey of that state with a view to
recommending improvements. Private citizens made experiments on their
estates; and the newspapers and the multiplying agricultural journals
published their reports and advice. Most prominent among the cotton belt
planters who labored in the cause of reform were ex-Governor James H.
Hammond of South Carolina, Jethro V. Jones of Georgia, Dr. N.B. Cloud of
Alabama, and Dr. Martin W. Philips of Mississippi. Of these, Hammond was
chiefly concerned in swamp drainage, hillside terracing, forage increase,
and livestock improvement; Jones was a promoter of the breeding of improved
strains of cotton; Cloud was a specialist in fertilizing; and Philips was
an all-round experimenter and propagandist. Hammond and Philips, who were
both spurred to experiments by financial stress, have left voluminous
records in print and manuscript. Their careers illustrate the handicaps
under which innovators labored.

Hammond's estate[16] lay on the Carolina side of the Savannah River, some
sixteen miles below Augusta. Impressed by the depletion of his upland
soils, he made a journey in 1838 through southwestern Georgia and the
adjacent portion of Florida in search of a new location; but finding land
prices inflated, he returned without making a purchase,[17] and for the
time being sought relief at home through the improvement of his methods. He
wrote in 1841: "I have tried almost all systems, and unlike most planters
do not like what is old. I hardly know anything old in corn or cotton
planting but what is wrong." His particular enthusiasm now was for plow
cultivation as against the hoe. The best planter within his acquaintance,
he said, was Major Twiggs, on the opposite bank of the Savannah, who ran
thirty-four plows with but fourteen hoes. Hammond's own plowmen were now
nearly as numerous as his full hoe hands, and his crops were on a scale of
twenty acres of cotton, ten of corn and two of oats to the plow. He was
fertilizing each year a third of his corn acreage with cotton seed, and a
twentieth of his cotton with barnyard manure; and he was making a surplus
of thirty or forty bushels of corn per hand for sale.[18] This would
perhaps have contented him in normal times, but the severe depression of
cotton prices drove him to new prognostications and plans. His confidence
in the staple was destroyed, he said, and he expected the next crop
to break the market forever and force virtually everyone east of the
Chattahoochee to abandon the culture. "Here and there," he continued, "a
plantation may be found; but to plant an acre that will not yield three
hundred pounds net will be folly. I cannot make more than sixty dollars
clear to the hand on my whole plantation at seven cents...The western
plantations have got fairly under way; Texas is coming in, and the game is
up with us." He intended to change his own activities in the main to the
raising of cattle and hogs; and he thought also of sending part of his
slaves to Louisiana or Texas, with a view to removing thither himself after
a few years if the project should prove successful.[19] In an address of
the same year before the Agricultural Society of South Carolina, he
advised those to emigrate who intended to continue producing cotton,
and recommended for those who would stay in the Piedmont a diversified
husbandry including tobacco but with main emphasis upon cereals and
livestock.[20] Again at the end of 1849, he voiced similar views at the
first annual fair of the South Carolina Institute. The first phase of the
cotton industry, said he, had now passed; and the price henceforward would
be fixed by the cost of production, and would yield no great profits even
in the most fertile areas. The rich expanses of the Southwest, he thought,
could meet the whole world's demand at a cost of less than five cents a
pound, for the planters there could produce two thousand pounds of lint
per hand while those in the Piedmont could not exceed an average of twelve
hundred pounds. This margin of difference would deprive the slaves of their
value in South Carolina and cause their owners to send them West, unless
the local system of industry should be successfully revolutionized.
The remedies he proposed were the fertilization of the soil, the
diversification of crops, the promotion of commerce, and the large
development of cotton manufacturing.[21]

[Footnote 16: Described in 1846 in the _American Agriculturist_, VI, 113,
114.]

[Footnote 17: MS. diary, April 13 to May 14, 1838, in Hammond papers,
Library of Congress.]

[Footnote 18: Letters of Hammond to William Gilmore Simms, Jan. 27 and Mch.
9, 1841. Hammond's MS. drafts are in the Library of Congress.]

[Footnote 19: Letter to Isaac W. Hayne, Jan. 21, 1841.]

[Footnote 20: MS. oration in the Library of Congress.]

[Footnote 21: James H. Hammond, _An Address delivered before the South
Carolina Institute, at the first annual Fair, on the 20th November, 1849_
(Charleston. 1849).]

Hammond found that not only the public but his own sons also, with the
exception of Harry, were cool toward his advice and example; and he himself
yielded to the temptation of the higher cotton prices in the 'fifties, and
while not losing interest in cattle and small grain made cotton and corn
his chief reliance. He appears to have salved his conscience in this
relapse by devoting part of his income to the reclamation of a great marsh
on his estate. He operated two plantations, the one at his home, "Silver
Bluff," the other, "Cathwood," near by. The field force on the former
comprised in 1850 sixteen plow hands, thirty-four full hoe hands, six
three-quarter hands, two half hands and a water boy, the whole rated at
fifty-five full hands. At Cathwood the force, similarly grouped, was rated
at seventy-one hands; but at either place the force was commonly subject to
a deduction of some ten per cent, of its rated strength, on the score of
the loss of time by the "breeders and suckers" among the women. In addition
to their field strength and the children, of whom no reckoning was made in
the schedule of employments, the two plantations together had five stable
men, two carpenters, a miller and job worker, a keeper of the boat landing,
three nurses and two overseers' cooks; and also thirty-five ditchers in the
reclamation work.

At Silver Bluff, the 385 acres in cotton were expected to yield 330 bales
of 400 pounds each; the 400 acres in corn had an expectation of 9850
bushels; and 10 acres of rice, 200 bushels. At Cathwood the plantings and
expectations were 370 acres in cotton to yield 280 bales, 280 in corn to
yield 5000 bushels, 15 in wheat to yield 100 bushels, 11 in rye to yield
50, and 2 in rice to yield 50. In financial results, after earning in 1848
only $4334.91, which met barely half of his plantation and family expenses
for the year, his crop sales from 1849 to 1853 ranged from seven to twenty
thousand dollars annually in cotton and from one and a half to two and
a half thousand dollars in corn. His gross earnings in these five years
averaged $16,217.76, while his plantation expenses averaged $5393.87, and
his family outlay $6392.67, leaving an average "clear gain per annum," as
he called it, of $4431.10. The accounting, however, included no reckoning
of interest on the investment or of anything else but money income and
outgo. In 1859 Hammond put upon the market his 5500 acres of uplands with
their buildings, livestock, implements and feed supplies, together with 140
slaves including 70 full hands. His purpose, it may be surmised, was to
confine his further operations to his river bottoms.[22]

[Footnote 22: Hammond MSS., Library of Congress.]

Philips, whom a dearth of patients drove early from the practice of
medicine, established in the 'thirties a plantation which he named Log
Hall, in Hinds County, Mississippi. After narrowly escaping the loss of his
lands and slaves in 1840 through his endorsement of other men's notes,
he launched into experimental farming and agricultural publication. He
procured various fancy breeds of cattle and hogs, only to have most of
them die on his hands. He introduced new sorts of grasses and unfamiliar
vegetables and field crops, rarely with success. Meanwhile, however, he
gained wide reputation through his many writings in the periodicals, and in
the 'fifties he turned this to some advantage in raising fancy strains
of cotton and selling their seed. His frequent attendance at fairs and
conventions and his devotion to his experiments and to his pen caused
him to rely too heavily upon overseers in the routine conduct of his
plantation. In consequence one or more slaves occasionally took to the
woods; the whole force was frequently in bad health; and his women, though
remarkably fecund, lost most of their children in infancy. In some degree
Philips justified the prevalent scorn of planters for "book farming."[23]

[Footnote 23: M.W. Phillips, "Diary," F.L. Riley, ed., in the Mississippi
Historical Society _Publications_, X, 305-481; letters of Philips in the
_American Agriculturist, DeBow's Review_, etc., and in J.A. Turner, ed.,
_The Cotton Planter's Manual_, pp. 98-123.]

The newspapers and farm journals everywhere printed arguments in the
'forties in behalf of crop diversification, and _DeBow's Review_, founded
in 1846, joined in the campaign; but the force of habit, the dearth of
marketable substitutes and the charms of speculation conspired to make all
efforts of but temporary avail. The belt was as much absorbed in cotton in
the 'fifties as it had ever been before.