CHAPTER LI.

FREE LABOR IN MISSISSIPPI.

Colonel Thomas, Assistant-Commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau for the State of Mississippi, stationed at Vicksburg, gave the negroes more credit for industry than they gave each other. In the large towns, to which vagrancy naturally gravitates, one in four was probably a fair estimate of the proportion of colored people unable or unwilling to earn an honest livelihood. “But I am confident,” said the Colonel, “there is no more industrious class of people anywhere than the freedmen who have little homesteads of their own. The colonies under my charge, working lands assigned them by the government, have raised this year ten thousand bales of cotton, besides corn and vegetables for their subsistence until another harvest.”

Other well-informed and experienced persons corroborated this statement. Dr. Warren, Superintendent of Freedmen’s Schools in Mississippi, told me of a negro family, consisting of one man, three women, and a half-grown girl, who took a lot of five acres, which they worked entirely with shovel and hoe, having no mule, and on which they had that season cleared five hundred dollars, above all expenses. I heard of numerous other well-authenticated instances of the kind.

Dr. Warren spoke of the great eagerness of the blacks to buy or lease land, and have homes of their own. This he said accounted in a great measure for their backwardness in making contracts. He said to one intelligent freedman: “The whites intend to compel you to hire out to them.” The latter replied: “What if we should compel them to lease us lands?”

There were other reasons why the blacks would not contract. At Vicksburg, a gentleman who had been fifty miles up the valley looking for a plantation, said to me: “The negroes everywhere I went have been shamefully abused. They had been promised that if they would remain and work the plantations, they should have a share of the crops; and now the planters refuse to give them anything. They have no confidence in Southern men, and will not hire out to them; but they are very eager to engage with Northern men.”

This was the universal testimony, not only of travellers, but of candid Southern planters. One of the latter class explained to me how it was that the freedman was cheated out of his share of the crop. After the cotton is sent to market, the proprietor calls up his negroes, and tells them he has “furnished them such and such things, for which he has charged so much, and that there are no profits to divide. The darkey don’t understand it,—he has kept no accounts; but he knows he has worked hard and got nothing. He won’t hire to that man again. But I, and any other man who has done as he agreed with his niggers, can hire now as many as we want.”

Colonel Thomas assured me that two thirds of the laborers in the State had been cheated out of their wages during the past year.

Mr. C——, a Northern man who had taken a plantation at ——, (I omit names, for he told me that not only his property but his life depended upon the good-will of his neighbors,) related to me his experience. He hired his plantation of a gentleman noted for his honesty: “He goes by the name of ‘Honest M——’ all through the country. But honesty appeared to be a virtue to be exercised only towards white people: it was too good to be thrown away on niggers. This M—— has four hundred sheep, seventy milch cows, fifteen horses, ten mules, and forty hogs, all of which were saved from the Yankees when they raided through the country, by an old negro who run them off across a swamp. Honest M—— has never given that negro five cents. Another of his slaves had a cow of his own from which he raised a fine pair of oxen: Honest M—— lays claim to those oxen and sells them. A slave-woman that belonged to him had a cow she had raised from a calf: Honest M—— takes that, and adds it to his herd. He promised his niggers a share of the crops this year; but he has sold the cotton, and locked up the corn, and never given one of them a dollar. And all this time he thinks he is honest: he thinks Northern capitalists treat free laborers in this way. You can’t get it through the heads of these Southern planters that the laboring class has any rights.

“Honest M—— has two plantations,” continued Mr. C——: “he rents me one of them. But he gave me notice at the start that he should take all the niggers from my plantation, and that I must look out for my own help. When I went to take possession I was astonished to find the niggers all there.

“’How’s this?’ I said. ‘I thought these people were going with you?’

“He said he couldn’t induce one of them to contract; and he had about given up the idea of running his other plantation, because the niggers wouldn’t work. He had offered twenty-five dollars a month, with board and medical attendance, and they wouldn’t engage to him even for that.

“’Well,’ said I, ‘if you have got through I should like to hire them.’

“He said I was welcome to try. They knew me to be a Northern man, and when I called them around me for a talk, they all came with grinning faces. Said I: ‘Mr. M—— offers you twenty-five dollars a month. That is more than I can afford to pay, and I think you’d better hire to him.’ They looked stolid: they couldn’t see it: they didn’t want to work for him at any price.

“Then I said, ‘If you won’t work for him, will you work for me?’ I never saw faces light up so in my life. ‘Yes, master! Yes, master!’ ‘But,’ said I, ‘ten dollars a month is all I can afford to pay.’ That made no difference, they said; they’d rather work for ten dollars, and be sure of their pay, than for twenty-five dollars, and be cheated out of it. I gave them a day to think of it: then they all came forward and made contracts, with one exception. They went right to work with a will: I won’t ask men to do any better than they have been doing. They are having their Christmas frolic now, and it’s as merry a Christmas as ever you saw!”

I met with many planters in the situation of Honest M——. Having made arrangements to run their plantations, and got in the necessary supplies, they had discovered that “the niggers wouldn’t contract.” They were then trying to lease their lands to Northern capitalists.

I have seldom met a more anxious, panic-stricken set of men than the planters I saw on the steamer going down to Vicksburg to hire freedmen. Observing the success of Northern men, they had suddenly awakened to the great fact that, although slavery was lost, all was not lost, and that there was still a chance to make something out of the nigger. They could not hire their own freedmen, and were going to see what could be effected with freedmen to whom they were not known. Each seemed to fear lest his neighbor should get the start of him.

“They’re just crazy about the niggers,” said one, a Mississippian, who was about the craziest of the set,—“crazy to get hold of ’em.”

“But,” I remarked, “they say the freedmen won’t work.”

“Well, they won’t,” said my Mississippi friend, unflinchingly.

“Then what do you want of them?”

“Well, I found everybody else was going in for hiring ’em, and if anything was to be made, I didn’t want to be left out in the cold.” Adding with great candor and earnestness: “_If everybody else would have refused to hire ’em anyhow, that would have just suited me: I’d have been willing to let my plantation go to the devil for one year, just to see the free niggers starve._”

I saw this gentleman afterwards in Vicksburg, and was not deeply grieved to learn that he had failed to engage a single freedman. “They are hiring to Northern men,” said he, bitterly; “but they won’t hire to Southern men anyhow, if they can help it.”

“How do you account for this singular fact?” I asked.

“I don’t know. They’ve no confidence in us; but they imagine the Yankees will do wonders by ’em. The Southern people are really their best friends.” At which stereotyped bit of cant I could not forbear a smile.

The usual terms proposed by the planters were one hundred and fifty dollars, for a full hand, payable at the end of the year; together with doctors’ bills, two hundred pounds of pork, and a peck of meal a week.

The terms most approved by Colonel Thomas were as follows: Fifteen dollars a month, with food, including flour, sugar, and molasses; a little patch of ground for each family, and Saturday afternoon, for the raising of their own vegetables; the freedmen to clothe themselves.

The planters insisted on furnishing all needful supplies, and charging the blacks for them when not stipulated for in the contract. The alleged reason for this was that the negroes, if allowed to buy their own supplies, would spend half their time in running about the country for knick-knacks. But the better class of planters admitted that the system was liable to gross abuse. “I have neighbors,” said one, “who keep stores of plain goods and fancy articles for their people; and, let a nigger work ever so hard, and earn ever so high wages, he is sure to come out in debt at the end of the year.”

Those who had given the free-labor system a fair trial admitted that the negro would work as well as ever before, while in the field,—some said better; but he would not work as many hours.

“How many hours did he formerly work?” I inquired; and received the following statement with regard to what was done on a well-regulated Mississippi plantation.

“Mr. P——’s niggers were in the field at daylight. It was so in the longest days of summer, as at other times of the year. They worked till six o’clock, when their breakfast was carried to them. They had just time enough allowed them to eat their breakfast; then they worked till noon, when their dinner was carried to them. They had an hour for their dinner. At six o’clock their supper was carried to them. Then they worked till dark. There were cisterns in the field, where they got their water. Nobody was allowed to leave the field from the time they entered it in the morning until work was over at night. That was to save time. The women who suckled babies had their babies carried to them. A little nigger-boy used to drive a mule to the field with a cart full of nigger babies; and the women gave the brats their luncheon while they ate their own. So not a minute was lost.”

And this was the plantation of a “liberal” owner, worked by a “considerate and merciful overseer.” It appeared, according to the planters’ own statements, that their slaves used to work at least sixteen hours a day in summer,—probably more, for they had chores to do at home after dark. That they should not choose to keep up such a continual strain on their bodily faculties, now that they were free, did not appear to me very unreasonable,—but that was perhaps because I was prejudiced.

Under the old system, many plantations were left entirely to the management of overseers, the owners living in some pleasant town where they enjoyed the advantages of society for themselves and of schools for their children. The overseer who could produce the most cotton to the hand was in great request, and commanded the highest wages. The natural result was that both lands and negroes were often worked to a ruinous excess. But the occupation of these best overseers was now gone. Not a freedman would hire out to work on plantations where they were known to be employed. Some managed, however, to avoid being thrown out of business by attaching themselves to other plantations, and changing their title. With the negroes a name is imposing. Many would engage cheerfully to work under a “superintendent,” who would not have entered the field under an “overseer.”

But it is easier to change an odious name than an odious character. Said a candid Southern planter to me, “I should get along very well with my niggers, if I could only get my superintendent to treat them decently. Instead of cheering and encouraging them, he bullies and scolds them, and sometimes so far forgets himself as to kick and beat them. Now they are free they won’t stand it. They stood it when they were slaves, because they had to. He can’t get the notion out of his head that they are still somehow slaves. When I see things going right badly, I take him, and give him a good talking to. Then for about three days he’ll use ’em better, and everything goes smooth. But the first I know, there’s more bullying and beating, and there’s more niggers bound to quit.”

Meanwhile the Christmas holidays were effecting a change in the prospects of free labor for the coming year. I never witnessed in so short a time so complete a revolution in public feeling. One day it seemed that everybody was in despair, complaining that the niggers wouldn’t work; the next, everybody was rushing to employ them. And the freedmen, who, before Christmas, had refused to make contracts, vaguely hoping that lands would be given them by the government, or leased to them by their owners, now came forward to make the best terms they could. The presence of the Bureau at this time in the South was an incalculable benefit to both parties. It inspired the freedmen with confidence, and persuaded them, with the promise of its protection, to hire out once more to the Southern planters. The trouble was, that there was not labor enough in the State to supply the demand. Many negroes had enlisted in the war; others had wandered back to the slave-breeding States from which they had been sold; others had become small proprietors; and others had died, in consequence of the great and sudden change in their circumstances which the war had brought about.