The Continental Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 3, March 1862 | Page 7

Alabama with his tools, and then started North. In
Tennessee he got out of money, and stopped to work at his trade, was
suspected, brought before a court, his papers examined and pronounced
genuine, and he passed on to Canada or elsewhere. Surely this man did
not know how to take care of himself!
There is no great reason why the slave should exert himself very much,
and why he should not, cannot be better stated than by the Rev. Mr.
McTeyire, the son of a large planter in South Carolina. 'Men,' he says,
'who own few slaves, and who share the labors of the field or workshop
with them, are very liable to deceive themselves by a specious process

of reasoning: they say, "I carry row for row with my negroes, and I put
no more on them than I take on myself." But the master who thus
reasons is forgetful or ignorant of the great truth that the negroes'
powers of endurance are less than his, while in the case of the latter
there are wanting those incentives which animate and actually
strengthen the master. This labor is for him, the gains of this excess of
industry are to make him rich. What is the servant bettered by the
additional bale of cotton extorted from exhausted nature, only that next
year he shall have more companions in the field, and the field be
enlarged?' This is extremely well put; but Rev. Mr. McTeyire, of South
Carolina, must have been unaware of the fact that it is not possible for a
white man to work row for row on cotton!
But Southern planters are not without some ingenious machines. In a
premium essay upon the cultivation of cotton, read before the Georgia
Agricultural Society, the Hon. Mr. Chambers thus describes one
invented by himself for covering the seed: 'I would cover with a board
made of some hard wood, an inch or an inch and a half thick, about
eight inches broad, beveled on the lower edge to make it sharp, slightly
notched in the middle so as to straddle the row, and screwed on the
foot of a common shovel.' Very safe for negroes to use, not being
complicated.
But in the protests of intelligent Southern men, when they occasionally
wake up to the terrible results of their mode of cultivation, may be
found their own condemnation.
Dr. Cloud, of Alabama, editor of the 'Cotton Plant,' mourning the want
of pasturage in his own State, writes thus: 'Our climate is remarkably
favorable to rich and luxuriant pasturage. The red man of the forest and
the pioneer white man that came here in advance of our scratching
plow, tell us they found the wild oat and native grasses waving thick, as
high as a man's head, and so entwined with the wild pea-vine as to
make it difficult to ride among it, all over this country. Every cotton
planter has heard of these fine primitive pasture ranges, and many have
seen them. If the country or the climate has been cursed in our
appearance as planters here, it has been in the wasting system, that we

introduced and continue to practice.'
Gov. Wise, in an address upon the agriculture of Virginia, condenses
the whole case in an epigram,--' The negroes skin the land, and the
white men skin the negroes.'
The limit to the production of cotton is in the capacity of the plantation
force to pick the amount cultivated by the field hands; but the whole
available force is insufficient, and large quantities are lost. The policy
of the planters being to buy out the small landholders in their
neighborhood, they have no extra force upon which to draw. Olmsted
says: 'I much doubt if the harvest demand of the principal cotton
districts of Mississippi adds five per cent. to their field-hand force. I
observed the advantage of the free-labor system exemplified in Western
Texas, the cotton-fields in the vicinity of the German village of New
Braunfils having been picked far closer than any I had before seen,--in
fact perfectly clean. One woman was pointed out to me who had, in the
first year she had seen a cotton field, picked more cotton in a day than
any slave in the county.'
'Substitute the French system (that of small allotment or parcellement)
for the Mississippi system in cotton-growing, and who can doubt that
the cotton supply of the United States would be greatly increased?'
Dr. Cloud, the most intelligent writer upon cotton cultivation I have
been able to find, is urgent in his advice to manure the land, practice
rotation of crops, and produce larger crops upon fewer acres. But the
universal practice is precisely the reverse; the process of exhaustion is
followed year after year; cotton is planted year