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

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 after year; the seed--which Northern men would cultivate for oil alone, and which exhausts the land ten times faster than the fibre--is mostly wasted; in the words of a Southern paper, 'The seed is left to rot about the gin-house, producing foul odors, and a constant cause of sickness.' The land is cropped until it is literally skinned, and