pers.

Of course the greater portion of those purchases goes to Europe via Norfolk, New York or Boston, but one German buyer this season shipped forty thousand bales via New Orleans and the Gulf. The character of the cotton is such as to make it specially sought after by all classes of spinners. As a cotton port Memphis is independent of New Orleans, and this independence has been recently achieved. Of the entire crop brought into Memphis in 1860-1 there were 184,366 bales sent to the Louisiana metropolis; whereas in 1872-3 scarcely 25,000 bales were sent there for market. The prices are so nearly up to those of New Orleans as not to leave a margin. The Louisville and Nashville road takes a great deal of cotton northward, and the various packet lines to St. Louis, Cairo, Cincinnati, Evansville, and Cannelton, carry many hundreds of bales. There are so many lines that Memphis is never blockaded. As a single item of commerce, that of cotton there is enormous, amounting at the average price in value to something like $28,000ooo. It is calculated that the whole commerce of Memphis foots up $62,000,000 yearly. It is the main supply point for a vast region. Thousands on thousands of barrels of flour, pork, bales of hay, sacks of oats, barrels of corn meal, are brought in on the Mississippi river and thence distributed. Besides handling one-eighth of the entire cotton crop of the United States, Memphis has thus far kept in food as well as in courage a very large portion of the half discouraged planters of the South; her merchants having made great efforts to accommodate themselves to the new order of things. So changed are all the conditions under which planters labor, and so evident is it that the character of planting or farming must change a good deal, that the merchants themselves are beginning to doubt the real beneficence of the supply system. At Memphis one hears a great deal of the miseries and vexations of both laborers and capitalists in the cotton country.

The truth of the matter is, I suspect, that the planters, up to the present, have not been willing to become farmers. "These people," said to me a gentleman familiar with the whole cotton planting interest of the South, "will never grow their own supplies until they are compelled to." They are willing to depend upon the West for the coarse food

supplied to negro laborers, and seem totally unconscious of the fact that they can never secure white immigration, so much desired, until they raise the status of the laboring man. White labor has proved a failure in a great many sections of the South, because the laborers who come to make trial are not properly treated. They are offered strong inducements, can purchase good lands on almost unlimited credit, and are received in a friendly manner, but they find all the conditions of labor so disorganized that they become disheartened, and give up the experiment. The negro along the Mississippi works better than ever before since freedom came to him, because he is obliged to toil or starve, and because, being the main stay of the planters, they accord to him very favorable conditions. Self-interest is teaching the planters a good deal, and in the cotton growing regions of Northern Alabama and Mississippi, as well as generally throughout the older cotton States, a diversity of crops will be compelled by the necessity of self protection. It is noticed that the cotton belt is gradually moving from the Atlantic seaboard to newer and more productive lands. The states west of the Mississippi, and bordering on that stream, are receiving immense colonies of negroes fleeing from the temporarily exhausted sections of Alabama, and the lands which they have left will soon come under the influence of fertilizers, and corn and rice and wheat will be raised. In consequence of the gradual change in the location of the planting interest, buyers from the North in such markets as Memphis hear from time to time that less cotton is planted than heretofore, and are led to figure on higher prices; but they find that new lands are constantly opened up, and that the yield on them is

surprising. It is the belief of many acute observers living at important points along the Mississippi river that the ultimate home of the black man is to be west of that stream, on the rich bottom lands where the white man has never been known to labor, and where it would be perilous to his health to settle. In the fall and winter of each year the migration. to Arkansas and Louisiana is alarming to the white planters left behind. In Western Tennessee the exodus has not been severely felt as yet, but it will doubtless come. The two hundred thousand negroes in that rich and flourishing region are reasonably content. They do not, in the various counties, enter so much into politics as they did immediately after the war. They show there, as, indeed, almost everywhere in the Mississippi Valley, a tendency to get into communities by themselves, and seem to have no desire to force their way into the company of the white man.

There must, and will be, a radical change in the conduct of the rising generation of planters. The younger men are, I think, convinced that it is a mistake to depend on Western and Northern markets for the articles of daily consumption, and for nearly everything which goes to make life tolerable. tolerable. But the elders, grounded by a lifetime of habit in the methods which served them well under a slave régime, but which are ruinous now-a-days, will never correct themselves. They will continue to bewail the unfortunate fate to which they think themselves condemned-or will rest assured that they can do very well in the present chaotic condition of things, provided Providence does not allow their crops to fail. They cannot be brought to see that their only safety lies in making cotton their surplus crop; that they must absolutely dig their sustenance, as well as

their riches, out of the ground. Before the war, a planter who owned a plantation of two thousand acres, and two hundred negroes upon it, would, when he came to make his January settlement with his merchant in town, invest whatever there was to his credit in more land and more negroes. Now the more land he buys the worse he is off, because he finds it very hard to get it worked up to the old standard, and unless he does, he can ill afford to buy supplies from the outer world at the heavy prices charged for them-or if he can do that, he can accomplish little else. As most of his capital was taken from him by the series of events which liberated his slaves, he has been compelled, since the war, to undertake his planting operations on borrowed capital, or, in other words, has relied on a merchant or middle man to furnish food and clothing for his laborers, and all the means necessary to get his crop, baled and weighed, to the market. The failure of his crcp would of course cover him with liabilities; but such has been his fatal persistence in this false system that he has been able to struggle through, as in Alabama, three successive crop failures. The merchant, somewhat reconciled to the anomalous condition of affairs by the large profits he can make on coarse goods brought long distances, has himself pushed en

durance and courage to an extreme point, and when he dare give credit no longer, hosts of planters are often placed in the most painful and embarrassing positions. So they gather up the wrecks of their fortunes, pack their Lares and Penates in an emigrant wagon, or car, and doggedly work their way to Texas.

66

The appalling failure of crops in certain sections has not, however, lessened the cotton production of the region supplied from Memphis. In the aggregate it is greater than ever before, and I was informed that its increase would be even more than it is if so many planters did not overcrop "-that is, plant more than they can cultivate. Those who plant a little land, and care for it thoroughly, usually make some money, even although they depend upon far-off markets for their sustenance, and are completely at the mercy of the merchants. It is believed that the crop failures will induce planters, in the sections which have suffered, to make an effort to grow their own supplies, and until that effort has been successful, there can be no real prosperity among them. Even when Fortune smiles, and they make a good crop, but little is left after a settlement with the merchant. Life is somewhat barren and unattractive to the man who, after a laborious season spent in cultivating one staple, finds that, after all,

he has only made a living out of it. He has done nothing to make his surroundings agreeable and comfortable; his buildings are unsightly and rickety, and there are very few stores in his cellar, if indeed he has any cellar at all.

The region which finds its market and gets its supplies in Memphis, Vicksburg and Natchez, is probably as fair a sample of the cotton-producing portion of the/ South as any other, and I found in it all the ills and all the advantages complained of or claimed elsewhere. Imagine a

farming country which depends absolutely for its food on the West and North-west; where every barrel of flour which the farmer buys, the bacon which he seems to prefer to the beef and mutton which he might raise on his own lands, the clothes on his back, the shoes on his feet, the very vegetables which the poorest laborer in the Northern agricultural regions grows in his door yard-everything, in fact, has been brought hundreds of miles by steamer or by rail, and has passed through the hands of the shipper, the carrier, the wharf men, the re-shipper, (if the planter live in a remote section) and the local merchant! Imagine a people possessed of superior facilities, who might live, as the vulgar saying has it, on the fat of the land, who are yet so dependent that a worm crawling over a few cotton leaves, or the rise of one or two streams, may reduce them to misery and indebtedness from which it will take years to recover! Men who consider themselves poorly paid and badly treated in Northern farming and manufacturing regions live better and have more than do the overseers of huge plantations in this cotton country. If you enter into conversation with the people who fare thus poorly, they will tell you that, if they raise vegetables, the "niggers" will steal them; that if times were not so hard, and seasons were not so disastrous, the

| supply system would work very well; that they cannot organize their labor so as to secure a basis on which to calculate safely; and will finally end by declaring that the South is ruined forever.

These are the opinions of the elders mainly. Younger men, who see the necessity of change and new organization, believe that they must in future cultivate other crops besides cotton; that they must do away with supply-merchants, and try at least to raise what is needed for sustenance. There are of course sections where the planter finds it cheapest to obtain his corn and flour from St. Louis; but that is only one item. There are a hundred things which he requires, and which are grown as well South as North. Until the South has got capital enough together to localize manufactures, the same thing must be said of all manufactured articles; but why should a needless dependence be encouraged by the very people whom it injures and endangers.

There are many plans of working large plantations now in vogue, and sometimes the various systems are all in operation on the same tract. The plan of "shares" prevails extensively, the planter taking out the expenses of the crop, and when it is sold dividing the net proceeds with the negroes who have produced it. In some cases in the vicinity of Natchez, land is

the land in the same way, and agree to furnish the supplies also. Still others depend entirely upon the wages system, but of course have to furnish supplies at the outset, deducting the cost from wages paid hands after the crop is raised. Sometimes the plantation is leased to squads," as they are called, and the "squad leader" negotiates the advances, giving "liens" on the squad's share of the crop and on the mules and horses they may own. This plan has worked very well and is looked upon favorably. Under the slave régime, the negroes working a large plantation were all quartered at night in a kind of central group of huts, known as the "quarters; " but it has been found an excellent idea to divide up the hundred or five hundred laborers among a number of these little villages, each located on the section of the plantation which they have leased. By this process, commonly known as "segregation of quarters," many desirable things have been accomplished; the negro has been encouraged to devote some attention to his home, and been hindered from the vices engendered by excessive crowding. On some plantations one may find a dozen squads, each working on a different plan, the planters, or land owners, hoping in this way to find out which system will be most advantageous to them

selves and most binding on the negro. Clairmont, a plantation of three thousand acres, of which one thousand are now cultivated, on the Louisiana side of the Mississippi river, opposite to Natchez, is cut up into lots of one hundred acres each, and on each division are ten laborers who have leased the land in various ways. It was amusing, by the way, to note the calculation that one negro made, when negotiating for one of these tracts. He was to be allowed one-half, but was vociferous for one-tenth. As ten is more than two, he supposed a tenth to be more than a half. On this Clairmont in 1860, the owner raised one thousand bales of cotton and eight thousand bushels of corn; now he raises about five hundred bales, and hardly any corn. Still, the conduct of the laborers is encouraging. The little villages springing up here and there on the broad acres, have a tendency to localize the negroes, who have heretofore been very much inclined to rove about, and each man is allowed to have half an acre of ground for his garden. The supplies spoken of as furnished the negroes are of the rudest description, pork, meal and molasses-all brought hundreds, nay, thousands of miles, when every one of the laborers could, with a little care, grow enough to feed himself and his family. But the negro throughout the cotton belt, takes little thought for the morrow. He works lazily although, in some places, pretty steadily. In others he takes a day here and there out of the week in such a manner as to render him almost useless. The planter always feels that the negro is irresponsible and must be taken care of. If he settles on a small tract of land of his own, as so many thousands do now-a-days, he becomes almost a cumberer of the ground, caring for nothing save to get a living, and raising only a bale of cotton or so wherewith to get "supplies." For the rest he can fish and hunt. He doesn't care to become a scientific farmer. Thrift has no charms for him. He has never been educated to care for himself; how should he suddenly leap forth, a new man, into the changed order of things? Nevertheless, some of the planters along the river near Natchez said, "Give the negro his due. The merchant will ordinarily stand a better chance of collecting all his advance from fifty small black planters than from fifty whites of the same class, when the crop is successful." But if the negro's crop fails, he feels very loth to pay up, although he may have the means.