Chapter I: AM proud of my acquaintance with Dobbs (2)

The first time these men met was in Milledgeville, in 1851 or ’52, when Governor Brown was a young Democratic State Senator and General Toombs was a Whig Congressman—then the idol of his party and the most eloquent man in Georgia. They were then just such men physically as one who had never seen them would imagine from reading their lives. General Toombs was, as Governor Brown has told me, “the handsomest man he ever saw.” His physique was superb, his grand head fit for a crown, his presence that of a king, overflowing with vitality, his majestic face illumined with his divine genius. Governor Brown was then pallid, uncomely—his awkward frame packed closely with nerve and sinew, and fed with a temperate flow of blood. They met next at Marietta, where Toombs had a fiery debate with that rare master of discussion, the late Robert Cowart. Governor Brown was deeply impressed with the power and genius of that wonderful man, but General Toombs thought but little of the awkward young mountaineer. For later, when in Texas, hearing that Joe Brown was nominated for Governor, he did not even remember his name, and had to ask a Georgia-Texan “who the devil it was.”

But the next time he met him he remembered it. Of course we all remember when the “Know-Nothings” took possession of the Whig party, and Toombs and Stephens seceded. Stephens having a campaign right on him, and being pressed to locate himself, said he was neither Whig nor Democrat, but “was toting his own skillet,” thus introducing that homely but expressive phrase into our political history. Toombs was in the Senate and had time for reflection. It ended by his marching into the Democratic camp. Shortly afterward he was astounded at seeing the standard of his party, upon the success of which his seat in the Senate depended, put in the hands of Joe Brown, a new campaigner, while the opposition was led by Ben Hill, then as now an audacious and eloquent speaker, incomparable on the stump. Hill and Brown had had a meeting at Athens, I believe, and it was reported that Brown had been worsted. Howell Cobb wrote Toombs that he must take the canvass in hand at once, at least until Brown could learn how to manage himself. Toombs wrote to Brown to come to his home at Washington, which he did. General Toombs told me that he was not hopeful when he met the new candidate, but after talking to him awhile, found that he had wonderful judgment and sagacity. After coquetting with Mr. Hill a while, they started on a tour together, going to south Georgia. General Toombs has talked to me often about this experience. He says that after two or three speeches Governor Brown was as fully equipped as if he had been in public for forty years, and he was amazed at the directness with which he would get to the hearts of the masses. He talked in simple style, using the homeliest phrases, but his words went home every time. There was a sympathy between the speaker and the people that not even the eloquence of Toombs could emphasize, or the matchless skill of Mr. Hill disturb. In Brown the people saw one of themselves, lifted above them by his superior ability, and his unerring sagacity, but talking to them common sense in a sensible way. General Toombs soon saw that the new candidate was more than able to take care of himself, and left him to make his tour alone—impressed with the fact that a new element had been introduced into our politics and that a new leader had arisen.

It is hard to say which has been the more successful of the two men. Neither has ever been beaten before the people. General Toombs has won his victories with the more ease. He has gone to power as a king goes to his throne, and no one has gainsaid him. Governor Brown has had to fight his way through. It has been a struggle all the time, and he has had to summon every resource to carry his point. Each has made unsurpassed records in his departments. As Senator, General Toombs was not only invincible, he was glorious. As Governor, was not only invincible, he was wise. General Toombs’s campaigns have been unstudied and careless, and were won by his presence, his eloquence, his greatness. His canvass was always an ovation, his only caucusing was done on the hustings. With Governor Brown it was different. He planned his campaigns and then went faithfully through them. His victories were none the less sure, because his canvass was more laborious. His nomination as Governor, while unexpected, was not accidental. It was the inevitable outcome of his young life, disciplined so marvelously, so full of thought, sagacity and judgment. If he had not been nominated Governor then, his time would have come at last, just as sure as cause produces result. His record as Governor proves that he was prepared for the test—just as his brilliant record in the Senate proves that he is fitted for any sphere to which he might be called.

To sum it up: Toombs is the embodiment of genius, and Brown is the embodiment of common sense. One is brilliant, the other unerring; one is eloquent, the other sagacious. Toombs moves by inspiration; Brown is governed by judgment. The first is superb; the latter is sage. Despite the fact that Governor Brown is by instinct and by inheritance a rebel, he is prudent, conservative, and has a turn for building things up. General Toombs, despite his love for kingliness and all that implies, has an almost savage instinct for overturning systems and tearing things down. It must not be understood that I depreciate General Toombs’s wisdom. Genius often flies as true to its mark as judgment can go. The wisest speech, and the ablest ever made by an American, in my opinion, is Mr. Toombs’s speech on slavery, delivered in Boston about ten years before the war. In that speech he showed a prescience almost divine, and clad in the light of thirty years of confirmation, it is simply marvelous. His leadership of the southern Whigs in the House during the contest of 1850 was a masterpiece of brilliancy, and even his Hamilcar speech, delivered after the most exasperating insults, was sublime in its lofty eloquence and courage. Safer as a leader, Governor Brown is more sagacious on material points—truer to the practical purposes of government: but no man but Toombs could have represented Georgia as he did for the decade preceding 1860.

Messrs. Brown and Toombs have disagreed since the war. That Governor Brown may have been wiser in “reconstruction” than Mr. Toombs, many wise men believe, and events may have proved. In that matter my heart was with Mr. Toombs, and I have never seen reason to recall it. That Governor Brown was honest and patriotic in his advice, my knowledge of the man would not permit me to doubt. The trouble between these gentlemen came very near resulting in a duel. While I join with all good men that this duel was arrested, I confess that I have been wicked enough to speculate on its probable result—had it occurred. In the first place, General Toombs made no preparation for the duel. He went along in his careless and kingly way, trusting, presumably, to luck and quick shot. Governor Brown, on the contrary, made the most careful and deliberate preparation. He made his will, put his estate in order, withdrew from the church, and then clipped all the trees in his orchard practicing with the pistol. Had the duel come off—which fortunately it did not—General Toombs would have fired with his usual magnificence and his usual disregard of rule. I do not mean to imply that he would not have hit Governor Brown; on the contrary, he might have perforated him in a dozen places at once. But one thing is sure—Governor Brown would have clasped his long white fingers around the pistol butt, adjusted it to his gray eye, and sent his bullet within the eighth of an inch of the place he had selected. I should not be surprised if he drew a diagram of General Toombs, and marked off with square and compass the exact spot he wanted to hit.

General Toombs has always been loose and prodigal in his money matters. Governor Brown has been precise and economical all his life, and gives $50,000 to a Baptist college—not a larger amount probably than General Toombs has dispensed casually, but how much more compact and useful! This may be a good fact to stop on, as it furnishes a point of view from which the two lives may be logically surveyed. Two great lives they are, illustrious and distinguished—utterly dissimilar. Georgia could have spared neither and is jealous of both. I could write of them for hours, but the people are up and the flags are flying, and the journalist has no time for moralizing or leisurely speculation.

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“_BOB_.”

HOW AN OLD MAN “COME HOME.”

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A STORY WITHOUT A MORAL, PICKED OUT OF A BUSY LIFE.

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[WRITTEN FOR THE SUNDAY GAZETTE.]

“YOU are the no-countest, laziest, meanest dog that ever wore breeches! Never let me see you again!”

Thus Mrs. Tag to Mr. Tag, her husband; she standing in the door, her arms akimbo, and, cat-like, spitting the words at him.

Mr. Tag made no reply. He did not even put up his hands in evasion. He stood dazed and bewildered, as one who hesitates in a sudden shower, and then turning, pulled his old hat down over his shoulders, as if she was throwing rocks at him instead of words, and shambled off in silence, quickening his retreat by a pitiful little jerk, every time she launched a new volley at him.

This she did as often as her brains could forge them and her tongue send them. She stood there, the very picture of fury. And at length, with disgust on every feature, she turned, sprawled a weevilly little child that was clinging to her skirts, and went into the house.

As for Mr. Tag, he hurried on, never once looking back until he had reached a hill, against which the sun was setting. He then slowed up a little, lifted the flap of his hat cautiously, as if to be sure he was out of ear-shot—then stopped. He pulled off his hat, shook it to and fro—unconsciously, I think—in his hand as one who comes out of the storm. He looked about him a while, as if undetermined, and then browsed about vaguely in the sunset, until his bent, shambling figure seemed melting into the golden glory that enveloped it; and his round, chubby head was tipped with light.

I thought probably he wanted to see me, so I climbed up the hill. He seemed to approve of my coming, and walked down in the shade to meet me.

“Ann was sorter rough to me, wan’t she?” he said, with a chuckle of deprecation.

I assented quietly to the lack of smoothness in Ann’s remarks.

“You aint know’d me long,” he said, with a sudden flicker of earnestness; “and you’ve knowed the worst part of me. You’ve knowed the trouble and the fag-end. You warn’t in at the good part of my life!”

I should think not, poor fellow. Ever since I had known him he had been the same shabby, good-for-nothing that he is now. He had grown a bit more serious of late, and his long face—it was abnormally long between the eyes and the chin—had whitened somewhat, but otherwise he was about the same shabby, ragged, half-starved old fellow I had known for a year or so. Yes, Bob, I had clearly known the worst of you!

“I was a better man once; not a better man, either, as I know of, but I had luck. When me and Ann married, there warn’t a happier couple nowhere. I remember just as well when I courted her. She didn’t think about me then as she does now. We had a buggy to ourselves, and we turned down a shady road. I fetched it on soon after we left the crowd, and she was about as well pleased as me. It seemed like that road was the road to heaven, and we was so happy that we wasn’t in no hurry to get to the end of it. Ann was handsome then. Oh yes, she was!”—as I winced at this,—“and at first as good a wife to me as ever a man had.

“It may a-been me that started the trouble. I was unfortnit in everything I touched. My fingers slipped off o’ everything and everything slipped off o’ them. I could get no grip on nothin’. I worked hard, but something harder agin me. Ann was ambitious and uppish, and I used to think when I come home at night, most tired to death, she was gettin’ to despise me. She’d snap me up and abuse me till actually I was afraid to come home. I never misused her or give her a back word. I thought maybe she wasn’t to blame, and that what she said about me was true. Things kept a-gitten worse, and we sold off pretty much what we had. Five years ago a big surprise came to us. It was a baby—a boy—him!” nodding toward the hut. “It was a surprise to both of us. We’d been married fourteen years. It made Ann harder on me than ever. She never let me rest; it was all the time hard words and hard looks. I never raised even a look against her, o’ course. I thought she was right about me. He never had a cross word with me. Him and me knowed each other from the start. We had a langwidge of our own. Ther wasn’t no words in it—just looks and grunts. I never could git ‘nough, nuther could he. He know’d more an’ me. Ther was a kinder way-off look in his eyes that was solemn and deep, I tell you. At last Ann got to breaking me up. Whenever she catch me with him she’d drive me off. I’d always hurry off, ’cause I never wanted him to hear her ’spressin herself ’bout me. ’Peared like he understood every word of it. Mos’t two years ago, and I ain’t had one since. I couldn’t git one. Ann commenced takin’ in washing, and one day she said I shouldn’t hang around no more a-eatin’ him and her out of house and home. That was more’n a year ago, and I seen him since to talk to him. Every time I go about she hustles me about like she did to-day. I never make no fuss. She’s right about me, I reckon. I am powerful no ’count. But he has stirred things in me I ain’t felt movin’ for many a year!”

“What’s his name, Bob?”

“Got none. She never would let me talk to her ’bout it, and I ain’t got no right to name him. I ast her once how it would do to call him little Bob, and she said I better git him sumpin’ to eat; he couldn’t eat a name, nor dress in it neither; which was true. But he’s got my old face on him, and my look. I know that, and he knows it too.”

“Did you ever drink, Bob?”

“Me? You know I didn’t. I did get drunk once. The boys give me the wine. They say liquor makes a man savage, and makes him beat his wife. It didn’t take me that way. I was the happiest fellow you ever see. I felt light and free. My blood was warm, and just jumped along—and beat Ann? why, all the old love come back to me, as I went to’ards home, feelin’ big as a king. I made as how I’d go up to Ann and put arm aroun’ her neck in the old way, and tell her if she’d only encourage me a little, I’d get about for her and him and make ’em both rich. I couldn’t hardly wait to get home, I was so full of it. She was just settin’ down a pail of water when I come in. I made for her, gentle like, and had just got my arms to her neck, when she drawed back, with a few words like them this evening, and dosed the pail of water full in my face. As I scrambled out o’ the door, sorter blind like, I struck the edge o’ the gulley there, rolled down head over heels, and fotch up squar’ at the bottom, as sober a man as ever you see!”

* * * * *

I met Bob a few days after that in a state of effusive delight. He would not disclose himself at first. He followed me through several blocks, and at length, diving into an alley, beckoned me cautiously to him. He took off his old hat, always with him a preliminary to conversation, and glancing cautiously around, said in a hoarse whisper:

“Had a pic-nic to-day.”

“A pic-nic! Who?”

“Me and him!”

And his wrinkled, weather-beaten old face was broken by smiles and chuckles, that struggled to the surface, as porpoises do, and then shrunk back into the depths from whence they came.

“You don’t know Phenice—the neighbor’s gal as nusses him sometimes? Well, I seed her out with him, to-day, and I tolled her off kinder, till she got beyant the hill, and then I give her a quarter I had got, and purposed as how she should gi’ me a little time with him. She sciddled off to town to git her quarter spent, and I took him and made for the woods, to meet her thar agin, by sun!”

“He’s a deep one, I tell you!” he said, drawing a breath of admiration; “as deep a one as I ever see. He’d never been in the woods before, but he jest knowed it all! You orter seed him when a jay-bird come and sot on a high limb, and flung him some sass, and tried to sorter to make free with him. The look that boy give him couldn’t a’ been beat by nobody. The jay tried to hold up to it and chaffered a little, but he finally had to skip, the wust beat bird you ever saw!”

And so the old fellow went on, telling me about that wonderful pic-nic; how he had gathered flowers for the baby, and made little bouquets, which the baby received with a critical air, as if he had spent his life in a florist’s shop, and being a connoisseur in flowers, couldn’t afford to become enthusiastic over pied daisies; how a gray squirrel scampering down a near tree had startled him out of his wits, while the baby, seated still nearer the disturbance than he, remained a marvel of stolidity and presence of mind; how the baby was finally coaxed out of his wise reserve by a group of yellow butterflies pulsating in the golden sunshine, and by the flashing of the silvery brook that ran beneath them; how all the birds in the county seemed to have entered into a conspiracy to upset that baby’s dignity; and how they would assail him with pert bursts of song and rapid curvetings about his head, while Bob sat off at a distance, “and let ’em fight it out, not helping one side or t’other,” always to see the chatterers retire in good-humored defeat before the serene impassibility of the youngster; how the only drawback to the pic-nic was that there was not a thing to eat, and besides its being in violation of all pic-nic precedent, there was danger of the little one getting very hungry; and how, in the evening—what would have been after dinner if they’d had any dinner—the baby, who was sitting opposite Bob on the grass, suddenly assumed an air of deeper solemnity, even than he had worn before, and gazed at Bob with a dense and inscrutable gaze, until he was actually embarrassed by the searching and fixed character of this look; and how the round, grave head suddenly keeled to one side as if it were so heavy with ideas that it could not be held upright any longer; and how then, suddenly, and without a sign or hint of warning, this self-possessed baby tumbled over in the grass, shot his little toes upward, and, before Bob could reach him, was dead asleep! And Bob told me then, with the glittering tears gathering in his eyes and rolling down his old cheeks, how he had picked the baby up and cuddled him close to his old bosom, and listened to his soft breathing, and stroked his chubby face, and almost guessed the wise dreams that were flitting through his round fuzzy head,—hugged him so close, and pressed him to his bosom with such hungry, tender love, that he felt as if he had him “layin’ agin’ my naked heart, and warmin’ it up, and stirrin’ all its strings with his little fingers!”

It was late that night when I went home—after one o’clock; a fearful night, too. The rain was pouring in torrents and the wind howled like mad. Taking a near cut home, I passed by the hut where Bob’s wife lived. Through the drifting rain, I saw a dark figure against the side of the house. Stepping closer, I saw that it was Bob, mounted on a barrel, flattened out against the planks, his old felt hat down about his ears, and the rain pouring from it in streams—his face glued to the window.

Poor old follow! there he was! oblivious to the storm, to hunger and everything else—clinging like some homeless night-bird, drifting and helpless, to the outside of his own home; gazing in stealthily at the bed where the little one slept, and warming his old heart up with the memory of that wondrous pic-nic—of the solemn contest with the impertinent jay-bird, and the grave rapture over the butterflies that swung lazily about in their rift of sunshine.

One morning, many months after the pic-nic, Bob came to me sideways. His right arm hung limp and inert by his side, and his right leg dragged helplessly after the left. The yielding muscles of the neck had stiffened and drawn his head awry. He stumbled clumsily to where I was standing, and received my look of surprise shamefacedly.

“I’ve had a stroke,” he said. “Paralysis? It’s most used me up. I reckon I’ll never be able to do anything for him! It came on me sudden,” he said, as if to say that if it had given him any sort of notice, he could have dodged it.

After that Bob went on from worse to worse. His face, all save that fixed in the rigid grasp of the paralysis, became tremulous, pitiful and uncertain. He had lost all the chirrupy good-humor of the other days, and became shy and silent. There was a wistfulness and yearning in his face that would have made your heart ache; a hungry passion had struggled from the depth of his soul, and peered out of his blue eyes, and tugged at the corners of his mouth. There was, too, a pitiful, scary look about him. He had the air of one who is pursued. At the slightest sigh he would pluck at his lame leg sharply, and shamble off, turning full around at intervals to see if he was followed. I learned that his wife had become even harder on him since his trouble, and that he was even more than ever afraid of her.

He had never had another “pic-nic.” He had snatched a furtive interview with the baby, under protection of the occasional nurse, from each of which he came to me with a new idea of the “deepness” of that infant. “He’s too much for me, that baby is!” he would say. “If I just had his sense!” He was rapidly getting shabbier, and thinner and more woe-begone. He became a slink. He hid about in the day-time, avoiding everybody, and seeming to carry off his love and his passion, as a dog with a bone, seeking an alley. At night he would be seen hanging like a guilty thief about the hut in which his treasure was hid.

“I’ve a mind,” he said one morning, “to go home. I don’t think she” (he had quit calling her “Ann” now) “could drive me out now. All I’d want would be to just sit in a corner o’ the house and be with him. That’s all.”

“Bob,” I said to him one morning, “you rascal, you are starving!”

He couldn’t deny it. He tried to put it off, but he couldn’t. His face told on him.

“Have you had anything to eat to-day?”

“No, sir.”

“Nor yesterday?”

“No, sir.”

I gave him a half-dollar. A wolfish glare of hunger shot into his eyes as he saw the money. He clutched it with a spasm of haste and started off. I watched his side-long walk down the street, and then went to work, satisfied that he would go off and pack himself full.

It was hardly an hour before he came back, his face brighter than I had seen it in months. He carried a bundle in his live hand. He laid it on my desk, and then fell back on his dead leg while I opened it. I found in the bundle a red tin horse, attached to a blue tin wagon, on which was seated a green tin driver. I looked up in blank astonishment.

“For him!” he said simply. And then he broke down. He turned slowly on his live leg as an axis and leaned against the wall.

“Could you send it to him?” he said at last. “If she knew I sent it, she mightn’t let him have it. He’s never had nothin’ o’ this kind, and I thought it might pearten him up.”

“Bob, is this the money I gave you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you were starving when you left here?”

“Oh, I got some bread!”

* * * * *

I suppose every man, woman and child remembers that terrible night three years ago when we had lightning while the snow was on the ground. The flashes plowed great yellow seams through the gray of the day, and at night a freezing storm of sleet and rain came.

It was a terrible night. I staggered home through it to where a big fire, and blue eyes and black, and slippers, and roasting apples were awaiting me. I thought of Bob—my old night-owl, with a heart in him, and wondered whether he was keeping his silent, but uncomplaining vigil about the little hut on the hillside. I even went so far as to speculate on this point with a certain blue-eyed youngster on my knee, to whom Bob’s life was a romance and a wonder.

Bless me! and all the time I was pitying him, I didn’t know that he had “gone home” and was all right.

His wife slept uneasily that night, as she has since said. She rolled in her sleep a long time, and at last got up and went to the window and looked out. She shuddered at the sound of the whizzing sleet and pitiless hum of the rain on the roof. Then she stumbled sleepily back to her couch, and dreamed of a long shady lane, and a golden-green afternoon in May, and a bright-faced young fellow that looked into her heart, and held her face in his soft fingers. How this dream became tangled in her thoughts that night of all nights, she never could tell. But there it was gleaming like a thread of gold through the dismal warp and woof of her life.

It was full day when she awoke. As she turned lazily upon her side she started up in affright. There was a man, dripping wet, silent, kneeling by her bedside. An old felt hat lay upon the floor. The man’s head was bowed deep down over the bed and his hands were bundled tenderly about one of the baby’s fists that had been thrown above its head.

The worn, weatherbeaten figure was familiar to her. But there was something that stopped her, as she started forward angrily. She stood posed like a statue for a moment, then bent down, curiously and tenderly, and with trembling fingers pulled the cover back from the bed, and looked up into the man’s face steadily. Then she put her fingers on his hand furtively and shrinkingly. And then a strange look crept into her face—the dream of the night came to her like a flash—and she sank back upon the floor, and dropped her head between her knees.

Ah, yes, Bob had “come home.”

And the poor fellow had come to stay. Not even his place in the corner would he want now! No place about the scanty board! Just to stay—that was all; not to offend by his laziness, or to annoy with his ugly, shambling figure, and his no-count ways. Just “come home to stay!”

And there the baby slept quietly, all unconscious of the shadow and the mystery that hung above his wise little head—unconscious of the shabby old watcher, and the woman on the floor, dreaming, perhaps, of the swinging butterflies and the chaffing birds and the brook flashing in the sunshine. And there was old Bob—brave, at last, through love—“come home.”

Out of the storm like a night-bird! In the door stealthily like a thief! Groping his way to the bedside through the dark like a murderer! But there was no danger in him—no ill-omen about him. It was only old Bob, come home, “come home to stay!”

He had clasped the little hand he loved so well in his rough palm and cuddled it close, as if he hoped to hold it always—fondled it in his hands, as if he hoped to ride his own life on the spring-tide that gathered in its rosy palm, or to catch that young life in the ebbing billows that wasted from his cold fingers. But no; the baby was “too much for him!” And the young heart, all unconscious and all perverse, sent the rich blood through the little arm, down the slender wrist, and into the dimpled fist, where it pulsed and throbbed uneasily, as it broke against the chill, stark presence of Death!

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COTTON AND ITS KINGDOM.[1]

Footnote 1:

Reprinted from Harper’s Magazine, Oct., 1881.

IT has long been the fortune of the South to deal with special problems—slavery, secession, reconstruction. For fifty years has the settlement of these questions engaged her people, and challenged the attention of the world. As these issues are set aside finally, after stubborn and bloody conflict, during which she maintained her position with courage, and abided results with fortitude, she finds herself confronted with a new problem quite as important as either of those that have been disposed of. In the cultivation and handling, under the new order of things, of the world’s great staple, cotton, she is grappling with a matter that involves essentially her own welfare, and is of the greatest interest to the general public. To the slaveholder the growing of cotton was straight and easy, as the product of his land was supplemented by the increase of his slaves, and he prospered in spite of himself. To the Southern farmer of _post-bellum_ days, impoverished, unsettled, and thrown upon free labor, working feverishly with untried conditions, poorly informed as to the result of experiments made by his neighbors, and too impatient to wait upon his own experience, it is quite a different affair. After sixteen years of trial, everything is yet indeterminate. And whether this staple is cultivated in the South as a profit or a passion, and whether it shall bring the South to independence or to beggary, are matters yet to be settled. Whether its culture shall result in a host of croppers without money or credit, appealing to the granaries of the West against famine, paying toll to usurers at home, and mortgaging their crops to speculators abroad even before it is planted—a planting oligarchy of money-lenders, who have usurped the land through foreclosure, and hold by the ever-growing margin between a grasping lender and an enforced borrower—or a prosperous self-respecting race of small farmers, cultivating their own lands, living upon their own resources, controlling their crops until they are sold, and independent alike of usurers and provision brokers—which of these shall be the outcome of cotton culture the future must determine. It is certain only in the present that the vigor of the cotton producers and the pace at which they are moving are rapidly forcing a settlement of these questions, and that the result of the experiments now swiftly working out in the South will especially concern a large part of the human race, from the farmer who plods down the cotton row, cutting through his doubts with a hoe, to the spinner in Manchester who anxiously balances the totals of the world’s crop.

It may be well to remark at the outset that the production of cotton in the South is practically without limit. It was 1830 before the American crop reached 1,000,000 bales, and the highest point ever reached in the days of slavery was a trifle above 4,500,000 bales. The crop of 1880-81 is about 2,000,000 in excess of this, and there are those who believe that a crop of 8,000,000 bales is among the certainties of the next few years. The heavy increase in the cotton crop is due entirely to the increase of cotton acreage brought about by the use of fertilizers. Millions of acres of land, formerly thought to be beyond the possible limit of the cotton belt, have been made the best of cotton lands by being artificially enriched. In North Carolina alone the limit of cotton production has been moved twenty miles northward and twenty miles westward, and the half of Georgia on which no cotton was grown twenty years ago now produces fully half the crop of the State. The “area of low production” as the Atlantic States are brought to the front by artificial stimulation is moving westward, and is now central in Alabama and Florida. But the increase in acreage, large as it is, will be but a small factor in the increase of production, compared to the intensifying of the cultivation of the land now in use. Under the present loose system of planting, the average yield is hardly better than one bale to three acres. This could be easily increased to a bale an acre. In Georgia five bales have been raised on one acre, and a yield of three bales to the acre is credited to several localities. President Morehead, of the Mississippi Valley Cotton Planters’ Association, says that the entire cotton crop of the present year might have been easily raised in fourteen counties along the Mississippi River. It will be seen, therefore, that the capacity of the South to produce cotton is practically limitless, and when we consider the enormous demand for cotton goods now opening up from new climes and peoples, we may conclude that the near future will see crops compared to which the crop of the past year, worth $300,000,000, will seem small.

Who will be the producers of these vast crops of the future? Will they be land-owners or tenants—planters or farmers? The answer to this inquiry will be made by the average Southerners without hesitation. “Small farms,” he will say, “well tended by actual owners, will be the rule in the South. The day of a land-holding oligarchy has passed forever.” Let us see about this.

The history of agriculture—slow and stubborn industry that it is—will hardly show stronger changes than have taken place in the rural communities of the South in the past fifteen years. Immediately after the war between the States there was a period of unprecedented disaster. The surrender of the Confederate armies found the plantations of the South stripped of houses, fences, stock, and implements. The planters were without means or prospects, and uncertain as to what should be done. The belief that extensive cotton culture had perished with slavery had put the price of the staple up to thirty cents. Lured by the dazzling price, which gave them credit as well as hope, the owners of the plantations prepared for vast operations. They refitted their quarters, repaired their fences, summoned hundreds of negro croppers at high prices, and invested lavishly their borrowed capital in what they felt sure was a veritable bonanza. The few years that followed are full of sickening failure. Planters who had been princes in wealth and possessions suddenly found themselves irretrievably in debt and reduced to beggary. Under the stimulation of high prices the crops grew, until there was a tumble from thirty to ten cents per pound. Unable to meet their engagements with their factors, who, suddenly awakening to the peril of the situation, refused to make further advances or grant extensions, the planters had no recourse but to throw their lands on the market. But so terrible had been their experience—many losing $100,000 in a single season—that no buyers were found for the plantations on which they had been wrecked. The result of this panic to sell and disinclination to buy was a toppling of land values. Plantations that had brought from $100,000 to $150,000 before the war, and even since, were sold at $6000 to $10,000, or hung on the hands of the planter and his factor at any price whatever. The ruin seemed to be universal and complete, and the old plantation system, it then seemed, had perished utterly and forever. While no definite reason was given for the failure—free labor and the credit system being the causes usually and loosely assigned—it went without contradiction that the system of planting under which the South had amassed its riches and lived in luxury was inexorably doomed.

Following this lavish and disastrous period came the era of small farms. Led into the market by the low prices to which the best lands had fallen, came a host of small buyers, to accommodate whom the plantations were subdivided, and offered in lots to suit purchasers. Never perhaps was there a rural movement, accomplished without revolution or exodus, that equalled in extent and swiftness the partition of the plantations of the ex-slave-holders into small farms. As remarkable as was the eagerness of the negroes—who bought in Georgia alone 6850 farms in three years—the earth-hunger of the poorer class of the whites, who had been unable under the slave-holding oligarchy to own land, was even more striking. In Mississippi there were in 1867 but 412 farms of less than ten acres, and in 1870, 11,003; only 2314 of over ten and less than twenty acres, and 1870, 8981; only 16,024 between twenty and one hundred acres, and in 1870, 38,015. There was thus in this one State a gain of nearly forty thousand small farms of less than one hundred acres in about three years. In Georgia the number of small farms sliced off of the big plantations from 1868 to 1873 was 32,824. In Liberty County there were in 1866 only three farms of less than ten acres; in 1870 there were 616, and 749 farms between ten and twenty acres. This splitting of the old plantations into farms went on with equal rapidity all over the South, and was hailed with lively expressions of satisfaction. A population pinned down to the soil on which it lived, made conservative and prudent by land-ownership, forced to abandon the lavish method of the old time as it had nothing to spare, and to cultivate closely and intelligently as it had no acres to waste, living on cost as it had no credit, and raising its own supplies as it could not afford to buy—this the South boasted it had in 1873, and this many believe it has to-day. The small farmer—who was to retrieve the disasters of the South, and wipe out the last vestige of the planting aristocracy, between which and the people there was always a lack of sympathy, by keeping his own acres under his own supervision, and using hired labor only as a supplement to his own—is still held to be the typical cotton-raiser.

But the observer who cares to look beneath the surface will detect signs of a reverse current. He will discover that there is beyond question a sure though gradual rebunching of the small farms into large estates, and a tendency toward the re-establishment of a land-holding oligarchy. Here and there through all the Cotton States, and almost in every county, are reappearing the planter princes of the old time, still lords of acres, though not of slaves. There is in Mississippi one planter who raises annually 12,000 bales of cotton on twelve consolidated plantations, aggregating perhaps 50,000 acres. The Capeheart estate on Albemarle Sound, originally of several thousand acres, had $52,000 worth of land added last year. In the Mississippi Valley, where, more than anywhere else, is preserved the distinctive cotton plantation, this re-absorbing of separate farms into one ownership is going on rapidly. Mr. F. C. Morehead, an authority on these lands, says that not one-third of them are owned by the men who held them at the close of the war, and that they are passing, one after the other, into the hands of the commission merchants. It is doubtful if there is a neighborhood in all the South in which casual inquiry will not bring to the front from ten to a dozen men who have added farm after farm to their possessions for the past several years, and now own from six to twenty places. It must not be supposed that these farms are bunched together and run after the old plantation style. On the contrary, they are cut into even smaller farms, and rented to small croppers. The question involved is not whether or not the old plantation methods shall be revived. It is the much more serious problem as to whether the lands divided forever into small farms shall be owned by the many or by the few, whether we shall have in the South a peasantry like that of France, or a tenantry like that of Ireland.

By getting at the cause of this threatened re-absorption of the small farmer into the system from which he so eagerly and bravely sought release, we shall best understand the movement. It is primarily credit—a false credit based on usury and oppression, strained to a point where it breeds distrust and provokes a percentage to compensate for risk, and strained, not for the purchase of land, which is a security as long as the debt is unpaid, but for provisions and fertilizers, which are valueless to either secure the lender or assist the borrower to pay. With the failure of the large planters and their withdrawal from business, banks, trust companies, and capitalists withdraw their money from agricultural loans. The new breed of farmers held too little land and were too small dealers to command credit or justify investigation. And yet they were obliged to have money with which to start their work. Commission merchants therefore borrowed the money from the banks, and loaned it to village brokers or store-keepers, who in turn loaned it to farmers in their neighborhood, usually in the form of advancing supplies. It thus came to the farmer after it had been through three principals, each of whom demanded a heavy percentage for the risk he assumed. In every case the farmer gave a lien or mortgage upon his crop of land. In this lien he waived exemptions and defense, and it amounted in effect to a deed. Having once given such a paper to his merchant, his credit was of course gone, and he had to depend upon the man who held the mortgage for his supplies. To that man he must carry his crop when it was gathered, pay him commission for handling it, and accept the settlement that he offered. To give an idea of the oppressiveness of this system it is only necessary to quote the Commissioner of Agriculture of Georgia, who by patient investigation discovered that the Georgia farmers paid prices for supplies that averaged fifty-four per cent. interest on all they bought. For instance, corn that sold for eighty-nine cents a bushel cash was sold on time secured by a lien at a dollar and twelve cents. In Mississippi the percentage is even more terrible, as the crop lien laws are in force there, and the crop goes into the hands of the merchant, who charges commission on the estimated number of bales, whether a half crop or a full one is raised. Even this maladjustment of credits would not impoverish the farmer if he did not yield to the infatuation for cotton-planting, and fail to plant anything but cotton.

Those who have the nerve to give up part of their land and labor to the raising of their own supplies and stock have but little need of credit, and consequently seldom get into the hands of the usurers. But cotton is the money crop, and offers such flattering inducements that everything yields to that. It is not unusual to see farmers come to the cities to buy butter, melons, meal, and vegetables. They rely almost entirely upon their merchants for meat and bread, hay, forage, and stock. In one county in Georgia last year, from the small dépôts, $80,000 worth of meat and bread was shipped to farmers. The official estimate of the National Cotton Planters’ Association, at its session of 1881, was that the Cotton States lacked 42,252,244 bushels of wheat, 166,684,279 bushels of corn, 77,762,108 bushels of oats, or 286,698,632 bushels of grain, of raising what it consumed. When to this is added 4,011,150 tons of hay at thirty dollars a ton, and $32,000,000 paid for fertilizers, we find that the value of the cotton crop is very largely consumed in paying for the material with which it was made. On this enormous amount the cotton farmer has to pay the usurous percentage charged by his merchant broker, which is never less than thirty per cent., and frequently runs up to seventy per cent. We can appreciate, when we consider this, the statement of the man who said, “The commission merchants of the South are gradually becoming farmers, and the farmers, having learned the trick, will become merchants.”

The remedy for this deplorable tendency is first the establishment of a proper system of credit. The great West was in much worse condition than the South some years ago. The farms were mortgaged, and were being sold under mortgages, under a system not half so oppressive as that under which the Southern farmer labors. Boston capital, seeking lucrative investment, soon began to pour toward the West, in charge of loan companies, and was put out at eight per cent., and the redemption of that section was speedily worked out. A similar movement is now started in the South. An English company, with headquarters at New Orleans, loaned over $600,000 its first year at eight per cent., with perfect security. The farmers who borrowed this money were of course immensely relieved, and the testimony is that they are rapidly working out. In Atlanta, Georgia, a company is established with $2,000,000 of Boston and New York capital, which it is loaning on farm lands at seven per cent. In the first three months of its work it loaned $120,000, and it has now appointed local agents in thirty counties in the State, and advertises that it wishes to lend $50,000 in each county. The managers say that they can command practically unlimited capital for safe risks at seven per cent. Companies working on the same plan have been established elsewhere in the South, and it is said that there will be no lack of capital for safe risks on rural lands in a few years.

The first reform, however, that must be made is in the system of farming. The South must prepare to raise her own provisions, compost her fertilizers, cure her own hay, and breed her own stock. Leaving credit and usury out of the question, no man can pay seventy-five cents a bushel for corn, thirty dollars a ton for hay, twenty dollars a barrel for pork, sixty cents for oats, and raise cotton for eight cents a pound. The farmers who prosper at the South are the “corn-raisers,” _i.e._, the men who raise their own supplies, and make cotton their surplus crop. A gentleman who recorded 320 mortgages last year testified that not one was placed on the farm of a man who raised his own bread and meat. The shrewd farmers who always have a bit of money on hand with which to buy any good place that is to be sold under mortgage are the “corn-raisers,” and the moment they get possession they rule out the all-cotton plan, and plant corn and the grasses. That the plan of farming only needs revision to make the South rich beyond measure is proven by constant example. A corn-raiser bought a place of 370 acres for $1700. He at once put six tenants on it, and limited their cotton acreage to one-third of what they had under cultivation. Each one of the six made more clear money than the former owner had made, and the rents for the first year were $1126. The man who bought this farm lives in Oglethorpe, Georgia, and has fifteen farms all run on the same plan.

The details of the management of what may be the typical planting neighborhood of the South in the future are furnished me by the manager of the Capeheart estate in North Carolina. This estate is divided into farms of fifty acres each, and rented to tenants. These tenants are bound to plant fifteen acres in cotton, twelve in corn, eight in small crops, and let fifteen lie in grass. They pay one-third of the crop as rent, or one-half if the proprietor furnishes horses and mules. They have comfortable quarters, and are entitled to the use of surplus herring and the dressings of the herring caught in the fisheries annexed to the place. In the center of the estate is a general store managed by the proprietor, at which the tenants have such a line of credit as they are entitled to, of course paying a pretty percentage of profit on the goods they buy. They are universally prosperous, and in some cases, where by skill and industry they have secured 100 acres, are laying up money. The profits to Dr. Capeheart are large, and show the margin there is in buying land that is loosely farmed, and putting it under intelligent supervision. Of the $52,000 worth of land added to his estates last year, at a valuation of twenty-five dollars per acre, he will realize in rental nine dollars per acre for every acre cultivated, and calculates that in five years at the most the rentals of the land will have paid back what he gave for it.

Amid all this transition from land-owner to tenant there is, besides the corn-raiser, one other steadfast figure, undisturbed by change of relation or condition, holding tenaciously to what it has, though little inclined to push for more. This is Cuffee, the darky farmer. There is no more interesting study in our agriculture than this same dusky, good-natured fellow—humble, patient, shrewd—as he drives into town with his mixed team and his one bag of cotton, on which, drawn by a sympathetic sense of ownership, his whole family is clustered. Living simply and frugally, supplementing his humble meal with a ’possum caught in the night hunt, or a rabbit shot with the old army musket that he captured from some deserted battle-field, and allowing no idlers in the family save the youngsters who “tend de free school,” he defies alike the usurer and the land-shark. In the State of Georgia he owns 680,000 acres of land, cut up into farms that barely average ten acres each, and in the Cotton States he owns 2,680,800 acres, similarly divided. From this possession it is impossible to drive him, and to this possession he adds gradually as the seasons go by. He is not ambitious, however, to own large tracts of land, preferring the few acres that he has constantly under his eye, and to every foot of which he feels a rude attachment.