A few days afterward I embarked again upon a Mississippi packet, at New Orleans, to make a visit to some noted cotton plantations near Natchez.

A good steamboat should make the trip in about thirty hours; but the packets lengthen the time one-half by their frequent stoppages. Every few miles we ran into shore, the gang-plank was thrown out, and half-a-dozen barrels of pork, or double as many of flour, or a few bales of hay were rolled off. So wedded are most of the old residents to their old ways of doing business, that they see all these supplies steadily carried past their doors by the “up-river boats,” but wait until they reach New Orleans, pass through the hands of their old commission merchant, and thus return with double freights and double commissions, to be landed at the very places they passed the week before. Ask one why he does not buy above, and have the goods shipped direct to his plantation, and he will reply that Mr. So-and-so, in New Orleans, has sold all his cotton or sugar, and purchased all his supplies for the last ten or twenty years, and he doesn’t want to be bothered making a change.

Among the passengers was a short, florid-faced, red-whiskered gentleman, with an empty coat-sleeve, who seemed a general favorite. “Poor fellow,” said one, as he passed near, “the war pretty much broke him, I guess.”

“Broke him! well, now, you just go below and look at the seventy-five mules he’s got on board, bought in New Orleans for his plantations, at two hundred dollars a head, cash, and see whether you think he’s broke.”

“I’m mighty glad he’s got his property back,” said another. “He owns three of the finest plantations in Louisiana; and one good crop will put him all right again, and let him go into politics if he wants to.”

All shared in the expressions of good will, and it was evident that the red-faced, one-armed little gentleman was a popular favorite. It was General Yorke, late of the Rebel army, scarred with three wounds, and back among those for whom he had unsuccessfully fought. At Monocacy he led the final charge which swept back Lew Wallace’s forces and opened the way for Ewell and Breckinridge to the Capital. At Spottsylvania a bullet struck him in the head; in another Virginia battle he was wounded in the shoulder; from several he came out with clothes riddled with bullets and all his horses shot under him; at last, in the Wilderness, his arm was carried away.

It was common at the North to regard such men as the leading criminals of the rebellion, but I would rather trust General Yorke in Congress, unpardoned Rebel as he is, than a single one of the pardoned Congressmen elect from Mississippi or Louisiana.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he exclaimed, impetuously, to some one who was haranguing against the tyranny and cruelty of the government; “I tell you, sir, you have got and I have got the most merciful government in the world. What’s the use of our trying to disguise the facts? We attempted to destroy the government and failed; any other would have hung me for my share in the matter; and would have had a perfect right to do it. I consider myself a standing proof of the mercy of my government. It confiscated my property, while I was gone, fighting against it. I don’t complain; it did perfectly right. Since then I’ve got my property back; a thing I had no right to expect; and I’m very grateful for it. I only want a chance to prove my gratitude. If we get into a war about this Mexican business, I’ll try to show the government how I appreciate its generosity to me.”

Very few of his hearers seemed to like the General’s views—much as they all admired him personally. To them it seemed a very great outrage that while he was losing his arm under Lee, in the Wilderness, government lessees should have been cultivating his splendid cotton plantations, within the national lines, at Natchez. What business had government to be interfering with the rights of property?

Some one said the war wasn’t over yet. “Isn’t it?” said the General. “Well, may be you havn’t had enough of it. But I tell you, the men that did the fighting have. What’s more, they are satisfied to quit and to take things as they can get them. More still, I don’t know of anybody that isn’t satisfied to quit, except the stay-at-home sneaks that have never yet made a beginning. You’re very full of fight now, all of a sudden, when it isn’t needed. Why didn’t you show some of it when we wanted you in the trenches at Richmond?”

Yet the General was as firm a believer in the right of secession as ever: “I have my own views as to the constitutionality and rightfulness of our course; I thought our cause just, and I did all I could to make it successful. But we were beaten, badly beaten. Some of those fellows that have been hanging around Natchez, or making money out of army contracts, may not be subjugated, but I am. And now, having submitted, I do it in good faith. What difference does it make now about our beliefs and our arguments in favor of secession? All that has been settled against us in the court to which we appealed; we have submitted to the verdict; and, as honorable men, we have no right to revive the controversy.”

The General assured me that his negroes were working well; and that he had not experienced the slightest difficulty in getting all the labor he wanted. “My people all knew well enough that I had been a kind master to them before the war; and you couldn’t have hired any considerable number of them to leave me. Why, when I came back here to White-Hall,^[69] from the army, it was a perfect jubilee. They picked me up and carried me into the house on their shoulders, and God-blessed me, and tanked de Lo’d for me, till I thought they were never going to get through.”

All this, as I had subsequent occasion to learn from numerous sources, was but a moderate statement of the facts. His old slaves had unlimited faith in him; his plantations had all the labor they needed; and the work on them was as well advanced as on any along the river.

At last our boat reached Natchez, having consumed over forty-eight hours in traveling the two-hundred and seventy-five miles from New Orleans. High bluffs rose above us, and perched upon them could be seen the roofs and steeples of an important little inland town. Between the river and bluff was crowded the most miserable, straggling, shabby-looking village imaginable. This was what is left of Natchez-under-the-hill. Once fine rows of brick warehouses lined the banks; but the steady encroachments of the river undermined their foundations, and one after another disappeared. Thirty or forty feet from the water’s edge a large deserted building still stood, with one corner of the wall washed away by the “last high water,” and the rest of it tottering, to fall with the next. Negroes filled the nasty little shops, where tobacco, whisky, sardines, calicoes, and head-handkerchiefs were displayed. The street was full of dirty idlers, and the whole appearance of the place was unprepossessing in the extreme. Up the river a saw-mill and lumber-yard shut in the view.

Altogether, it was about the most unlikely place imaginable in which to look for any display of art or appreciation of natural beauties. But, the day after my arrival, a citizen, to whom I had brought letters of introduction, taught me how to find a rare gem in this shabbiest of settings. Driving past the saw-mill, we approached the residence of the sawyer, nestled close, as it seemed, under the bluff, which, a few yards further up, jutted out against the river. Passing from the lumber-yard and the whisky shops, we entered, as my enthusiastic companion said, “the garden of Eden.” Hedges of the most beautiful flowering shrubs led up to the airy, many-galleried house. Graveled walks led off on either hand to pleasant summer-houses, covered with vines, and bordered with the rarest exotics. Great mounds, covered with shrubs and flowers, stood sentry on either side the gate. The air was heavy with perfumes, and vocal with the music of the full-throated little songsters that flitted about among the branches. Citizens of Natchez boast that the sawyer’s garden is the finest in the South. They might enlarge their boast, by a little modification, and safely pronounce it the most surprising one on the continent.

Natchez-on-the-hill, (to which passengers from the boats ascend by a long carriage-way, cut out of the perpendicular face of the bluff,) would be called, at the North, a flourishing county-town; dusty, and by no means specially attractive. But it is the aristocratic center of the lower Mississippi Valley cotton-planting interests. Before the war, it was regarded as a most desirable residence, and wealthy Southerners sought plantations within a range of thirty or forty miles up or down the river, in order to be able to fix their own residences at Natchez. Few resided on their plantations; many owned several—in some cases as high as eight or nine—the smallest rarely, if ever, falling below a thousand acres in extent. These lands were all of the richest alluvial soil; and, before the war, were worth, after being cleared, from sixty to a hundred dollars per acre. Recent sales had been made at about forty dollars, but the leases were all disproportionately high. I heard of cases in which thirty thousand dollars had been paid in cash, and in advance, for one year’s lease of fourteen hundred acres. This, however, was probably the highest lease paid along the river. Fifteen thousand dollars seemed a common rent for a thousand acres of good land, with the use of agricultural implements, gin, and saw and grist-mills. It was always, however, an important consideration that the former slaves should all be on the plantation. Here, as elsewhere, labor was the great desideratum. That secured, speculators were ready to pay almost any price for the use of the land.

Around Natchez is a beautiful rolling country, abounding in park-like scenery. Showy, and, in some cases, elegant residences crown the little knolls; and the country, for several miles back into Mississippi, wears an air of wealth and comfort. On the opposite side of the river are “the swamps.” But the swamps are the gold mines; it is only those who draw their support from the rich, low lands of the neighboring parishes of Louisiana who can afford the display that crowns the hills about Natchez.

Buildings in Natchez, which the Government had seized, were being restored to their former owners. Business had revived. Northern men had established themselves as commission merchants and dealers in plantation supplies, and were infusing new energy into the town. They said they had all the business they could do, made no complaints of hostility from the people, and said they believed it would be better for all parties if the troops were removed. So far as they were themselves concerned, at any rate, they professed that they would not have the slightest apprehension.

Many of the small planters in the interior (hill country) of Mississippi, who used Natchez as their base of supplies, were anxious for assistance from capital, from whatever source it might come. Some had supplies enough to carry them through till their cotton should be half made. Then they wanted to borrow money enough to last till they could begin to receive returns from their crops, and were willing to pay such extravagant rates as two and even two and a half per cent. per month for it.

“Cotton square” was crowded with ox-teams from these hill plantations. Each brought in two or three bales of cotton, and returned with pork, meal, and molasses to support the negroes. The planters themselves, rough, hairy, wild-looking men, wearing homespun, bargained in the shops, where they sold their cotton, for Calhoun plows, harness, drills, and denims for the “niggers,” and an occasional article for themselves. The whole scene was primitive, and rude in the extreme; yet these tobacco-chewing, muddy-footed men from the hills were among the best customers the Natchez merchants had. They were nearly all small planters, working from six to thirty, or even forty hands, raising from fifty to three hundred bales of cotton, and handling more money in a year than half-a-dozen Northern farmers, each of whom would have his daily newspaper, a piano in the house, daughters at the nearest “Female Seminary,” and sons at college.

A steam ferry-boat sets passengers, once an hour, across the Mississippi, from Natchez-under-the-hill. A pleasant drive for a few miles down the levee, (passing but two plantations on the way—one to a mile of river front is a small allowance here,) brought me to the plantations I had come to visit. They lay beside each other, and belonged to the same man; but each had its separate set of quarters and gang of negroes, and the work on each had always been kept distinct. The levee formed the boundary of their arable land. Outside this were two or three hundred acres, thickly set in Bermuda grass,^[70] and fringed with a dense growth of young willows. This was covered with water when the Mississippi rose to its highest point, but at all other seasons it furnished pasturage for the mules and other stock of the plantations. A negro on each, enjoying the title and dignity of “stock-minder,” was charged with the duty of “carrying out,” daily, all the stock not in use, and herding it on this open common.

A lane led down between an old gin-house on one hand, and an old stable on the other, to the broad-porched, many-windowed, one-story “mansion.” China and pecan trees surrounded it. On one hand was a garden, several acres in extent, to which the labors of two negroes were steadily devoted; and on the other were the quarters—a double-row of frame, one-story houses, fronting each other, each with two rooms, and a projecting roof, with posts, shutting in an earthen porch floor. Down the middle of the street were two or three brick cisterns; at the foot of it stood the church. Back of each cabin was a little garden, jealously fenced off from all the rest with the roughest of cypress pickets, and carefully fastened with an enormous padlock. “Niggers never trust one another about their gardens or hen-houses,” explained the overseer.

Back of the house and quarters stretched a broad expanse of level land, gently sloping down to the cypress swamp, which, a mile and a half in the rear, shut in the view. Not a stump, tree, or fence broke the smooth monotony of the surface; but half-a-dozen wide, open ditches led straight to the swamp; and were crossed at no less than seven places by back levees, each a little higher than the one beyond it. The lands were entirely above overflow from the Mississippi in their front; but the back-water from the swamp, when swelled by the overflows from crevasses above, almost every year crept up on the land nearest the swamp—coming sometimes before the planting had begun; sometimes not till the first of June. Then began the “fight with the water,” as the planters quaintly called it. An effort was made to “catch it at the back levee.” Failing in this, the negro forces retreated to the next levee, a hundred and fifty yards further up; closed the leading ditches, and went to work trying to raise this levee to a hight sufficient to check the sluggish, scarcely moving, muddy sheet of water that, inch by inch, and day by day, crept nearer to it. The year before they had failed here, and at every levee till they came to the one nearest the river. On the two plantations, out of twelve or fourteen hundred acres of cotton land, they saved less than three hundred. The rest was planted in the ooze, as the waters receded, late in June; the negroes following close behind, men and women knee-deep in the alluvial mud, drilling in the cotton-seed, and covering it by rubbing along the row the flat sides of their hoes. “Ten or twelve barrels of whisky got it done,” the overseer explained. But the crop, like all late ones in this region, was attacked by the worms; the grass got ahead of the plows, and less than a quarter of a bale to the acre was realized on lands that had been made to produce a bale and a half.

Along the inner levee, at which the water had been finally “caught,” led a fine, beaten wagon-road down to the quarters on the other plantation. These differed in no way from those already described, except that they were less regularly arranged. Instead of a “mansion,” there was at the front only a double cabin, which in old times served as the overseer’s house. Now both plantations were managed by the same overseer; and at this lower place were eighty-five field negroes, besides children and old people, without a white man nearer to them than at the house on the upper place, a mile off. “They get along nearly as well as if they were watched,” said the overseer. “We have about as much trouble at the upper place as here.”

By the inner levee were, at points about three-quarters of a mile apart, the ruins of the two steams-gins that had once been the pride of the plantations. The boilers were still in their places; and fragments of the engines and machinery strewed the ground for many yards in each direction. One was lost by the carelessness of an unaccustomed negro engineer; the other had been destroyed by the guerrillas. From this point, for a distance of thirty miles down the river, nearly all the steam-gins were burnt. The guerrillas were determined, they said, that the Yankees, or men that would stay at home and be friendly with the Yankees, shouldn’t make money out of them. A few had been rebuilt; but, in most cases, the planters were relying upon clumsy horse-power arrangements for ginning out the next crop.

We rode out to see the negroes at work. They were back half-way between the river and the swamp. Two gangs made up the working force on each plantation; and each was under its own negro-driver, who rode about on his horse and occasionally gave sharp, abrupt directions.

The plow-gang, containing fifteen plows, each drawn by a pair of scrawny mules, with corn-husk collars, gunny-bag back-bands, and bed-cord plow-lines, was moving across the land, after a fashion which would have broken the heart of a Northern farmer, at the rate of about eighteen acres a day. They had been at work since the middle of January, and would continue plowing, without interruption, till the first of April, by which time they hoped to reach the swamp. The land was plowed in beds; each occupying about five feet. Each plowman started down, what had been the “middle,” between last year’s cotton rows; returning, he threw another furrow up to meet the one he had turned going down. Two more furrows were then thrown on each side, and the bed was completed, ready for planting. On one of the plantations, however, they were only “four-furrowing” the land; i. e., throwing up two furrows on each side, but leaving the middles still unbroken. “If we done gits behine, we’s plant on dem beds, and knock de middles out afterwards;” so the plow-driver answered my question about his object for leaving part of the work undone. Two or three women were plowing, and were said to be among the best hands in the gang.

A quarter of a mile ahead of the plows a picturesque sight presented itself. Fifty women and children, with only a few weakly men among them, were scattered along the old cotton rows, chopping up weeds, gathering together the trash that covered the land, firing little heaps of it, singing an occasional snatch of some camp-meeting hymn, and keeping up an incessant chatter. “Gib me some ’backey please;” was the first salutation as the overseer rode among them. These were the “trash-gang.” After the cotton is planted, they become the hoe-gang, following the plows, thinning out the cotton, and cutting down the grass and weeds which the plows can not reach. Most of them were dressed in a stout blue cottonade; the skirts drawn up till they scarcely reached below the knee, and reefed in a loose bunch about the waist; heavy brogans of incredible sizes on their feet, and gay-checkered handkerchiefs wound about their heads. As evening approached the work moved more slowly, and the sharp remonstrances of the energetic driver grew more frequent and personal. The moment the sun disappeared every hoe was shouldered. Some took up from the levee, where they had been lying through the heat of the day, army blouses or stout men’s overcoats and drew them on;^[71] others gathered fragments of bark or dry lightwood to kindle their evening fires and balanced them nicely on their heads. In a moment the whole noisy row was filing across the field toward the quarters, joining the plow-gang, pleading for rides on the mules, and looking as much like a caravan crossing the desert as a party of weary farm-laborers.

The drivers were all comparatively intelligent men, and they occupied positions of considerable responsibility. Each plow-driver had charge of about thirty-five mules, was required to see that these were properly fed, to prescribe for them when sick, and to decide when they were too tired to work and must be replaced by fresh ones. It was his duty to have his plowmen out by sunrise, keep them steadily at work, to change them from part to part of the land to find that in the best condition for plowing at that particular time; to have broken plows repaired at the plantation blacksmith shop; and, in general, to get as much plowing done and in as good style as possible. The “hoe-drivers” had larger numbers under their command and more troublesome material to deal with. “Dem women done been a squabblin’ ’mong deirselves dis afternoon, so I’s harly git any wuck at all out ob ’em.” “Dem sucklers ain’t jus wuf nuffin at all. ’Bout eight o’clock dey goes off to de quarters, to deir babies, an’ I don’ nebber see nuffin mo’ ob ’em till ’bout eleben. Den de same way in afternoon, till I’s sick ob de hull lot.” “De ’moody (Bermuda) mighty tough ’long heah, an’ I couldn’t make dem women put in deir hoes to suit me.” “Fanny an’ Milly done got sick to-day; an’ Sallie’s heerd dat her husban’s mustered out ob de army, an’ she gone up to Natchez to fine him.”

On each plantation, as soon as the people reached the quarters, the hoe-drivers began giving out their tickets. Each hand received a white ticket for a full day’s work, or a red one for half a day. These they preserved till the end of the month, when they were paid only for the number presented. Under this arrangement the overseer said he had very few sick people on the plantations. Sometimes in fact they went to the fields when really too sick to work, lest they should lose their wages for the day. In unpleasant weather too, when the ground was a little muddy, or when a fine mist was falling, they were far less anxious to quit work than formerly.

The tickets distributed, the women were soon busy in the quarters getting supper. Meantime the plow-gang had gathered about the entrance to the overseer’s part of the house. He’d done promised dem a drink o’ whisky, if dey’d finish dat cut, an’ dey’d done it. The whisky was soon forthcoming, well-watered. The most drank it down at a gulp, from the glass into which the overseer poured it; others, as their turns came, passed up tin cups to receive their allowance, and went off boasting about “de splennid toddy we’s hab to-night.” Then came a little trade at the store. Some wanted a pound or two of sugar; others a paper of needles or a bar of soap, or “two bits worth o’ candy.” Some had money; other offered in payment their tickets, just received; which were taken at their face value. In an hour the trade was all over and the quarters were as silent as a church-yard.

Next morning at four o’clock I was waked by the shrill “Driber’s Horn.” In a couple of hours it was blown again; and looking from the window, just as the first rays of the sun came across the level field, I saw the women filing out, and the plowmen slowly strolling down to the stables, each with his harness in his hand.^[72] At twelve the horn blew again, and they came in; at half-past one again, and from then until sunset they were in the field.

The overseer said he “couldn’t get as many hours of work out of ’em” as in old times; nor was he quite sure that they worked as well during the shorter time they were at it. Still he had never heard of gangs of white laborers of equal size, in which better or more cheerful work was done. On the whole, he was perfectly satisfied with the free-labor system; and, if the water only kept away, was sure of making a hundred thousand dollars net profit this year for the proprietors.

On the two plantations there were one hundred and seventy-six laborers on the pay-roll. The first-class men were paid fifteen dollars per month, first-class women ten dollars, and drivers forty dollars. The wages for the entire number averaged between ten and eleven dollars per month. They were furnished a weekly ration, for each laborer, consisting of

Each family, in addition, had its garden and poultry; and they were always paid for Saturday afternoons, but were given the time for their own work.

The expenses on these plantations for the year could be quite accurately calculated. The items would stand nearly or quite as follows:

Economical management and the personal supervision of an interested party might undoubtedly reduce these expenses at least ten per cent., but under the loose expenditures of overseers the calculation was none too large. The amount would still be swelled by at least twenty thousand dollars for rent, and two thousand as wages of the overseer, so that the expenses of conducting the plantations for a year might be pretty accurately set down in round numbers at seventy thousand dollars.

With a good season and without overflow, the yield ought to be twelve hundred bales of cotton, worth, say, a hundred dollars per bale. Taking all the risks, therefore, and using this heavy capital, the proprietors were likely, under the most favorable circumstances, to have, at the end of the year, fifty thousand dollars and sixty mules, as their net profit. On other plantations, where they paid less exorbitant rents, they anticipated, of course, larger returns.