The officers of a negro regiment at Natchez spent the month of March in mustering it out of the service. First the muster-out rolls gave interminable delays; then every body waited for the mustering officer; then on the paymaster; and, meantime, the camp was inundated by a flood of planters and speculators seeking to contract for hands.

One Surgeon Dayton, late of our volunteer service, son of the late United States Minister to France, had leased a plantation over on Black River. He wanted hands badly, but they wouldn’t leave the Mississippi River. And the truth was, he didn’t blame them very greatly. All his neighbors were the old set; mad at him as a Northerner, and mad at the negroes as freedmen. It wasn’t very pleasant for him and he supposed it wouldn’t be very pleasant for the negroes. But, nevertheless, he must have some hands if he could get them; and he was trying to get an influential sergeant who would be able to carry a dozen or two wherever he went.

Colonel Wallace, late of an Illinois cavalry regiment,^[80] was another. He wanted hands for some plantation in which he was interested, but he had about made up his mind that it would cost more than they were worth, to get them.

“Fact is, gentlemen,” I heard an officer wearing the United States uniform say to planters, asking about the chances for hands, when the regiment was disbanded; “Fact is, you had better make your bargains with us than with the niggers. We control ’em; and we don’t mean to take ’em to anybody’s plantation without being paid for it.” And, in truth, quite a number of officers were bargaining all the time with the negro-seeking planters for their valuable influence. Some insisted on a considerable share of the crop in return for taking a specified number of negroes to the place. Others preferred a fixed salary of two, three, or indeed, as high as five or six thousand dollars a year, for their services—not as overseers, for they knew absolutely nothing of cotton culture—but simply in preserving order on the plantations and retaining the confidence of the negro.^[81] After making their own bargain on the most favorable terms they could secure, it became their duty to persuade the negroes that this was the identical place they had been looking for, all the time, in their search for a good home.

In most cases they knew nothing whatever about the homes which they thus recommended; had never seen them, and had never heard of the proprietors until they proved themselves adventurers by making these extravagant offers. In other cases they knew that these men were dishonest and unprincipled; and yet they encouraged their confiding subordinates to bind themselves to such men for a year, in remote regions, where there was little hope for protection from the Freedman’s Bureau or from civil officers. “Why didn’t you warn the sergeant against that man with whom he has contracted?” said the colonel of the regiment, one day to the adjutant. “You had yourself found that the man didn’t keep his promises, and couldn’t be depended on.” The adjutant blushed, stammered, and explained: “I expect to stay in this country myself, and I didn’t want to be making enemies of such men!”

This flunkeyism of Northern men, who “expected to stay in this country and didn’t want to make enemies,” was manifest everywhere. For a genuine toady, commend me to a Northern adventurer, or “runner,” in the cotton-growing regions. Through the winter of 1865-’66, the South was full of them, looking for cotton-lands, soliciting custom for Northern business houses, collecting old debts. They never spoke of Rebels, but with great caution called them Confederates. The National armies became, in their mouths, “the Federals.” They were always profound admirers of General Lee, the “second Washington of Virginia;” they grew enthusiastic over Stonewall Jackson; and, if it became necessary to speak kindly of any Northern officers, they always, with delicate appreciation of the proprieties, selected McClellan. If they were found out to be Northerners, they were anxious to have it understood that, at any rate, they were not Yankees; and were pretty sure to intimate that if they had any hatred a little more intense than that which good Christians ought to cherish toward the devil, it was evoked by the doings or the presence of these Yankees aforesaid.

Day after day, the camp of the negro regiment was filled with Mississippi or Louisiana planters. It was refreshing to see with what careful consideration and scrupulous politeness they approached the “niggers.” Here was no longer “hatred of the upstarts,” “war of races,” “unconquerable antagonism.” The negro was king. Men fawned upon him; took him to the sutler’s shop and treated him; carried pockets full of tobacco to bestow upon him; carefully explained to him the varied delights of their respective plantations. Women came too—with coach and coachman—drove into the camp, went out among the negroes, and with sweet smiles and honeyed words sought to persuade them that such and such plantations would be the very home they were looking for. Sambo listened, took the tobacco, drank the whisky, grinned ample return for every smile, and——cogitated. Scarcely an old planter got a negro, unless by some bargain with the officers. Half of them made no engagements at all; and, in a week after their discharge, the streets of Natchez were full of ragged, hungry negroes who had spent all their money and lost all their clothes; and were anxious to contract for a year’s work with the first planter who came along.

Competition had driven the planters who needed hands the worst to offering extravagant wages. Twenty dollars per month, with rations, lodging, etc., was a common offer; and some went as high as twenty-five. Influential sergeants and corporals were offered thirty and forty dollars a month, on condition that they brought a certain number of men with them. In general, the more remote the plantation, the more backward the work upon it; and the less reliable the owner or lessee, the higher were the offered wages. The negroes displayed very little judgment, at last, in making their selections; and, as a rule, the men who made the most big promises, which they never meant to keep, got the most laborers.

About the same time the business of furnishing the labor for sugar and cotton plantations had assumed another phase in New Orleans. A regular system had been organized early in the year, by which agents, white or black, undertook to furnish negroes to the planters who needed them, at so much a head. This gradually degenerated until, in April, hundreds of negroes were within call of these agents, ready to reenact the rôle of the Northern bounty-jumpers. The agent would hire them to a planter, receive his twenty-five dollars a head, and turn them over. The planter would start with them to his plantation. Sometimes they escaped from the boat before it started; in other cases they even went to the plantation, drew their rations for a week, and then ran away. On their return they shared the proceeds of the little operation with the agent. In Vicksburg a similar process of swindling was carried on, but on a smaller scale.

A Missouri cooper, who had managed to make enough money on cotton during the war to secure a plantation, boasted of his better success in securing labor: “I jist went over to Montgomery, Alabama, and from there to Selma. I takes my landlord aside, and persuades him to jine me in a straight drink. Then I told him I was after niggers, and asked him what he thought of my chances. He tole me he had jist six men in the house on the same business already. None of ’em had had any luck, and they was a goin’ to Eufala by the Shamrock. All right, my covey, thinks I. So I jist steps down to the Shamrock, bargained awhile with the captain, and finally got the use of her yawl. He wasn’t agoin’ to start till Tuesday mornin’ and that was Sunday. I puts my nigger into the yawl, and we pulled down stream all night. Monday mornin’ we was in Eufala. I sends my nigger out to talk to the people. They had nothin’ to do; Georgians wanted to hire ’em for their board and clothes; and fifteen dollars a month seemed enormous. Wednesday mornin’ the Shamrock got down, and as the Selma nigger-hunters stepped off, I stepped on with sixty-five niggers.”

He said he had no trouble in getting as many as he wanted, except from the apprehension of the negroes throughout all that region, that any one who proposed to take them away anywhere to labor, really meant to run them over to Cuba and sell them. Several asked him, confidentially, whether Cuba wasn’t just across the Mississippi River. Even the white men entertained no doubt of his being a negro smuggler. One congratulated him on his remarkable luck, and “calculated that lot would about make his fortune by the time he got them over.”

I saw but one successful experiment with white laborers on a cotton plantation. This was in one of the northern parishes of Louisiana, where seventy or eighty Germans, picked up from sponging-houses in New York and elsewhere, had been engaged for the year. At first they worked very badly. The overseer treated them as he had been in the habit of treating the slaves; and, degraded as these Germans were, they would not submit to it. A new overseer was engaged; and, after a time, matters seemed to go on measurably well. But it was still too early (about the middle of April) to tell how they would succeed during the unhealthy summer months. None of the neighboring planters had any faith in the experiment. These Germans, they said, were not by any means as good as the niggers. If you sought Germans of a better class, they wouldn’t contract with you, unless they saw a chance to become, after a time, the owners of the soil they cultivated.

Against this, and indeed against any subdivision of the great river plantations, the feeling was very strong. That a German should buy a hundred or two acres from the edge of a large plantation, was a thing not to be tolerated. Even sales of entire tracts to new-comers were very unpopular. “Johnson has gone and sold his plantation to a Yankee,” exclaimed one. “Is it possible?” was the reply. “Why, I thought Johnson was a better citizen than that. If he had to sell, why didn’t he hunt up some Southern man who wanted to buy?”

The negroes were all anxious to purchase land. “What’s de use of being free,” said one, an old man of sixty, who was begging permission to plant cotton; “What’s de use of being free if you don’t own land enough to be buried in? Might juss as well stay slave all yo’ days.” “All I wants,” said another, explaining what he was going to do with his money, of which he had already saved four or five hundred dollars; “All I wants is to git to own fo’ or five acres ob land, dat I can build me a little house on and call my home.” In many portions of the Mississippi Valley the feeling against any ownership of the soil by the negroes is so strong, that the man who should sell small tracts to them would be in actual personal danger. Every effort will be made to prevent negroes from acquiring lands; and even the renting of small tracts to them is held to be unpatriotic and unworthy of a good citizen. Through such difficulties is it that the subject-race is called upon to prove, by its prosperity, its fitness for freedom.

“I stops at your plantation de oder day, but I not know tat you had goods of your own to sell mit your niggers. I vill not interfere mit no man’s trade.”

The speaker was a Jew peddler, who also kept up a little store in Natchez-under-the-hill. He had been peddling down the river on the Louisiana side, and had been driven away from the plantation, whose proprietor he was addressing, by the overseer. Once before, the owner said, the overseer had permitted him to stay all night and trade with the negroes. He had sold, in a few hours, goods to the amount of nearly two hundred dollars, and had received payment in full in greenbacks, from ragged-looking blacks who would never have been suspected of having a penny. Nearly all the negroes had money. Some saved it quite carefully. On this very plantation he had field hands, working at fifteen dollars a month, who had five or six hundred dollars hid away in old stockings. Of course it wouldn’t do to look too closely into the means by which they had acquired it. During the war, and especially in the confusion following the surrender, they had great opportunities for trade, and their master’s property constituted the stock from which they drew. He had one man who had made several hundred dollars by killing his hogs and selling the pork.

But, with the cunning that seemed natural to them, they would rarely acknowledge the possession of money. “I have had boys come to me with the sorriest stories of their necessities, to get an advance of a few dollars on their month’s wages, when I knew that they had as much money in their pockets as I had in mine. The worst of it was, that what they had rightfully belonged to me as much as that in my own pocket-book.”

“Vat you tinks about de overflow?” asked the peddler, with an anxious look at the river, which was then rapidly rising.

“Why, what business is it of yours about the overflow? So you can swindle my niggers, what do you care about the overflow?”

“Vy, I wants you to make a pig crop. If tere’s an overflow, tere’ll pe no monish in te country next fall, and my trade ish gone. But if you makes pig crop, monish ish plenty, and I does pig business.”

The planter subsequently explained, that this fellow had sold common unbleached muslins and the cheapest calicoes at from seventy-five cents to a dollar a yard; and that on the trinkets and gew gaws, with which his pack was liberally supplied, his profits were from five to eight hundred per cent.^[82] The negroes bought readily, no matter what price he asked; and for the average plantation hand, the more worthless the article, the greater seemed, often, the desire to purchase it.

There could be no question of the zeal with which, through the exciting spring months, the people in the interior of the cotton States, supported the “President’s Policy” of Reconstruction; but it was rarely a zeal according to knowledge.

“Just think of the infamous lengths those cursed Radicals are going!” exclaimed a wealthy and by no means illiterate or unpolished Mississippi cotton-planter to me in April; “They’ve actually turned out Stockton, of Missouri, from the Senate!”

“I thought it was some New Jersey senator,” I ventured to suggest.

“Oh, no!” (with great positiveness of manner.) “You got that into your head from having New Jersey and the Stockton name associated. But there’s a Missouri family of Stocktons, and its one of the finest in the State. There never was a greater outrage than to turn Stockton out, just to get a party majority.”

“But how can Mr. Stockton be from Missouri? Haven’t they got Mr. Henderson and Gratz Brown there already?”

“Well, what’s to hinder them from having three, I’d like to know, except the infamous usurpation of these Radicals?”

This gentleman owned five large plantations, had an annual income of certainly not less than a hundred thousand dollars before the war, and himself belonged to one of “our first families.”

“Have you heard the news?” said a finely-educated and really very skillful surgeon in one of the inland towns to me one day. “Johnson isn’t going to put up with your Radicals any longer. He is going to prorogue Congress at once, to get rid of its meddlesome interference with his policy!” “I have no doubt,” he continued, in reply to some incredulous expression of mine; “I have no doubt of it in the world. Why, you can see yourself from Voorhees’ speech that, if he don’t, they’re going to impeach him right off. Of course he wouldn’t stand that, or wait for it!” Yet this believer in Voorhees had been educated in Europe, had traveled nearly over the world, and had the hearing and manners of an intelligent and accomplished gentleman.

“Johnson’ll be the next President, as sure as the Mississippi runs down stream,” said a planter, waiting in a bar-room for the ferry-boat. “Why?” “Because he’s got the South with him, sure, to start on. Then he’s got Seward with him, and Seward has had the North in his breeches-pocket for the last six years. I’d like to know how you are going to beat that combination!”

Sitting in a Natchez parlor, one day, conversing with the hostess, we were interrupted by the entrance of a smart, bright-looking negro girl, clothed in a fashionably-short and fashionably-expanded skirt of common striped bed-ticking. The child made its little courtesy to the stranger, and timidly stole behind the chair and clung to the skirts of “Missey.”

“This is our little Confederate nigger,” explained the lady. “She is the only one I have been able to keep; and I only have her because her parents haven’t yet been able to coax her away. You see she wears her old Confederate clothes. When we could get nothing else we were forced to the necessity of ripping up our mattresses to get material for dresses; and we are all too poor yet to buy new things for their every-day wear.

“Did you notice,” she continued, patting the woolly head of the child as it lay with its face buried in her lap, “that she called me ‘Missey,’ just now? All the niggers have been trying to break her of that, but they can’t. They tell her to call me Miss Lizzie, but she says ‘she may be your Miss Lizzie, but she’s my Missey.’ The other day she made quite a scene in church, by breaking away from the other servants and shouting out, ‘I will sit with my Missey to-day!’ You should have seen everybody’s head turning to see who it was, in these sorrowful times, that was still fortunate enough to be called Missey!”

On a Mississippi steamboat, one evening, I encountered an intelligent, substantial-looking Arkansas planter, hirsute, and clad in Confederate gray. The buttons had been removed from his military coat; but I soon discovered that the companion, with whom I was passing an idle evening in talk about planting and politics, was the Rebel General, E. C. Cahell.

He was giving the free-labor experiment a fair trial; and risking upon it pretty nearly all he was worth. He paid his first-class hands a dollar a day, and furnished them lodgings. They supplied themselves with clothing and provisions, which he sold—there being no village, or even store, within six miles of his landing—at a very slight advance on St. Louis prices, barely enough to cover freight and waste. He felt that he was paying very high wages; but he fixed upon this plan in preference to paying them fifteen dollars a month and rations, because a negro seemed to himself to be getting more for his work. “A dollar a day” was short and very easily understood; and the negroes thought it had a big sound.

Thus far he had less trouble with his laborers than he had anticipated. They worked well and seemed contented; but he was by no means certain that his hold upon them was secure enough to give him the slightest guaranty of being able to gather what he was planting. Now and then he found a troublesome negro; but, in the main, they had been unexpectedly open to reason. “The mistake we have generally made in the South has been that we have supposed nigger nature was something different from human nature. But I find that they are just as easily controlled, when sufficient motives are presented, as any other class of people would be.” He was getting along without the aid of the Freedman’s Bureau; and, indeed, without aid of any sort. He knew of no laws and of no officers; he was off in the woods by himself; and his only resource had been to try and do what was right, and then convince the negroes that he had done so.

On one point he had been closely pressed. His negroes all wanted to plant cotton on their own account, and made a dead-set at him for an acre of land apiece for that purpose. It would never do to tell them the truth—that he was afraid to let them grow any, lest, when picking-time came, they should steal from him to add to their own crops—but he had approached the delicate point diplomatically. “Of course, Jim, it would be all right with you; but then you know there are some of the boys here that will steal. They would bring a bad name on the whole of you, and get you all into trouble.” And, “nigger nature being very much like human nature,” his argument had been successful, and he had been relieved from the embarrassment.

He thought about three-fourths of the good cotton land directly fronting on the Mississippi, so far as his observation extended, was under cultivation and might be relied upon, with a favorable season, for an average crop. Back from the river, through Mississippi, Arkansas, and West Tennessee, he doubted whether one-fourth of the land was under cultivation.

Two or three days later, in another steamboat trip, I encountered a heavy planter, who came to this country originally from Illinois. He owned a fine plantation in Mississippi, fronting on the river, and with the cultivation of this he had always been contented. But this year he regarded as the golden opportunity. The free-labor project had not yet settled down into a steadily-working system. Half these old planters in the interior believed the niggers wouldn’t work, and were doing very little to find out. When all made the discovery that they would work, cotton would come down to nearly its old prices, and there would be no great speculation in it. But this year, the men who “went in” would make the money which the backward ones ought to make, as well as their own. So he had leased, right and left. He had three plantations near his own, in Mississippi, and three more across the river, in Louisiana. On all of them he had plenty of negroes. At that time (3d April) he had a little over seventeen hundred acres of cotton planted. With good weather, in another week, he should have over four thousand.

But this was the last year he would do anything of the sort. He didn’t believe there would be so much money in it another year; but, at any rate, he was kept forever running up and down the river, from one place to another, buying supplies and giving directions. He had no peace, day or night; and he meant to make enough this year to be able to retire and have some comfort.

He was trying all the different plans of paying negroes, and, next year, planters would be welcome to his experience. On one place he gave them fifteen dollars per month,^[83] with rations, lodging, and medical attendance. On another he gave twelve dollars per month, and furnished clothing also. On one he gave a fifth of the crop, and supported the negroes; on another, a fourth of the crop, and required them to furnish a part of their own support. But on none would he permit any of the hands to plant a stalk of cotton on their own account. Nobody need tell him anything about niggers. He had owned them long enough to know all about them, and there wasn’t one in a hundred he would trust to pick cotton for himself (the negro) out of a patch adjacent to the cotton fields of his employer.

He could as yet perceive no marked difference in the work of his hands on the different plantations. None did as much as under the old system, but all did more than was expected. Much depended on the overseer. Where the hands thought he understood his business, and could tell when they were doing their duty, and was, at the same time, disposed to treat them justly, there was no trouble. But some of the old overseers made a good deal of mischief on a plantation. They thought they could knock and cuff niggers about as they used to; and by the time they discovered their mistake, the niggers were leaving, and keeping others from coming in their places.

“One o’ my niggers left, the other day, without saying a word to me about it. You couldn’t guess why. The cussed nigger had been lazy about mending a plow which was badly needed in the field, and the nigger-driver scolded him about it. He said he was a free man, and wasn’t going to be insulted; so off he started. There’s one consolation; he had only been paid half his wages at the end of each month; and so there’s a matter of twenty-five or thirty dollars which he lost and I gained by his running away.”

This man had but an indifferent education; he had seen little of society or the world; he knew nothing thoroughly, save cotton and the negro. But, coming down, raw, from Illinois, years ago, he had won the good opinions of the heiress to a plantation, and had married,——it rather than her, as an acquaintance expressed it. How he was wealthy, and, with a fair season, was sure of not less than five thousand bales of cotton, worth, at only twenty-five cents per pound, half a million dollars, as the profits of this year’s operations. How he would spend his money when he got it, it would be difficult to say. Horse-racing and hard drinking were the amusements most congenial to his class. Gambling was pleasant, but his business habits had given him a wholesome dread of it; and, after all, there seemed more probability that he would soon return to cotton, and end his days in worship at its kingly shrine.