to lighten the burden as much as possible, the gang is divided into two watches, one taking the first and the other the last part of the night; and, notwithstanding this continued labor, the negroes improve in appearance, and appear fat and flourishing. They drink freely of cane-juice, and the sickly among them revive, and become robust and healthy.
After the grinding is finished, the negroes have several holidays, when they are quite at liberty to dance and frolic as much as they please; and the cane-song—which is improvised by one of the gang, the rest all joining in a prolonged and unintelligible chorus—now breaks, night and day, upon the ear, in notes “most musical, most melancholy.”
The above is inserted as a specimen of the facility with which the most horrible facts may be told in the genteelest phrase. In a work entitled “Travels in Louisiana in 1802” is the following extract (see Weld’s “Slavery as It Is,” p. 134), from which it appears that this cheerful process of laboring night and day lasts three months!
“At the rolling of sugars, an interval of from two to three months, they (the slaves in Louisiana) work both night and day. Abridged of their sleep, they scarcely retire to rest during the whole period.”
Now, let any one learn the private history of seven hundred blacks—men and women—compelled to work day and night, under the lash of a driver, for a period of three months.
Possibly, if the gentleman who wrote this account were employed, with his wife and family, in this “cheerful scene” of labor—if he saw the woman that he loved, the daughter who was dear to him as his own soul, forced on in the general gang, in this toil which
“Does not divide the Sabbath from the week,
And makes the night joint laborer with the day,”
—possibly, if he saw all this, he might have another opinion of its cheerfulness; and it might be an eminently salutary thing if every apologist for slavery were to enjoy some such privilege for a season, particularly as Mr. Ingraham is careful to tell us that its effect upon the general health is so excellent that the negroes improve in appearance, and appear fat and flourishing, and that the sickly among them revive, and become robust and healthy. One would think it a surprising fact, if working slaves night and day, and giving them cane-juice to drink, really produces such salutary results, that the practice should not be continued the whole year round; though, perhaps, in this case, the negroes would become so fat as to be unable to labor. Possibly, it is because this healthful process is not longer continued that the agricultural societies of Louisiana are obliged to set down an annual loss of slaves on sugar plantations to the amount of two and a half per cent. This ought to be looked into by philanthropists. Perhaps working them all night for six months, instead of three, might remedy the evil.
But this periodical pressure is not confined to the making of sugar. There is also a press in the cotton season, as any one can observe by reading the Southern newspapers. At a certain season of the year, the whole interest of the community is engaged in gathering in the cotton crop. Concerning this Mr. Weld says (“Slavery as It Is,” page 34):
In the cotton and sugar region there is a fearful amount of desperate gambling, in which, though money is the ostensible stake and forfeit, human life is the real one. The length to which this rivalry is carried at the South and South-west, the multitude of planters who engage in it, and the recklessness of human life exhibited in driving the murderous game to its issue, cannot well be imagined by one who has not lived in the midst of it. Desire of gain is only one of the motives that stimulates them; the éclat of having made the largest crop with a given number of hands is also a powerful stimulant; the Southern newspapers, at the crop season, chronicle carefully the “cotton brag,” and the “crack cotton-picking,” and “unparalleled driving,” &c. Even the editors of professedly religious papers cheer on the mêlée, and sing the triumphs of the victor. Among these we recollect the celebrated Rev. J. N. Maffit, recently editor of a religious paper at Natchez, Miss., in which he took care to assign a prominent place and capitals to “THE COTTON BRAG.”
As a specimen, of recent date, of this kind of affair, we subjoin the following from the Fairfield Herald, Winsboro’, S. C., Nov. 4, 1852.
COTTON-PICKING.
We find in many of our southern and western exchanges notices of the amount of cotton picked by hands, and the quantity by each hand; and, as we have received a similar account, which we have not seen excelled, so far as regards the quantity picked by one hand, we with pleasure furnish the statement, with the remark that it is from a citizen of this district, overseeing for Maj. H. W. Parr.
“Broad River, Oct. 12, 1852.
“Messrs. Editors:—By way of contributing something to your variety (provided it meets your approbation), I send you the return of a day’s picking of cotton, not by picked hands, but the fag end of a set of hands on one plantation, the able-bodied hands having been drawn out for other purposes. Now for the result of a day’s picking, from sun-up until sun-down, by twenty-two hands—women, boys, and two men:—four thousand eight hundred and eighty pounds of clean picked cotton, from the stalk.
“The highest, three hundred and fifty pounds, by several; the lowest, one hundred and fifteen pounds. One of the number has picked in the last seven and a half days (Sunday excepted), eleven hours each day, nineteen hundred pounds clean cotton. When any of my agricultural friends beat this, in the same time, and during sunshine, I will try again.
James Steward.”
It seems that this agriculturist professes to have accomplished all these extraordinary results with what he very elegantly terms the “fag end” of a set of hands; and, the more to exalt his glory in the matter, he distinctly informs the public that there were no “able-bodied” hands employed; that this whole triumphant result was worked out of women and children, and two disabled men; in other words, he boasts that out of women and children, and the feeble and sickly, he has extracted four thousand eight hundred and eighty pounds of clean picked cotton in a day; and that one of these same hands has been made to pick nineteen hundred pounds of clean cotton in a week! and adds, complacently, that, when any of his agricultural friends beat this, in the same time, and during sunshine, he “will try again.”
Will any of our readers now consider the forcing up of the hands on Legree’s plantation an exaggeration? Yet see how complacently this account is quoted by the editor, as a most praiseworthy and laudable thing!
“Behold the hire of the laborers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth! and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth.”
That the representations of the style of dwelling-house, modes of housekeeping, and, in short, the features of life generally, as described on Legree’s plantation, are not wild and fabulous drafts on the imagination, or exaggerated pictures of exceptional cases, there is the most abundant testimony before the world, and has been for a long number of years. Let the reader weigh the following testimony with regard to the dwellings of the negroes, which has been for some years before the world, in the work of Mr. Weld. It shows the state of things in this respect, at least up to the year 1838.
Mr. Stephen E. Maltby, Inspector of Provisions, Skaneateles, N. Y., who has lived in Alabama.—“The huts where the slaves slept generally contained but one apartment, and that without floor.”
Mr. George A. Avery, elder of the 4th Presbyterian Church, Rochester, N. Y., who lived four years in Virginia.—“Amongst all the negro cabins which I saw in Virginia, I cannot call to mind one in which there was any other floor than the earth; anything that a Northern laborer, or mechanic, white or colored, would
