of the slave-gang, driven out at daybreak and home at sundown. In many
cases the planters were forced to abandon it, because they had not the
means to carry on such huge farming, and they could not secure the same
liberal advances from capitalists as when they were able to mortgage
a growing "crop of niggers." Then the system of working on shares was
tried. This was reasonably fair, and the negro laborers were satisfied
as long as it lasted. The owners of the land, under this system, would
furnish the indispensable mule and the farming implements, and take one
half the product. The planters themselves relinquished this system. Some
of them contend that the laziness and indifference of the negro made the
partnership undesirable; many others admit that they were not able to
advance the negro tenant his supplies pending the growth of the year's
crop, as it was necessary they should do under the sharing system.
Now the renting system is almost universal. It yields the land owner a
certainty, endangered only by the death, sickness, or desertion of the
negro tenant; but it throws the latter upon his own responsibility, and
frequently makes him the victim of his own ignorance and the rapacity
of the white man. The rent of land, on a money basis, varies from six to
ten dollars an acre per year, while the same land can be bought in
large quantities all the way from fifteen to thirty dollars per acre,
according to location, clearing, improvement, richness, etc. When paid
in product, the rent varies from eighty to one hundred pounds of lint
cotton per acre for land that produces from two hundred to four hundred
pounds of cotton per acre; the tenant undertakes to pay from one quarter
to one half--perhaps an average of one third--of his crop for the use
of the land, without stock, tools, or assistance of any kind. The land
owners usually claim that they make no money even at these exorbitant
figures. If they do not, it is because only a portion of their vast
possessions is under cultivation, because they do no work themselves,
and in some cases because the negroes do not cultivate and gather as
large a crop as they could and ought to harvest. It is very certain that
the negro tenants, as a class, make no money; if they are out of debt at
the end of a season, they have reason to rejoice.

The credit system, which is as universal as the renting system, is even
more illogical and oppressive. The utter viciousness of both systems in
the