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or three times as much as he ought to pay for ginning his cotton;
and, finally, he turns over his crop to be eaten up in commissions, if
anything still be left to him. It is easy to understand why the negro
rarely gets ahead in the world. This mortgaging of future services,
which is practically what a pledge of the growing crop amounts to, is in
the nature of bondage. It has a tendency to make the negro extravagant,
reckless, and unscrupulous; he has become convinced from previous
experience that nothing will be coming to him on the day of settlement,
and he is frequently actuated by the purpose of getting as much as
possible and working as little as possible. Cases are numerous in which
the negro abandons his own crop at picking time, because he knows that
he has already eaten up its full value; and so he goes to picking for
wages on some other plantation. In other cases, where negroes have
acquired mules and farming implements upon which a merchant has secured
a mortgage in the manner described, they are practically bound to that
merchant from year to year, in order to retain their property; if he
removes from one section to another, they must follow him, and rent
and cultivate lands in his neighborhood. It is only the ignorance,
the improvidence, and the happy disposition of the negro, under the
influence of the lazy, drowsy climate, to which he is so well adapted
physically, that have enabled him to endure these hardships so long.
And, though the negro is the loser, the white man is not often the
gainer, from this false plantation and mercantile system. The incidental
risk may not be so large as the planter and merchant pretend, but the
condition of the people is an evidence that the extortion they practice
yields no better profit in the long run than would be gained by
competition in fair prices on a cash system; and in leading up to a
general emigration of the laboring population the abuses described will
eventually ruin and impoverish those who have heretofore been the only
beneficiaries thereof. The decay of improvements inevitable under annual
rentings, the lack of sufficient labor to cultivate all the good land,
and the universal idleness of the rural whites have kept the land
owners comparatively poor; the partial failure of crops and the
unscrupulousness of the negro debtor, engendered by the infamous
exactions of his creditor, have prevented the merchants, as a class,
from prospering as much as might be s