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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Cotton
Kingdom, volume 2 (of 2)
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License
included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you
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Title: The Cotton Kingdom, volume 2 (of 2)

A traveller's observations on cotton and slavery in the
American Slave States

Author: Frederick Law Olmsted

Release date: January 11, 2024 [eBook #72677]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Mason Brothers, 1861

Credits: Melissa McDaniel and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file
was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE

COTTON KINGDOM, VOLUME 2 (OF 2) ***
 Transcriber’s Notes
Inconsistent hyphenation, capitalization, and spelling in
the original document have been preserved. Obvious
typographical errors have been corrected.
Quotes in dialect were not corrected.
The following are possible errors, but retained:

but I havn’t got through with you yet. (page 10)

venemous water-snakes, (page 24)
Barbecued rabits. (page 57)
Rasins (page 57)
prehaps you’ll never see a stage again; (page 66)
Page 76 and 77 (Numerous possible spelling
errors).
Your equaility is acknowledged (page 143)
As to the moralty of this question (page 234)
lagunes, and jungles (page 257)
a caldron which stood over the fire (page 316)
the moral physican (page 344)

Download Volume 1 at
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/72676.

JOURNEYS AND
EXPLORATIONS
 IN

THE COTTON KINGDOM OF

AMERICA.
 THE

COTTON KINGDOM:

A TRAVELLER’S OBSERVATIONS ON COTTON AND SLAVERY IN THE

AMERICAN SLAVE STATES.

BASED UPON THREE FORMER VOLUMES OF JOURNEYS AND INVESTIGATIONS BY THE SAME
AUTHOR.

BY

FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED.

IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. II.
 NEW YORK:
PUBLISHED BY MASON BROTHERS,
5 and 7 MERCER STREET.
LONDON: SAMPSON LOW, SON & CO., 47 LUDGATE HILL.
1861.
 Entered, according to the Act of Congress, in the year 1861, by
MASON BROTHERS,
In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the United States for the
Southern
District of New York.

PRINTED BY
C. A. Alvord,
15 Vandewater-st.
 CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.
PAGE
SOUTH-WESTERN LOUISIANA AND EASTERN 1
TEXAS

CHAPTER II.
A TRIP INTO NORTHERN MISSISSIPPI 55

CHAPTER III.
THE INTERIOR COTTON DISTRICTS—CENTRAL 84
MISSISSIPPI, ALABAMA,
ETC.

CHAPTER IV.
THE EXCEPTIONAL LARGE PLANTERS 143

CHAPTER V.
SLAVERY IN ITS PROPERTY ASPECT.—MORAL AND 184
RELIGIOUS
INSTRUCTION OF THE SLAVES, ETC.

CHAPTER VI.
SLAVERY AS A POOR LAW SYSTEM 236

CHAPTER VII.
COTTON SUPPLY AND WHITE LABOUR IN THE 252
COTTON CLIMATE
 CHAPTER VIII.
THE CONDITION AND CHARACTER OF THE 272
PRIVILEGED CLASSES
OF THE SOUTH

CHAPTER IX.
THE DANGER OF THE SOUTH 338

APPENDIX (A.)
THE CONDITION OF VIRGINIA.—STATISTICS 364

APPENDIX (B.)
THE SLAVE TRADE IN VIRGINIA 372

APPENDIX (C.)
COST OF LABOUR IN THE BORDER STATES 380

APPENDIX (D.)
STATISTICS OF THE GEORGIA SEABOARD 385

INDEX TO THE WORK 393

COTTON AND SLAVERY.
 CHAPTER I.
SOUTH-WESTERN LOUISIANA AND EASTERN
TEXAS.

Nacogdoches.—In this town of 500 inhabitants, we found there was

no flour. At San Augustine we had inquired in vain at all the stores
for refined sugar. Not satisfied with some blankets that were shown
us, we were politely recommended by the shopkeeper to try other
stores. At each of the other stores we were told they had none: the
only blankets in town we should find at ——’s, naming the one we
had just quitted. The same thing occurred with several other articles.

Houston County.—This day’s ride and the next were through a very
poor country, clay or sand soil, bearing short oaks and black-jack.
We passed one small meadow, or prairie, covered with coarse grass.
Deserted plantations appeared again in greater numbers than the
occupied. One farm, near which we stopped, was worked by eight
field hands. The crop had been fifty bales; small, owing to a dry
season. The corn had been exceedingly poor. The hands, we
noticed, came in from the fields after eight o’clock.
The deserted houses, B. said, were built before the date of Texan
Independence. After Annexation the owners had moved on to better
lands in the West. One house he pointed out as having been the
residence of one of a band of pirates who occupied the country thirty
or forty years ago. They had all been gradually killed.
During the day we met two men on horseback, one upon wheels,
and passed one emigrant family. This was all the motion upon the
principal road of the district.
The second day’s camp was a few miles beyond the town of
Crockett, the shire-town of Houston County. Not being able to find
corn for our horses, we returned to the village for it.
We obtained what we wanted for a day’s rest, which we proposed for
Sunday, the following day, and loaded it into our emptied hampers.
We then looked about the town for current provisions for ourselves.
We were rejoiced to find a German baker, but damped by finding he
had only molasses-cakes and candies for sale. There was no flour in
the town, except the little of which he made his cakes. He was from
Hamburgh, and though he found a tolerable sale, to emigrants
principally, he was very tired of Crockett, and intended to move to
San Antonio among his countrymen. He offered us coffee, and said
he had had beer, but on Christmas-day a mass of people called on
him; he had “treated” them all, and they had finished his supply.
We inquired at seven stores, and at the two inns for butter, flour, or
wheat-bread, and fresh meat. There was none in town. One
innkeeper offered us salt beef, the only meat, except pork, in town.
At the stores we found crackers, worth in New York 6 cents a pound,
sold here at 20 cents; poor raisins, 30 cents; Manilla rope, half-inch,
30 cents a pound. When butter was to be had it came in firkins from
New York, although an excellent grazing country is near the town.

Trinity Bottom.—On landing on the west side of the Trinity, we

entered a rich bottom, even in winter, of an almost tropical aspect.
The road had been cut through a cane-brake, itself a sort of
Brobdignag grass. Immense trees, of a great variety of kinds,
interlaced their branches and reeled with their own rank growth.
Many vines, especially huge grape-vines, ran hanging from tree to
tree, adding to the luxuriant confusion. Spanish moss clung thick
everywhere, supplying the shadows of a winter foliage.
These bottom lands bordering the Trinity are among the richest of
rich Texas. They are not considered equal, in degree of fatness, to
some parts of the Brazos, Colorado, and Guadaloupe bottoms, but
are thought to have compensation in reliability for steady cropping.
We made our camp on the edge of the bottom, and for safety against
our dirty persecutors, the hogs, pitched our tent within a large hog-
yard, putting up the bars to exclude them. The trees within had been
sparingly cut, and we easily found tent-poles and fuel at hand.
The plantation on which we were thus intruding had just been sold,
we learned, at two dollars per acre. There were seven hundred
acres, and the buildings, with a new gin-house, worth nearly one
thousand dollars, were included in the price. With the land were sold
eight prime field-hands. A quarter of the land was probably subject to
overflow, and the limits extended over some unproductive upland.
When field-hands are sold in this way with the land, the family
servants, who have usually been selected from the field-hands, must
be detached to follow the fortunes of the seller. When, on the other
hand, the land is sold simply, the whole body of slaves move away,
leaving frequently wives and children on neighbouring plantations.
Such a cause of separation must be exceedingly common among
the restless, almost nomadic, small proprietors of the South.
But the very word “sale,” applied to a slave, implies this cruelty,
leaving, of course, the creature’s whole happiness to his owner’s
discretion and humanity.
As if to give the lie to our reflections, however, the rascals here
appeared to be particularly jolly, perhaps adopting Mark Tapley’s
good principles. They were astir half the night, talking, joking, and
singing loud and merrily.
This plantation had made this year seven bales to the hand. The
water for the house, we noticed, was brought upon heads a quarter
of a mile, from a rain-pool, in which an old negress was washing.

At an old Settler’s.—The room was fourteen feet square, with

battens of split boards tacked on between the broader openings of
the logs. Above, it was open to the rafters, and in many places the
sky could be seen between the shingles of the roof. A rough board
box, three feet square, with a shelf in it, contained the crockery-ware
of the establishment; another similar box held the store of meal,
coffee, sugar, and salt; a log crib at the horse-pen held the corn,
from which the meal was daily ground, and a log smoke or store-
house contained the store of pork. A canopy-bed filled one quarter of
the room; a cradle, four chairs seated with untanned deer-hide, a
table, a skillet or bake-kettle, a coffee-kettle, a frying-pan, and a rifle
laid across two wooden pegs on the chimney, with a string of
patches, powder-horn, pouch, and hunting-knife, completed the
furniture of the house. We all sat with hats and overcoats on, and the
woman cooked in bonnet and shawl. As I sat in the chimney-corner I
could put both my hands out, one laid on the other, between the
stones of the fire-place and the logs of the wall.
A pallet of quilts and blankets was spread for us in the lean-to, just
between the two doors. We slept in all our clothes, including
overcoats, hats, and boots, and covered entirely with blankets. At
seven in the morning, when we threw them off, the mercury in the
thermometer in our saddle-bags, which we had used for a pillow,
stood at 25° Fahrenheit.
We contrived to make cloaks and hoods from our blankets, and after
going through with the fry, coffee and pone again, and paying one
dollar each for the entertainment of ourselves and horses, we
continued our journey.

Caldwell.—Late in the same evening we reached a hamlet, the “seat

of justice” of Burleson County. We were obliged to leave our horses
in a stable, made up of a roof, in which was a loft for the storage of
provender, set upon posts, without side-boarding, so that the norther
met with no obstruction. It was filled with horses, and ours alone
were blanketed for the night. The mangers were very shallow and
narrow, and as the corn was fed on the cob, a considerable
proportion of it was thrown out by the horses in their efforts to detach
the edible portion. With laudable economy, our landlord had twenty-
five or thirty pigs running at large in the stable, to prevent this
overflow from being wasted.
The “hotel” was an unusually large and fine one; the principal room
had glass windows. Several panes of these were, however, broken,
and the outside door could not be closed from without; and when
closed, was generally pried open with a pocket-knife by those who
wished to go out. A great part of the time it was left open. Supper
was served in another room, in which there was no fire, and the
outside door was left open for the convenience of the servants in
passing to and from the kitchen, which, as usual here at large
houses, was in a detached building. Supper was, however, eaten
with such rapidity that nothing had time to freeze on the table.
There were six Texans, planters and herdsmen, who had made
harbour at the inn for the norther, two German shopkeepers and a
young lawyer, who were boarders, besides our party of three, who
had to be seated before the fire. We kept coats and hats on, and
gained as much warmth, from the friendly manner in which we drew
together, as possible. After ascertaining, by a not at all impertinent or
inconsiderate method of inquiry, where we were from, which way we
were going, what we thought of the country, what we thought of the
weather, and what were the capacities and the cost of our fire-arms,
we were considered as initiated members of the crowd, and “the
conversation became general.”
The matter of most interest came up in this wise: “The man made a
white boy, fourteen or fifteen years old, get up and go out in the
norther for wood, when there was a great, strong nigger fellow lying
on the floor doing nothing. God! I had an appetite to give him a
hundred, right there.”
“Why, you wouldn’t go out into the norther yourself, would you, if you
were not obliged to?” inquired one, laughingly.
“I wouldn’t have a nigger in my house that I was afraid to set to work,
at anything I wanted him to do, at any time. They’d hired him out to
go to a new place next Thursday, and they were afraid if they didn’t
treat him well, he’d run away. If I couldn’t break a nigger of running
away, I wouldn’t have him any how.”
“I can tell you how you can break a nigger of running away, certain,”
said another. “There was an old fellow I used to know in Georgia,
that always cured his so. If a nigger ran away, when he caught him,
he would bind his knee over a log, and fasten him so he couldn’t stir;
then he’d take a pair of pincers and pull one of his toe-nails out by
the roots; and tell him that if he ever run away again, he would pull
out two of them, and if he run away again after that, he told them
he’d pull out four of them, and so on, doubling each time. He never
had to do it more than twice—it always cured them.”
One of the company then said that he was at the present time in
pursuit of a negro. He had bought him of a relative in Mississippi,
and had been told that he was a great runaway. He had, in fact, run
away from his relative three times, and always when they caught him
he was trying to get back to Illinois;[1] that was the reason he sold
him. “He offered him to me cheap,” he continued, “and I bought him
because he was a first-rate nigger, and I thought perhaps I could
break him of running away by bringing him down to this new country.
I expect he’s making for Mexico now. I am a-most sure I saw his
tracks on the road about twelve miles back, where he was a-coming
on this way. Night before last I engaged with a man who’s got some
first-rate nigger dogs to meet me here to-night; but I suppose the
cold keeps him back.” He then asked us to look out for him as we
went on west, and gave us a minute description of him that we might
recognize him. He was “a real black nigger,” and carried off a
double-barrelled gun with him. Another man, who was going on by
another road westward, offered to look for him that way, and to
advertise him. Would he be likely to defend himself with the gun if he
should try to secure him? he asked. The owner said he had no doubt
he would. He was as humble a nigger when he was at work as ever
he had seen; but he was a mighty resolute nigger—there was no
man had more resolution. “Couldn’t I induce him to let me take the
gun by pretending I wanted to look at it, or something? I’d talk to him
simple; make as if I was a stranger, and ask him about the road, and
so on, and finally ask him what he had got for a gun, and to let me
look at it.” The owner didn’t believe he’d let go of the gun; he was a
“nigger of sense—as much sense as a white man; he was not one of
your kinkey-headed niggers.” The chances of catching him were
discussed. Some thought they were good, and some that the owner
might almost as well give it up, he’d got such a start. It was three
hundred miles to the Mexican frontier, and he’d have to make fires to
cook the game he would kill, and could travel only at night; but then
every nigger or Mexican he could find would help him, and if he had
so much sense, he’d manage to find out his way pretty straight, and
yet not have white folks see him.
We slept in a large upper room, in a company of five, with a broken
window at the head of our bed, and another at our side, offering a
short cut to the norther across our heads.
We were greatly amused to see one of our bed-room companions
gravely spit in the candle before jumping into bed, explaining to
some one who made a remark, that he always did so, it gave him
time to see what he was about before it went out.
The next morning the ground was covered with sleet, and the gale
still continued (a pretty steady close-reefing breeze) during the day.
We wished to have a horse shod. The blacksmith, who was a white
man, we found in his shop, cleaning a fowling-piece. It was too d——
d cold to work, he said, and he was going to shoot some geese; he,
at length, at our urgent request, consented to earn a dollar; but, after
getting on his apron, he found that we had lost a shoe, and took it off
again, refusing to make a shoe while this d——d norther lasted, for
any man. As he had no shoes ready made, he absolutely turned us
out of the shop, and obliged us to go seventy-five miles further, a
great part of the way over a pebbly road, by which the beast lost
three shoes before he could be shod.
This respect for the north wind is by no means singular here. The
publication of the week’s newspaper in Bastrop was interrupted by
the norther, the editor mentioning, as a sufficient reason for the
irregularity, the fact that his printing-office was in the north part of the
house.