136 HUMAN FACTORS IN COTTON CULTURE 



won't mind a bigger expense account, with orders coming in 

 like this. 45 



It is known that tenants work up into land ownership 

 in good cotton years; in poor years owners relapse into 

 tenancy. Du Bois in a study of the Negro landholders 

 of Georgia, made for the Department of Labor in 1901, 

 pointed out this trend. After showing that his study 

 indicated that Negro owners in fifty-four Georgia coun- 

 ties had increased their landholdings from 338,769 acres 

 in 1874 to 1,075,073 in 1900, Katharine Coman points 

 out: 



This threefold gain has been won by the most strenuous 

 earning and saving. It means slow, difficult, patient achieve- 

 ment. Much depends on the price of cotton. In the years of 

 high prices, 1884, 1890, 1900, there is a long step in ad- 

 vances, one hundred thousand acres being added each year. 

 When cotton drops to five cents a pound, there is actual retro- 

 gression, as in 1894, 1898 and 1899. The cotton corner of 

 the year just past 45a was the means of putting thousands 

 of Negro farmers in full possession of the land they 

 tilled. 46 



Business becomes almost stagnant in certain cotton 

 areas when prices fall. Farmers quit work and come to 

 town not to buy but to stand around on street corners 

 and talk things over. Cotton goes unpicked, partly be- 

 cause of a belief that this will cause the price to rise, 

 but mainly because picking would add another expense 

 to a crop already a dead loss. "I found many fields of 



45 Henry K. Webster, "Slaves of Cotton," American Magazine, 

 July, 1906, p. 19. 



45 a The corner engineered by Dan Sully in 1903. 



46 "The Negro as Peasant Farmer," American Statistical Asso- 

 ciation Publications, IX (1904), 48. 



