CHAPTER VIH 



HOW THE COTTON FARMER LIVES 

 OPINIONS 



THE CONFLICTING attitudes as to the standard of living 

 he has, or should have, might lead one to believe that 

 the cotton farmer is the victim of a preconception of his 

 role. When he arrived on the scene after the Civil War, 

 cotton had merely changed its status from a slave crop 

 to a cheap crop. Cotton labor was definitely classified 

 as cheap labor. From Phillips' accounts of Negro slavery 

 and from contemporary records of the small upland 

 cotton producers variously called "poor whites," "sand 

 hillers," and "clay eaters" one gathers that their stand- 

 ards of living must have been low indeed. Edward At- 

 kinson, the New England spinner, by 1861 had anony- 

 mously published a pamphlet speculating on the pos- 

 sibility of Cheap Cotton by Free Labor after the war. 

 Atkinson arrived at $20 per month as the estimated 

 upkeep of a Negro slave and his family and noted that 

 with cotton at ten cents the owner had continued to buy 

 more land and more slaves. "It is therefore evident," he 

 concluded, "that the owner of land can afford to pay $20 

 per month wages, and that there is a class of poor white 

 laborers (poor white trash comprising the large ma- 

 jority of the cotton states) at hand to whom such pay 

 would be an income never dreamed of." * He did not hold 



1 Pp. 11, 3-4. 



