THE UPPER PINE BELT. 83 



East of the rivers named there are farms having over six hundred 

 acres in cotton, the average acreage in cotton to the farm is sixteen acres. 

 Here forty-six per cent, of the farms are rented, and fifty-four per cent, 

 worked by the owners. Of the rented farms, thirteen per cent, are over 

 fifty acres, while of those worked by the owners eighty per cent, are 

 above that figure. 



The laborers are chiefly negroes, but the number of whites engaged in 

 field labor is largely increasing, in some localities, especially east of the 

 Pee Dee, where one-third to one-half the field labor is performed by 

 whites. The general price of day labor is fifty cents and food, though it 

 fluctuates from forty cents to seventy-five cents. The class of day laborers 

 is also largely increasing, being recruited from the increasing class of 

 tenant farmers, who supplement their earnings by hiring out when not 

 busy with their own crops, or when pressed for ready cash. Contract labor- 

 ers are becoming much fewer ; the general wages is ten dollars a month 

 and rations, but in some localities it is as low as six dollars to eight dol- 

 lars, and in others as high as twelve dollars to fifteen dollars, the higher 

 prices prevailing in the northeast, the lower to the southwest, being less 

 where the percentage of negroes is greatest, and vice versa. Hands 

 hired by the year receive from ninety dollars to one hundred and twenty 

 dollars, with rations, shelter firewood and truck patches. Hands, how- 

 ever, have always preferred, when contracting for a year's work, to have 

 some interest in the crop, and this desire has steadily increased so as to 

 have become by far the most general practice. This has been arranged in 

 so many, and in such complicated ways, as to preclude any general de- 

 scription. For instance, a widely adopted system is one proposed as early 

 as 1866, by a negro laborer in Silverton township. The laborer works 

 five days in the week for the land owner and has a house, rations, three 

 acres of land, and a mule and plow every other Saturday to w^ork it when 

 necessary, with sixteen dollars in money at the end of the year. Had he 

 worked four days and a half per week for the land owner, and one and a 

 half days for himself, this would have been equivalent to one-fourth of 

 the crop and his food. The sixteen dollars was intended to cover the fifty- 

 two half days more than this, which he worked.* This system proved 



* This freedinan was impressed with the belief that the share of tlie laboier should 

 be his food and shelter, and one-fourth of the produce. AVhile he was sure that 

 his proportion covered this, he could neither state the rationale as above given, or ap- 

 parently understand it, when stated. It inaj'' serve as an illustration of the instinctive 

 processes by which these people seemed to grasp intuitively the most complicated j)rob- 

 lems, and the most advanced doctrines in the great questions as to the remuneration of 

 labor. Only just emancipated, they at once take ground, to which the laborers of the 

 old world seem to have been struggling up through all the centuries since the abolition 

 of serfdom. 



