284 READINGS IN RURAL ECONOMICS 



The overseers of the plantation were generally selected from 

 the lower grades of whites and did not enter the best society of 

 the South. They were often of a brutal character. Their wages 

 varied from $200 to $600 a year, but sometimes $1000 or $1500 

 was paid when the planter did not reside on the plantation and 

 the overseer had entire responsibility. The overseer was valued 

 according to the crop which he was able to make, and therefore 

 many of them worked the slaves with little regard to the health 

 and endurance of the latter. Mr. W. W. Phillips of Jackson, 

 Mississippi, one of the most intelligent planters of the South, 

 wrote as follows to an agricultural paper, The Southern Planter: 

 " Overseers are not interested in raising children, or meat, in 

 improving land, or improving productive qualities of seed or ani- 

 mals. Many of them do not care whether property has depreciated 

 or improved, so they have made a crop (of cotton) to boast of." 



The custom of valuing the overseer according to the amount 

 of work which he could get out of the negroes led to frequent 

 changes in overseers, one being rarely employed more than two 

 years. "Two years of service is sure to spoil them." 



It is much easier now, after thirty years' experience of free 

 labor in the cotton fields, to judge of the relative advantages of 

 free and slave labor in the cultivation of this staple. The number 

 of free laborers employed prior to i860 was small, and the con- 

 ditions of their employment were usually so different from those 

 of slave labor that comparison between the two systems is neces- 

 sarily imperfect. Yet the opportunities for such comparison were 

 not wholly wanting, and the results warrant us in saying that it 

 was a misfortune for Southern agriculture that slave labor was 

 ever applied to the cultivation of the cotton plant. As has been 

 pointed out in the preceding chapter, cotton culture offered many 

 and great advantages over other crops for the use of slave labor ; 

 but slavery had few, if any, advantages over free labor for the 

 cultivation of cotton. On the sugar and rice plantations on the 

 low, marshy coast land, where the climate was unpropitious for 

 whites, there was probably an economy in the use of slavery so 

 long as the colonial system of agriculture was itself profitable, and 

 perhaps the same was true of the Mississippi river bottoms. But 



