planters carry a heavy load of debt from year to year, till a lucky crop coincident with a rise in the price of cotton relieves them.
The whole number of slaves engaged in cotton culture at the Census of 1850 was reckoned by De Bow to be 1,800,000,[1] the crops at 2,400,000 bales, which is a bale and a third to each head of slaves. This was the largest crop between 1846 and 1852. Other things being equal, for reasons already indicated, the smaller the estate of slaves, the less is their rate of production per head; and, as a rule, the larger the slave estate the larger is the production per head. The number of slaves in cotton plantations held by owners of fifty and upwards is, as nearly as it can be fixed by the Census returns, 420,000.
If these produce on an average only two and a half bales per head (man, woman, and child), and double this is not extraordinary on the large plantations of the South-west,[2] it leaves an average for the smaller plantations of seven-eighths of a bale per head. These plantations are mostly in the interior, with long haulage and boatage to market. To the small planter in the interior, his cotton crop does not realize, as an average plantation price, more than seven cents a pound, or thirty dollars the bale.[3] Those who plant cotton in this small way usually raise a crop of corn, and some little else, not enough, take the country through, one year with another, to
- ↑ Official Census—Compend., p. 94.
- ↑ Messrs. Neill Brothers, cotton merchants of New Orleans, the most painstaking collectors of information about the cotton crop in the country, state, in a recent circular, that many of the Mississippi cotton plantations last year, after an extraordinary fertilizing flood, produced sixteen bales to the hand. The slaves on these plantations being to a large extent picked hands, as I elsewhere show, the production per head was fully eight bales.
- ↑ In a careful article in the Austin State Gazette, six and a quarter cents is given as the average net price of cotton in Texas. The small planters, having no gins or presses of their own, usually have their cotton prepared for market by large planters, for which service they of course have to pay.
