- fectly clean, having been undoubtedly gleaned, by the poor
emigrants. I was told that some mechanics made more in a day, by going into the field of a slaveowner and picking side by side with his slaves, being paid by measure, than they could earn at their regular work in a week. The degree of intelligence and of practice required to pick to advantage was found to be very slight, less, very much, than in any single operation of wheat harvesters. One woman was pointed out to me who had, in the first year she had ever seen a cotton field, picked more cotton in a day than any slave in the county.
I am reminded, as this page is about to be stereotyped, by observing the letter of a cotton planter in the New Orleans Price Current, of another disadvantage for cotton production, of slave labour, or rather of the system which slavery induces. In my volume on Texas, I stated that I was informed by a merchant that the cotton picked by the free labour of the Germans was worth from one to two cents a pound more than that picked by slaves in the same township, by reason of its greater cleanliness. From the letter referred to, I make the following extracts:—
"Dear Sir: * * * There are probably no set of men engaged in
any business of life who take as little pains and care to inform themselves
with regard to the character and quality of their marketable produce as
the cotton-planter. Not one in a thousand knows, nor cares to know,
whether the cotton he sends to market is ordinary, good ordinary, or
middling. Not one in a hundred spends one hour of each day at his gin
in ginning season; never sees the cotton after it is gathered, unless he
happens to ride near the scaffold and looks from a distance of a hundred
yards, and declares the specimen very white and clean, when, perhaps, it,
on the contrary, may be very leafy and dirty. * * *
"I have often seen the hands on plantations picking cotton with sacks that would hardly hold stalks, they were so torn and full of holes; these sacks dragging on the ground and gathering up pounds of dirt at every few steps. The baskets, too, were with scarcely any bottoms remaining, having been literally worn out, the cotton lying on the ground. Indeed, some overseers do not forbid the hands emptying their cotton on the ground when their sacks are full, and they some distance from their
