American Experiment (52 page)

Tools were simple, yet ingenious. In summer Coffin and his sons hoed crops by hand, pulled weeds, mowed and raked hay and brought it under cover. They reaped rye with a smooth-bladed reaping hook or a long, narrow-bladed sickle, cradled oats, and mowed wheat and barley with a scythe. Shortage of labor for harvesting wheat was a crucial problem for northern farmers. Thomas Jefferson noted in 1793 that “every laborer will manage ten acres of wheat, except at harvest.” The farmer sowed only as much in the spring as he could harvest in late summer with the cradle, the long scythe blade paralleled by a rack of wooden fingers. An expert cradler could earn a dollar a day at harvest. If a man with a sickle could cut one-half to three-quarters of an acre a day, a man with a cradle could cut two to three acres a day. Only the later invention of the reaper removed the bottleneck on wheat growing.

Coffin fed livestock all winter long with hay cut and cured in summer. Cutting was by scythe, followed by raking, drying, and loading into wagons hauled by oxen to the haymow of the barn. It took tremendous energy and muscle to swing the scythe for hours. Coffin wrote in his diary one July day: “uncommon warm for three days, we mowed, raked, got in three small jags [loads], we are almost sick.” Although Coffin sometimes hired extra hands at from six to nine dollars a month to help him bring hay under cover before rain, the average northern farmer with poor or uncleared land could not afford permanent help. Shortage of farm labor, according to Timothy Dwight, contributed to neglect of the soil, failure to rotate crops, and inattention to fertilizers or other soil-improving minerals.

Harvest was the time to hunt up the cattle in the summer pasture. The average farm had ten to twenty sheep, fifteen head of cattle, including five dairy cows. It also had fifteen pigs which often ran wild in the woods, fed only just before slaughter. One English agriculturist reported in 1798: “The real American hog is what is termed the wood-hog…they are long in the leg.…You may as well think of stopping a crow as those hogs. They will go a distance from a fence, take a run, and leap through the rails, three or four feet from the ground, turning themselves sidewise. These hogs suffer such hardships as no other animal could endure.”

New England farms differed from fertile Pennsylvania and New York farms in that much of the soil was thin and stony and the growing season shorter. The Connecticut Valley and the Champlain area of Vermont were exceptional areas in New England for farming. Maize was the largest crop on the mixed farms owned by most of the New England farming
population. Thomas Coffin could support his family with the products of his farm—flax and wool for clothing; barley and wheat for his livestock; peas, potatoes, corn, and vegetables for his table; plus milk, dairy products, veal, beef, pork, lamb, and mutton—all raised on his self-sufficient farm.

Coffin marketed surplus pork, veal, cider, and cheese in Boscawen, but his home and farm had been in his family for generations, so he did not need to buy on credit to clear or maintain his farm. Coffin could also sell trees on his farm. New England farmers hauled logs on great sleds to a “brow,” a landing place by the river. In the spring, upon ice-out, the logs on the brow would float off to a mill. To the nearby Merrimack River Coffin brought logs that would be used in building Manchester factories. “If by hard labour and frugal economy,” one observer noted, “the common independent Yankee farmer, such as the traveller meets with anywhere in New England, lays up annually from four to seven hundred dollars, he is a thriving man and ‘getting rich.’ ”

Like most New England farmers, Coffin had to be a jack-of-all-trades. He was a carpenter, mechanic, wheelwright, cooper, well digger, woodcutter, cider maker, maple-tree tapper, fence builder, drover, paperhanger, rudimentary blacksmith, harness maker. (He was also a diarist, to history’s benefit.) He not only repaired tools; he sometimes made them, or adapted them to his own purposes. Coffin was not equally skillful at all these tasks; but few farmers were more versatile than this Boscawen husbandman. No wonder he was a “thriving man.”

Mixed farming in New England was a year-round, time-consuming occupation absorbing all the energies of Coffin and his wife, Hannah, who washed, cooked, sewed, and cleaned while rearing six children. Large families of from six to eight children were the rule on New England farms. Farm women spun and wove all the family’s clothing out of flax or wool, and they made soap and candles. The period between 1775 and 1815 was the high point of home industry.

If close to a market in a village or city, farm women wove textiles or produced shoes to sell. Daughters entering the new textile mills then rising in New England and Pennsylvania often returned part of their earnings to needy parents, who tried to finance the migration of some of their children to the West while keeping their farm intact. The surplus property, livestock, and equipment were rarely enough for families on even good-sized northern farms to give each child a farm. Only in the 1830s did farm families start limiting the number of children they had, thus providing fewer offspring with more land. Farm land values in New England were generally high, owing to the large population and numerous towns; a good
spread in Connecticut in 1807-08 brought between $40 and $50 an acre. These high land values encouraged landless young families to emigrate to the West.

Down South, population was also shifting westward, especially after the War of 1812. Farmers and planters had turned to raising cotton, which had a high value in relation to its weight, and with the invention of the gin, planters could profitably raise and process cotton for the market. New machines and processes lowered costs of cotton textiles, encouraging their substitution for woolens and linen. After the embargo and the War of 1812, England needed cotton to supply its textile mills and prices soared. Not until 1827 did supply begin to overtake demand, with the price of cotton in the New York market dropping back from thirty cents a pound to nine. At the same time the price of slaves rose, and cotton planters, dependent on the North and West for foodstuffs and manufactured goods, found they needed more working capital as the yield of their worn-out tobacco and wheat lands declined. Large planter and small farmer alike began the trek toward more promising lands of the Southwest. Between 1816 and 1820 the combined population of Alabama and Mississippi leaped from 75,000 to 200,000. Other states with cotton lands experienced similar growth. Louisiana had 76,000 settlers in 1810, 143,000 in 1820, and 215,000 by 1830.

Thomas Smith Gregory Dabney was one of the men who moved west. Lured by the rich profits to be made in cotton, he left his model plantation, Elmington, in Virginia to lead his family and slaves to 4,000 acres of prime cotton land he bought from several small farmers in western Mississippi. When wealthy planters like Dabney migrated, they purchased the best cotton lands for low prices in the rich soil of Alabama and Mississippi. The small farmer found he could not compete with the large planter and was usually willing to sell out if the planter made him an attractive offer. Good cotton land sold for five to ten dollars an acre; clearing cost eight to fifteen dollars an acre; fencing, three to six. Small farmers could not meet these expenses, build the necessary home, and subsist until returns from the cotton crop came in, so many sold out and migrated farther west. Dabney had capital. With a labor force of 500 slaves, he brought his new land into production at the rate of 100 acres a year.

During the mild southern winters slaves cleared land, chopped logs, and rolled them for new fences. Plowing of new land began in February; soon field hands would be keeping the plows constantly in action “listing up” new ground. In April slaves began planting cotton. A narrow plow pulled by a single horse opened a ridge; the sower then followed with a sack from which he threw the cotton seed, scattering twenty grains for every stalk that
would grow. A field hand with a harrow followed the sower, covering the seeds lightly. Each set of three hands—plower, sower, and harrower—planted ten to fifteen acres a day between early April and the middle of May.

After the plants sprouted, thinning out or “scraping” began, and every hand came into the field with a hoe. A plow first ran a light furrow on each side of the row of cotton plants, and the hands “scraped” or thinned out the extra plants in the rows. Slaves then cultivated the ground around the plants all summer.

Cotton picking began in late August and might continue until the end of December. At dawn bells awakened slaves, men and women alike, so they could be in the fields by first light, and they would remain there until dark. Each slave, wet from the cold dew, brought a large basket and two coarse cotton bags strapped to the neck. The slave left the basket at the end of the row and proceeded to pick; when her two bags were full, she went back to her basket and dumped the cotton into it. At nightfall, she took the basket on her head to the scaffold yard for weighing. The overseer met all hands at the scales with lamp, slate, and whip. He then weighed each basket and entered the weight beside the slave’s name on his slate. A slave might not know beforehand if she had met the quota. According to one observer acquainted with the labor practices of overseers, on some plantations “those who are found to have brought in less than their usual quantity” received ten, twenty, or fifty stripes with the whip.

Overseers usually came from the small-farmer or landless classes of the region. Responsible to many absentee planters, they knew that their jobs and reputation rested on one thing only—how many bales of cotton they could produce from each acre of the planter’s land. It was usually of little concern to the owner how the overseer secured a large crop, although the planter did want his investment in workers maintained in efficient operating condition.

Cold and haughty in appearance, Dabney himself supervised the 200 slaves at Burleigh, his plantation, wearing gloves as he rode horseback through the fields. The other three sections of his estate Dabney regularly assigned to overseers. Field slaves on the Burleigh plantation picked cotton on a piece-rate system, with 400 pounds considered a good day’s output, although many picked 500 pounds according to the memory of Dabney’s daughter, who wrote about Burleigh several years later. One Southerner said in 1825 that to pick 400 or 500 pounds a day “requires such brisk and incessant motion that it could not be done two days in succession without danger of life or health; and is only attempted for a wager or such like reason.” He maintained that the average weight picked
by all hands on a place, including children, was 150 to 160 pounds a day. Each hand could produce five or six 400-pound bales a year. Dabney’s overseers weighed each slave’s output three times a day and entered the number of pounds picked by field hands opposite their names on a slate.

To maintain his slaves in their most efficient working condition, Dabney provided them food, clothing, medical care and supervision; two woolen suits in winter and two in summer made by household servants on the plantation; and about five pounds of pork and other rations each week. Dabney felt his slaves worked harder if they received half of Saturday and all of Sunday off from field work.

Like other planters, Dabney tried to make his estate as self-sufficient as possible. He required twenty-seven servants to wait upon his family in the plantation house as well as other trained slaves to conduct plantation operations—carpenters, blacksmiths, millers, seamstresses, laundresses, and cooks. Dabney raised sheep, pigs, horses, and mules on the plantation and butchered from 150 to 175 pigs each year, since pork was the mainstay of his slaves’ diet. He cured his own hams and kept a herd of forty cows for dairy products for the household. But the alluvial lands of the Mississippi delta did not favor corn, so most planters imported large quantities of corn and pork from northwestern farmers.

Like Livingston, Dabney tried to improve the yields from his land. He studied better farming practices, published numerous articles in the
Mississippi Farmer
, and served as president of the State Agricultural Society. Versatile in his way, he investigated the new agricultural implements such as better plows and advocated their use. But he was working his land with forced labor, which often quietly resisted his best management efforts. Slaves were not interested in diversifying crops, improving livestock, or developing new techniques and machinery to enrich the master. They had little incentive to use better tools and at times deliberately broke or lost them. They had their own ways of evading the overseer. One observer wrote of the weighing of cotton picked by slaves, “It is not an uncommon occurrence for an overseer, who is even vigilant, amid the crowd of negroes and baskets, with only one lamp, held close to the scales and slate, to weigh some of the heavier baskets several times, their exact weight being changed by taking out, or putting in a few pounds; while the lighter ones pass entirely unnoticed.”

A technological backwardness pervaded the region. Investment in agriculture for large planter and small farmer alike meant investment in slaves. Even small farmers moving west usually invested in slaves rather than in improved implements or techniques. One northern journalist, Joseph Ingraham, observing some small farmers in 1833 at the port of Natchez,
Mississippi, wrote: “Seated in a circle around their bread and cheese were half a dozen as rough, rude, honest-looking countrymen from the back part of the state as you could find in the nursery of New England’s yeomanry. They are small farmers—own a few negroes—cultivate a small tract of land, and raise a few bales of cotton, which they bring to market themselves. Their carts are drawn around them forming a barricade to their camp, for here, as is customary among them, instead of putting up at taverns, they have encamped since their arrival. Between them and their carts are their negroes.…”

These small farmers worked isolated, hilly regions and lived a backward, self-sufficient way of life. Lacking capital, they could not buy industrial products, nor could they easily move their surplus crops to market without a transportation system. In turn, manufactures in the southern states declined after 1810, owing to a lack of good transportation, a rural market, and free labor not tied to the land.