From the public-domain record · 81,371 quotes
Founders, statesmen and world leaders — cited from their collected works.
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On three plantations, where I had the opportunity of watching their performance critically at various periods during a couple of months, I was convinced that when they were employed in gangs, under the supervision of an overseer who had…
Give them that, and they would work better than the average of uneducated white laborers.
The most of them were getting nothing but rations and lodging for their labor; six or eight dollars per month were the highest wages any received, and all were eager to go back to Louisiana, provided they were sure they wouldn’t be taken…
There were no poor whites in this country, from which the aristocratic planters had driven them.
With a good season and without overflow, the yield ought to be twelve hundred bales of cotton, worth, say, a hundred dollars per bale.
On the whole, he was perfectly satisfied with the free-labor system; and, if the water only kept away, was sure of making a hundred thousand dollars net profit this year for the proprietors.
Before the war, it was regarded as a most desirable residence, and wealthy Southerners sought plantations within a range of thirty or forty miles up or down the river, in order to be able to fix their own residences at Natchez.
But it is the aristocratic center of the lower Mississippi Valley cotton-planting interests.
My people all knew well enough that I had been a kind master to them before the war; and you couldn’t have hired any considerable number of them to leave me.
All that has been settled against us in the court to which we appealed; we have submitted to the verdict; and, as honorable men, we have no right to revive the controversy.
What difference does it make now about our beliefs and our arguments in favor of secession?
Some of those fellows that have been hanging around Natchez, or making money out of army contracts, may not be subjugated, but I am.
What business had government to be interfering with the rights of property?
Since then I’ve got my property back; a thing I had no right to expect; and I’m very grateful for it.
We attempted to destroy the government and failed; any other would have hung me for my share in the matter; and would have had a perfect right to do it.
You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he exclaimed, impetuously, to some one who was haranguing against the tyranny and cruelty of the government; “I tell you, sir, you have got and I have got the most merciful government in the world.
It was common at the North to regard such men as the leading criminals of the rebellion, but I would rather trust General Yorke in Congress, unpardoned Rebel as he is, than a single one of the pardoned Congressmen elect from Mississippi or…
Demand will not long exist here, among the new elements of this changing population, without creating a supply.
Already the negroes, who have once tasted the sorghum molasses, insist on being furnished with it in preference to that made from cane.
And Yankees will not continue many years manufacturing the base of sugar, without forcing the secret of sorghum, and finding how to crystallize its syrup into sugar.
Yankees will not grow cotton long till they begin growing the sorghum to manufacture their own molasses.
Perhaps, in time, we shall have large sugar-mills erected here as flour-mills are at the North; every man’s growth of cane to be manufactured for a fixed toll, or sold to the miller at current rates; but till then, the growth of cane for…
