If you’d a yielded an inch to ’em then,” he said, “you’d a been pestered and run over by ’em all season. ’S long’s they think they can browbeat you into givin’ ’em things, they’ll do it; an’ if you’d a let ’em plant cotton, every acre they’d a had in would a brought three or four bales.
Reid recounts advice on managing expectations and demands from laborers in a post-war context.
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Extravagant living left nearly every planter enormously in debt when the war came.
I would rather give up my crop to the negroes than the lives of my wife and children.
But proofs were not wanting of the spirit in which, to the very last, the conflict against the Government had been waged.
Public sentiment was against the sale of lands to the Yankees; “Get white laborers,” they urged, “and in a year you’ll make enough to be able to hold on to your lands.