Baton Rouge tri-weekly gazette & comet. [volume] (Baton Rouge, La.) 1865-18??, 1865-08-17
Free Labor on Plantations.
EFrom this New York Evening p0s..l

that if they are wise they viii not
lose by it. He makes q practical
suggestion of much importance--Get
as many of the freedmen on your
place as you need, he says, build
them comfortable cabins, and let
them have these and sufficient pro-
| vision patch for each, free of rent,
and by that means you win gather
and retain at your command a force
large enough to carry on all your
own operations.
We commend this plan with con-
fdence to planters in Virginia and
elsewhere, for the reason that it is
already used in a considerable and
wealthy agricultural region. 1t is
by practising upon it that the own
ers of the great prairie farms in the
West obtain the labor necessary to
carry on their business.
A man who owns three or five or
ten thousand acres of land must have
number of men; but in the West
hired een are very uncertain and
not easily to be got. To depend
upon them would often leave the
farmer with his crops upon his hands,
and no one to gather them. There
fore, the shrewd farmer builds half q
dozen or a dozen comfortable houses
upon his place, according to the
number Of men he may need; he
surrounds each with an acre, or per-
haps two or three acres of land at
a convenient spot he builds school
house; and then he seeks men with
families to live in these houses
House and land are held rent free by
the tenant, on the condition that
whenever the farmer needs help, at
any time of the year, the tenant
shall work for him at such rate of
wages as is in the agreement fixed.
In this way abundant and skilled
labor is commanded for the great
operations of large farm. 1t is not
unusual for the tenant to hire hun
dred or two hundred acres, on which
he plants some crop which he can
till during those intervals in which
the farmer does not require his labor;
and it is yet more common for ten
ant to raise crop of corn on shares,
the farmer furnishing land, ma
chinery and animals, and receiving a
certain share of the product, delivered
in his crib-three-ffths is, we be-
lieve, a common allowance.
Now any planter, even with small
means, may adopt this plan, and if
he treats his tenants honorably and
kindly, he will have no difficulty in
raising proftably a good crop. In
fact he will do this at less expense
than under the slave-labor system,
for he will pay his workmen only
while be uses them; and everybody |
knows that in the cotton and sugar
culture the whole force is needed
only during few months in the year, |
and the planter was obliged to keep |
a considerable number of slaves idle, |
Or unproftably employed, for part of
the year, in order that he might have |
them at hand in the picking or the
hoeing season. /
The single advantage which slav
cry gave the planter or farmer in the
thinly populated South was COM
mand OF certain assured amount of
labor. He was able to reckon be-
forehand upon 50 many hands, and
his planting ventures easily
and certainly, accordingly. Planters
profess to fear more the uncertainty
q free labor than any other quality
Of it. Now doubtless there is some
thing in this view of the subject;
but we have just shown how the
difficulty they dread is overcome in
free Illinois and Indiana; and if the
system of tenantry which there meets
all the requirements of the great
farmer is fairly tried anywhere in the
South, it will be found equally sue
,essful there. /
1t will succeed, because in this
way capital and labor work harmo-
liously together, and the interests of
he working man and his family are
IDENTICAL with those of the capital
SITS; the cooperation Of the two
loubles the power of each; the
armer or planter furnishes labor
aving tools, the workman finds it to
lis interest to use these skillfully
he capitalist plans and the workman
'arries out; and the farmer and
planter will soon discover that the
more intelligent his workmen, the
more rraf,,l tho1r ,,,;II T.. 4. H. |