Yorkville enquirer. [volume] (Yorkville, S.C.) 1855-2006, 1869-04-01
Aatifnltnral 4epartment.
From the New York Tribune,
RING GCnTT0N.

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KING COTTON. + {
Some Sensible Talk for the Southern Plant.
i ers from Horace Greeley.
Hardly Southern paper reaches us but
has editorial comment of some sort on the
prospective crop of 1869. It is generally
conceded that it will be large if the season
is at all favorable. Some editors have the
sagacity to see that saying so much about
great crop this year will have bad ef-
feet on that part of the crop of 1868 which
remains unsold. ..
Now, friends at the South, before your
double ploughs have thrown all the land in
to ridges for cotton rows take time and give
this whole business of agriculture sober
second thought. You have just come out
of a great war in which you were worsted
The weakest thing in the Southern military
service during that war was its commits:
sarrat. A strictly agricultural people, hav-
ing as much pride Of acres as any landed
aristocracy in the world, were from the
first, and in all stages of four years
strife, weakened, hampered, thwarted, de.
moralized, and finally defeated, for want Of
beef, corn, wheat, hay and oats. ..
A great war is like severe illness; it
tries the constitution and unmasks the
weakness of the system. The agricultural
system of the South has. been proved de-
fective, because in protracted fight the
breach appeared there first. Now, what is
the great characteristic of planting? 1t is,
and from the first has been, the deriving Of
large income in clear money from broad
surface, by the sale of vegetable products.
A small planter is one whose account sales
of cotton or tobacco, rice or sugar, do not
figure up more than $4,000. The sales of
the large planters range all the way from
$4,000 to 100000, A few, q very few
Southern proprietors, received over $780,.
900 from single crop. That mode Of
deriving an income may have been connect
ed with the character and status of The
laborer but such connection was not in
separable. A slave could cradle wheat or
fatten hogs if ordered to just as we'll as he
could pick cotton or sucker tobacco. Slave
ry had inherent sins enough without charg-
ing it with blunders that were not, in the
nature of things, inseparable from unpaid
labor. From the time of Pecahontas the
the Southern domain was divided into large
estates. Those who surveyed and plotted
it felt as Brutus did about Caesars body
"Let us carve him as dish fit for the gods,
not hew him like carcass for the hounds. y
These broad areas were cleared and
cropped by sport-loving men, for whose
ears the baying of pack of fox hounds was
sweetest music. Put a man with these tastes
at the centre of twelve hundred acre tract,
and what will he do? He will have as few
inside fences as possible; he will make his
money on crop that will cost him the
least time, or planning, or worry. He will
say duna vivimus, vivamus -"after us the
deluge." Talk to him of rotation, fertili-
zers, bone dust, the foot of the sheep hav-
ing gold beneath it; he answers you by a
blast on his hunting horn. "My niggers
know how to make cotton" These seven
words were the doom of true progressive
agriculture South of Mason and Dixon.
The inducements that draw the Southern
agriculturalist toward cotton fields are very
great. He is in debt. He wants carriage
horses to replace those which Bragg, or
johnson, or Lee broke down dragging can
non. He is living in cabin and would
like to do something with those ghostly
and blackened chimney-stacks. The saws
of his gin-stand are bent and rusty. His
press is rude and slow. His mules are stiff,
and his ploughs worn; his tobacco sheds
went for camp fires. We admit that it
would be help on your place ifyou could
sell three hundreds bales next December at
two bits pound. But let US reason about
it. You do not propose to move West. You
know of no good cotton or tobacco land
that is cheaper than your own plantation.
Besides, you have no money to 60 on. If
you leave your children anything, it must
| be in the acres over which you walk. If
you drain those acres of the last ton of pot
ash ard phosphorous they contain, you leave
to those who come after you wide waste
of broom-sedge and stunted pines-a herit-
age of briers and gullies, and rotten fences.
No, gentlemen; you will be wiser and more
provident than that. You will see that
while there is some money in cotton and to-
bacco, there is in it little trade, wealth or
power, little of that which makes nations
great and keeps them so. The South has
never been sufficiently devoted to the pro-
duction of articles of prime necessity. Man
kind would be better off if frost or worms
should destroy every tobacco plant that
sprouts this spring. Cotton is very i'm.
portant textile; but nations were clad and
we'll clad, before Eli Whitney was born.
agriculture means the culture ofthe fields,
not skimming and desolating them. En-
joying the best climate and plowing the best
soil on the continent, the Southron ate i'm
ported bread, drank imported wine, gave
his hands imported pork, shod them with
imported leather, and buckled an imported
saddle on the back of horse that had trav-
cled a thousand miles southwark to find a
purchaser. When such people went to
war with States that fed and clothed them,
the result was inevitable. Julius Caesar
with his tenth legion could have delayed
that exchange of notes at Appomattox
Courthouse, but he could not have made it
impossible.
In profound peace, with strong, silent,
vigilant man at the wheel, the country is
l. y