The Montgomery advertiser., 1903-08-28
Raising Cotton With White Labor.

New Orleans Picayune
 There has long been a commonly con- ceived notion that white men could not work in the field in the Southern States, and that, therefore, cotton and other sta pie products of these States must be grown by negro labor.
 That it is a false assumption is estab- lished by the fact that most of the rice production, almost the whole of the inn mense truck farming and vegetable grow ing in this State, and much of the field work in grow ng cotton and sugar in Louisiana are done with white labor
 The immense rice production of south west Louisiana Is carried on not only by whites, but chiefly by white farmers who gave up wheat growing in Northern States 10 become rice planters; and they have made Louisiana the foremost rice State in the Union. The extensive truck farm ing in the Louisiana and Mississippi re- zion along the line of the Illinois Gen. tral Is largely in the hands of men who have come hither from Northern States In the cotton fields of Louisiana are many Italians. who have in the past decade or two emigrated to this city. They are in- dustrious and give satisfaction.
 Here, then, is abundant proof that white men and white men from Northern attitudes, can and do work successfully in the fields of Louisiana, and the same sort of facts obtain In others of the Gulf States. The Baltimore Manufacturers Record, in addition to general statements to the effect that cotton can be made by white labor, presents elaborate statistics to back up it's contention. The statistics show that in the year 1900 cotton was raised and ginned and otherwise prepared for market in fifteen States and two Ter ritories. In 1900, to every negro in each of the States mentioned hereinafter there were ginned bales of cotton as follows: 5.5 bales of cotton in Texas, 2.2 in Ar kansas. 1.2 in Alabama. II in Missis- sippi II in Georgia, I in Louisiana, .s lima. All these States, with the excep- tion of Texas and Arkansas, contain large negro populations. and yet the cot ton sa product & to the prSPortion of negroes and Indian Territory are large cotton producers in proportion to their total populations, but the number of negroes Is small in proportion. The Record holds that the greater number, proportionately, of bales raised in Arkansas and Texas Oklahoma and Indian Territory cannot be credited to the whites, for in these States, especially the last three, the white population Is very large as com pared with that of the negro. A side llgnt upon the Texas situation is given by the facts for Indian Territory and Okla homa. In 1900 in the first-named Terri tory with population of .6S0 whites and 36,S53 negroes, 249935 bales of cotton were ginned, nearly one-half in the Chickasaw Nation, where the negroes consututs hardly one-fifteenth of the population, and in the second, with a population oi 357524 whites and 1S,SS1 ne- groes. 106,707 bales were ginned.
 Texas. however, presents the most strik- ing view of the part in cotton raising toward which the whites have tended. In thlrty-seven of the 243 counties in Texas there were no negroes in 1900 In that year there were in the State 2S6, ,65i farms of white farmers, with 1714SoSi acres of improved land producing in iS99 to the value of $15. ,934, and there were ,4I2 farms of negro farmers, with D. 41S,643 acres of improved land. produc- ing in 1899 to the value of $2i, ,367, ,0i0 Eighteen counties of the State ginned more than 50.0O0 bales each, the total in those counties being 1.41S 102 bales of 5O0 pounds each, nearly equal to the total crop of the State of 1471,242 bales of AT pounds in 1889. Outside of Texas there Mississippi and two nations in the h. dlan Territory-which ginned more than 50,0O0 tales in 1900 The number of 300 - round bales 6, l3sSS6). ginned in Texas !n 1900 was nearly equal to the total crop of the South (3,SD,3S6) bales of Ar pounds each) in 1880. It constituted more than one third of the total ginning of 1900.
 The eighteen counties of Texas which were Bell, Collin, Dallas, Ellis, Falls. Fannin Grayson, Guadalupe, Hill. Hunt Kaufman, Lamar, Limestone, McLennan, Mllam. Navarro, Travis and Williamson. produced in 1900 cotton to the amount of ,1O2 bales. weighing each 800 pounds, and this was done by an aggregate pop ulation of 692. .453 whites and l37, iS1 ne- grUes. The figures quoted by The Record sh w that in every one of the eighteen Texas counties mentioned the whites were largely in the majority. their total excess ovc- the negroes in the eighteen counties being 554912- In 1890 the whites constituted more than S2 per cent. of the population of these counties, and in 1900 they constituted more than s per cent, In spite of the increases of negroes