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Oh, it was easy to preach a high ideal of existence for the poor, as long as one had a considerable margin over the week's expenses; easy to rebuke the men and women who tried to forget themselves in beer-shops and gin-houses, as long as one could take up some rational amusement with a quiet heart.
Small wonder that the poor little white slaves, taking up their serfdom at the loom where the negro left off at the lint, die like pigs in a cotton-seed pen. There was cotton everywhere in the fields, unpicked; in the gin-houses, unginned. That in the fields would be plowed under next spring, presenting the strange anomaly of plowing under one crop to raise another of the same kind.
Along the streams live-oaks, magnolias, pecans, and other trees grow luxuriantly; but, for the most part, the prairies are open to the horizon, and at this time, though the gin-houses were full of cotton, the fields were mainly given over to the raising of corn for the armies and the people of the Confederacy.
And nothing makes so much for frowsiness in the cotton plant, and in woman, as to know they are not wanted. The gin-houses were yet full, tho' the gin had been running day and night.
Five years after the war Robert Somers, an English traveler, said of the Tennessee Valley: "It consists for the most part of plantations in a state of semi-ruin and plantations of which the ruin is for the present total and complete.... The trail of war is visible throughout the valley in burnt-up gin-houses, ruined bridges, mills, and factories... and in large tracts of once cultivated land stripped of every vestige of fencing.
Their residences were unostentatious, but capacious and comfortable, with every attachment which could secure comfort or contribute to their pleasure. The plantation houses for the slaves were arranged conveniently together, constituting with the barns, stabling, and gin-houses a neat village.
But it has been done many times in the fertile Valley of the Tennessee. There is that in the Saxon race that makes it discontented, even with success. There was cotton everywhere; it lay piled up around the gin-houses and screws and negro-cabins and under the sheds and even under the trees.
On each plantation there were ten dwelling-houses for the negroes. On one they were arranged in a double row, and on the other in a single row. There was a larger house for the overseer, and there were blacksmith shops, carpenter shops, stables, corn-cribs, meat-houses, cattle-yards, and gin-houses.
Another had four hundred acres of standing cotton, but the plantation had been secured by a lessee, who was about commencing work. All had merits, and all had demerits. On some there was a sufficient force for the season's work, while on others there was scarcely an able field-hand. On some the gin-houses had been burned, and on others they were standing, but disabled.
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