Cotton Comes To The Mississippi Delta

COTTON COMES TO THE DELTA

ALMOST TWO CENTURIES AGO, men began their battle to wrest from nature the land we know today as the Mississippi-Yazoo Delta, to subdue it and to make it contribute to the needs of the world. Today, virtually all of its original swamp and timber wilderness has been converted to cultivation. Every step forward in the long, weary process has been like a battle in an almost endless war.

Hand picking and weighing in were harvest tasks unchanged from cotton's earliest days until the advent of the mechanical picker after World War II.

The drainage of thirty-one states flows past its more than three hundred miles of levees, some of them over 50 feet high. The levees were built and rebuilt to prevent the annual flooding which formed and enriched the land for countless centuries before the arrival of the Mound Builders and the Choctaws, and later the American settlers and their slaves. Hundreds of miles of canals today provide for its interior drainage.

In years past, yellow fever exacted its heaviest toll in the Mississippi Delta and led to the temporary death of a depopulated Memphis. The city lost its charter in 1879 as a result and remained a mere taxing district of Shelby County for the next 12 years. In the Delta itself, malaria was also a problem, probably to as great an extent as anywhere in North America. Nearly three-quarters of a century passed from the beginning of cultivation of the Delta before pure water could be counted on.

EARLY DELTA SETTLERS

As early as 1822, long-forgotten Ben Smith bought 30,000 acres four miles north of Lake Washington in Washington County, an immense plantation by any standards. Two years later, Richard Abbay and Ira D. Walton each patented land in Yazoo County, and in 1832, Abbay and his brother Anthony established the forerunner of the Abbay-Leatherman Plantation in Tunica County. By 1826, Frederick Turnbull and Junius Ward had established plantations on the banks of Lake Washington. Five years later, Coahoma County's future King Et Anderson Plantation began to take shape.

Brothers Walker, LeRoy and William Alexander Percy moved from Madison County, Alabama, to the banks of Deer Creek, where the town of Leland now stands, to begin Washington County planting operations which continue today at Trail Lake, east of Arcola. Percy family descendants bearing the names of these three brothers would earn prominent places in the history of the Delta and of Staplcotn.

THE ROLE OF THE FACTOR

Cotton buyers office. Leland, Mississippi Delta

In the Mississippi Delta, as in other large scale agricultural enterprises, the factorage system played an important role. Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the English factor bore substantially the same relationship to overseas agriculture and trade that today's great banking institutions bear to modern industrial enterprise.

The ramifications of the factor's business were intricate and extensive. He would purchase a plantation in the colonies for an English younger son. An Englishman could engage in planting without loss of caste. Such was not the case with "e-trade".

The factor would arrange with the Royal African Company for a supply of slaves, buy tools and machinery, and furnish necessary funds and supplies. In return, in addition to interest, commissions, brokerage, and numerous incidental charges and tares, the entire crop was consigned to the factor. He sold at his discretion and accounted for the proceeds.

The factor prospered under the system. The planter rarely did. He wore out his life under a mortgage, which was usually his sole legacy to his children. The fate of one planter was the fate of nearly all.

The operations of the system were essentially the same, regardless of crop or location. Developed in the West Indies, the system was transplanted to England's mainland colonies, and applied to tobacco and indigo, and, after independence from the crown, to rice and cotton. By the 1820s, when the Mississippi Delta's first settlers began farming on the banks of Lake Washington, it had become inseparably identified with cotton production.

The factor invariably required the consignment of the entire crop, for the sale of which he charged a commission. The planter's basis of credit was usually fixed on baleage. For an advance of so many thousand dollars, so many bales of cotton were required to be shipped. A penalty was charged for every bale short of the contract amount.

State of Mississippi 1862$10 Note with a picture of Civil War Governor John J. Pettus and a slave with a horse

The factor also received a commission or rebate on storage, insurance and drayage. Most factors averaged out their sales in such fashion that their 'average account" showed a more or less handsome profit. In the occasional instances in which the planter received a balance, this was left as a credit on his factor's book.

This system had far reaching economic results. Because its emphasis was on baleage, there was every incentive to attempt the impossible in production. The more land a planter was willing to buy on time, the more cotton he could promise ... and the more money he could borrow .. and the more land and slaves he could purchase.

Prices for cotton fluctuated with supply and demand during the antebellum period, but generally ranged from 10 to 20 cents per pound prior to the depression which began in 1837 In 1845, cotton prices skidded to three to five cents per pound, the lowest point in the antebellum period. Cotton planters sought to diversify their operations and started rotating crops and using animal manure's to increase yields. Attention was also given to improvements in fiber quality.

"However, to most Mississippi cotton growers, the depression of 1837-49 was a financial disaster," according to John Hebron Moore's book 'Agriculture in Ante-Bellum Mississippi.' It was not until 1849 that cotton prices started to trend upward, and in the mid1850s, Middling cotton brought more than ten cents per pound.

The factor system also helped concentrate in a few important cities,and towns practically all of the fluid wealth of the cotton growing South. The Mississippi Delta and other interior regions were virtually the sole source of this wealth, but they remained in a state of hopeless economic dependence on these urban centers.

State of Mississippi 1862$50 "Cotton Pledged" Note with Indian and slaves picking cotton

Growing cotton was a business in which social prestige might be enhanced by success, but was not diminished by failure. Taken as a whole, however, the business end of it was fundamentally unsound and could not have survived unchanged for many more years, even if the Civil War had not occurred.

The sharecropping system was born of economic necessity following the Civil War. Freed slaves with no way to make a living and farmers with land but no labor formed partnerships that offered both parties unique advantages. This system, with variations, prevailed until agricultural research supplied technological breakthroughs that initiated mechanization.

The steamboat Robert E. Lee, famous as a Mississippi River racer, is pressed into harvesttime service by Mississippi Delta planters.

For the Mississippi Delta, the dependence upon the factor system was not alleviated until the advent of mortgage loan companies in the 1890s. Even then, there was only an exchange of one mortgage provider for another. That step, however, had to be taken before even the semblance of a new order could be established.

The Delta was tributary to New Orleans for the first sixty or seventy years of its cultivated existence. With the rise of railroads, Memphis played an increasingly important part in the business and social life of the Delta. However, from its first settlement in the 1820s, until the mid-1880s, the Delta poured its wealth down the Mississippi and out into the world. Scarcely any was kept at home.

Bender cotton, its staple product, made millions for others and was known throughout the cotton world. Prior to the mid-1880s, the Delta was almost completely dependent on river transportation for its contact with the world. Boats engaged in this traffic out of New Orleans were advertised as trading "in the bends" of the Mississippi River. The cotton carried from these river bends to New Orleans thus became known in the markets of the world as "Benders", a designation still in use by the cotton trade decades after railroads replaced paddle wheelers.

The Civil War devastated the few Delta communities which saw armed conflict and resulted in the abolition of slave labor and the disintegration of the whole Southern agricultural system. Reconstruction led to the reorganization of Southern agriculture on the basis of free labor, a gradual opening of additional areas of cotton production in the Delta and elsewhere, and improved transportation, banking and other infrastructure necessary to handle the crop.