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THE
SECOND EMANCIPATION OF ENSLAVED AFRICAN AMERICANS By Henry Robert Burke Slavery and “King Cotton” The 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution was the first of the Reconstruction
Amendments. This is the time that schools have always taught when slavery in the United States ended, but this is not an accurate
portrayal of slavery in the United States. To get a real view of slavery in the United States we need to look at conditions that
many African American familys faced in the Deep South after the American Civil War.
In the agricultural field there were many labor intensive crops before machines were invented to replace
human and animal labor. Here we are concerned with the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 which replaced the human hand in
removing the seeds from cotton fiber. Ironically, while the cotton gin replaced the human labor of separating seeds from cotton
fiber, it necessitated the use of more enslaved Africans to do the other labor intensive task of picking cotton.
Late
summer is the season for picking cotton. The work day for enslaved African Americans began at sunrise, with a brief
midday break for lunch, after which the work resumed until dask. Children from age 10 years old worked along side adult
men and women. Pickers made their way down the long rows, kneeling or bending at the waist, taking a firm grip on each fluffy
cotton boll, and giving it a sharp pull. The thorny sheaths at the base of each cotton boll are as rough as splintered
wood which made the workers’ fingers sore and sometimes bloody. Under the blazing sun each picker dragged a sack that grew heavier as cotton filled the sack. Much
of that weight was seed that was later combed out by the cotton gin. Children as young as 10 years of age would pick as much
as 150 pounds of cotton per day.
From around 1810 through 1860 thousands of African Americans were transported from Virginia
and Maryland to the Deep South to work in cotton fields. From the Tidewater Region enslaved African Americans were transported
by ships down along the Atlantic Coast. In western Virginia enslaved African Americans were transported down the Ohio River
to the Mississippi River the down to slave markets in Memphis, Tennessee and Natchez, Mississippi.
Cotton was first introduced about 1664 from Barbados into
the English Colonies of North America which became the United States. About 1778-9 a gentleman named Burden, living upon John's
Island a few miles south of Charleston, S. C., clothed his Negroes with cotton cloth made on his plantation. At that time
the only manner of separating cotton fiber from the seed was with human fingers. There were no cotton gins. Sea Island cotton
was the only kind cultivated because the lint does not adhere to the seed as tenaciously
as does upland variety of cotton. About 1849 or '50 time was spent upon the Burden plantation researching the early history of cotton from
a son of the first Mr. Burden. Burden reported that when cotton was first grown the constant evening work for all the family,
men, women, children, and servants was cleaning seeds from cotton fiber. As simple and inefficient as the roller-gin
was compared with the later improvement of the saw-gin of, it was hailed with joyous acclamations when replaced the very toilsome
labor of the hand removal of cotton seed. Burden stated that the first cotton ever shipped from this country (English
Colonies of North America) was one bag sent from Charleston S.C. to England about the year 1740. Fifty years elapsed
before the next shipment was made.
After the American
Civil War from 1866 through 1877 during the Period called Reconstruction, the
conditions written in the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments were pretty much adhered to. Recently
freed African Americans seemed to be making rapid progress. During Reconstruction, the State Legislatures in the former rebellious
States had been suspended and the United States government kept Federal troops stationed in the former rebellious
States to enforce the Reconstruction Amendments, (13th, 14th and 15th), protecting citizen’s
rights for African Americans who were now enfranchised citizens. When the United States Congress reinstated the State Legislatures in the former rebellious States and removed
Federal troops, the Southern States immediately began to pass discriminatory laws and repressive codes against African Americans.
They formed clandestine groups, (i.e. the Ku Klux Klan), to intimidate and control African Americans. White Southerners still
owned nearly all the land and so millions of freed African Americans were quickly re-enslaved in a new scheme of slavery called
“sharecropping”. Most aspects of cotton cultivation still depended on human labor and millions of recently freed African
Americans were coerced into becoming sharecroppers and tenant farmers to fill the labor need; in principle re-enslaved. Few
blacks would have chosen to become sharecroppers if they had a choice. Quality education for African Americans was hard to
acquire, so recently freed African Americans, were prevented from receiving educations, so they were vulnerable to share cropping
schemes developed by educated Southern land owners. These recently freed African Americans weren’t stupid; they suffered
from the lack of any type of formal education. Through no fault of their own many African Americans were illiterate. Being
unable to read, write or figure arithmetic made them vulnerable to the worst type of exploitation. Blacks were kept in a perpetual state of indebtedness by the land owner’s practice of using double
books. One book kept the normal business figures while the book shown to sharecroppers was falsified to lead sharecroppers
to believe they owed more money than their cotton crop had made. Land owners, who also owned company stores, would continue
to extend credit to the sharecropper and year after year the sharecropper just sank deeper and deeper into debt. It was against
the law for sharecroppers to leave the area if he was indebted so the sharecropper and his entire family were stuck on the
land. African American sharecroppers were also ensnared in indebtedness by being paid with scrip rather than
cash. The script could only be used at the “company store” which sold goods at inflated prices that also helped
keep sharecroppers indebted. It is reported that as late as the mid 1960s some sharecroppers in Alabama had never seen an
actual dollar bill. Night riders or Klansmen would visit
to administer whippings or other forms of punishment, including lynching, to sharecroppers who did not follow the rules of
the land owners. In some cases Kangaroo Courts were held, but local law enforcement ignored justice in cases involving African
Americans.
For a long time there
was absolutely no relief from the tedious labor of picking cotton. Inventors tried unsuccessfully to build cotton picking
machines; one machine was patented clear back in 1850, but it just couldn’t handle the complexities of picking cotton.
One problem is that cotton bolls don’t all ripen at the same time so cotton fields have to be
picked over repeatedly. That particular cotton picking machine damaged and destroyed too much cotton and also collected pieces
of leaf “trash” that discolored the cotton thus reducing its value. Inventors didn’t get very far with perfecting a cotton picking machine in the Nineteenth Century.
Peter Haring, of Goliad, Texas, worked through much of the 1890s and built a machine that held some promise. The McCormick
Harvesting Machine Company agreed to test it, but after running the machine down one row four or five times, no one could
tell whether any cotton had been picked. Having decided that Haring’s contrivance had no “promise of success,”
McCormick’s officials returned it to him. Another inventor, Angus Campbell, of Chicago, had similar bad luck. He built his first cotton picker
in 1889 and then spent 20 years making annual journeys to the South to test improvements on it. Trash remained the problem. In the 1920s International Harvester entered the field. The company was
introducing the world’s first successful line of tractors, and farmers were using them to pull seed drills, plows, and
combines. A good mechanical cotton picker would sell not only itself but more tractors. Clarence Hagen, the company’s
chief engineer, conducted development work at the company’s headquarters in Chicago and then headed south for field
testing. He started in 1922
with a picker that resembled a vacuum cleaner. Workers would wield tubes to suck bolls from the plants. This sort of machine
had been patented since 1859— with tentacle-like hoses that extended from a single vacuum tank, it tended to look like
an octopus—and Hagen built both mule- and tractor-drawn versions. In September 1924 he set up a competition between
a mule-pulled model and a hand picker near Dallas. The contest resembled the legendary race between John Henry and the steam
drill, which John Henry won. The man pitted against the machine was an experienced field hand who had shown that he could pick up
to 400 pounds of cotton in a day. The mechanical picker had four hoses, with a separate man tending each. After an hour the
field worker was more than 50 yards ahead, and his cotton was considerably cleaner. When the Depression began to wane, activity at International
Harvester picked up. In 1940 Hagen reinvented his cotton picking machine. His former designs had built it as a separate unit
pulled by a tractor or set at the rear of a tractor. Now he had the tractor back down the cotton rows in reverse gear. He
widened the rear wheels to avoid damaging the delicate plants, and the front wheel stayed out of the way until the cotton
was picked. The row of cotton plants passed through the picking throat of the machine first. The cotton was picked before
the plants contacted any part of the tractor. No cotton bolls were knocked to the ground before they could be gathered. Field tests began during the 1941 picking season and became an annual occurrence. The company sent
a caravan south, with a big truck carrying the machine and a pickup following with tools and spare parts. The picking started
in late July, in southern Texas, and swung up into Arkansas and Mississippi. In 1942 it went so well that by December International
Harvester’s chairman, Fowler McCormick, announced that he was ready for production: “We are certain that it is
a commercial machine right now … our picker has been tested exhaustively, and we know it will pick cotton profitably.…” With the nation now
at war, workers were heading off to both the fighting and the Northern factories, and cotton fields faced manpower shortages.
Growers turned to Mexican laborers and even prisoners of war to do the work, and sometimes their crops rotted in the fields.
They started feeling more receptive to automation. Meanwhile John Rust’s fortunes began to rise. He and his wife, Thelma,
had little left save a heavily mortgaged home in Memphis, but at her urging he took three months to redraw the designs for
his machine’s most crucial parts. Cashing in some war bonds, he traveled to Washington to file new patent applications.
When he got there, he learned that representatives from the firm of Allis-Chalmers had been trying to get in touch with him,
wanting to purchase rights to his patents and build experimental machines under his supervision. Allis put him on the payroll
as a consultant and built six pickers from 1944 to 1945. International Harvester started pilot production too, finally realizing
the goal Hagen had been pursuing back in the 1920s.
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