He paid "one-third of his product for the use of the land, he
paid an exorbitant fee for recording the contract by which he paid his
pound of flesh; he was charged two or three times as much as he ought to
pay for ginning his cotton; and, finally, he turned over his crop to be
eaten up in commissions, if any was still left to him."[11]

The worst of all results from this iniquitous system was its effect on the
Negroes themselves. It made the Negroes extravagant and unscrupulous.
Convinced that no share of their crop would come to them when harvested,
they did not exert themselves to produce what they could. They often
abandoned their crops before harvest, knowing that they had already spent
them. In cases, however, where the Negro tenants had acquired mules,
horses or tools upon which the speculator had a mortgage, the blacks were
actually bound to their landlords to secure the property. It was soon
evident that in the end the white man himself was the loser by this evil
system. There appeared waste places in the country. Improvements were
wanting, land lay idle for lack of sufficient labor, and that which was
cultivated yielded a diminishing return on account of the ignorance and
improvidence of those tilling it. These Negroes as a rule had lost the
ambition to become landowners, preferring to invest their surplus money in
personal effects; and in the few cases where the Negroes were induced to
undertake the buying of land, they often tired of the responsibility and
gave it up.[12]

There began in the spring of 1879, therefore, an emigration of the Negroes
from Louisiana and Mississippi to Kansas. For some time there was a
stampede from several river parishes in Louisiana and from counties just
opposite them in Mississippi. It was estimated that from five to ten
thousand left their homes before the movement could be checked. Persons of
influence soon busied themselves in showing the blacks the necessity for
remaining in the South and those who had not then gone or prepared to go
were persuaded to return to the plantations. This lull in the excitement,
however, was merely temporary, for many Negroes had merely returned home
to make more extensive preparations for leaving the following spring. The
movement was accelerated by the work of two Negro leaders of some note,
Moses Singleton, of Tennessee, the self-styled Moses of the Exodus; and
Henry Adams, of Louisiana, who credited himself with having organized for
this pur