asn't getting on at all. Smith of Albany
"furnishes" him, and his rent is eight hundred pounds of cotton. Can't
make anything at that. Why didn't he buy land! Humph! Takes money to
buy land. And he turns away. Free! The most piteous thing amid all
the black ruin of war-time, amid the broken fortunes of the masters,
the blighted hopes of mothers and maidens, and the fall of an
empire,--the most piteous thing amid all this was the black freedman
who threw down his hoe because the world called him free. What did
such a mockery of freedom mean? Not a cent of money, not an inch of
land, not a mouthful of victuals,--not even ownership of the rags on
his back. Free! On Saturday, once or twice a month, the old master,
before the war, used to dole out bacon and meal to his Negroes. And
after the first flush of freedom wore off, and his true helplessness
dawned on the freedman, he came back and picked up his hoe, and old
master still doled out his bacon and meal. The legal form of service
was theoretically far different; in practice, task-work or "cropping"
was substituted for daily toil in gangs; and the slave gradually became
a metayer, or tenant on shares, in name, but a laborer with
indeterminate wages in fact.

Still the price of cotton fell, and gradually the landlords deserted
their plantations, and the reign of the merchant began. The merchant
of the Black Belt is a curious institution,--part banker, part
landlord, part banker, and part despot. His store, which used most
frequently to stand at the cross-roads and become the centre of a
weekly village, has now moved to town; and thither the Negro tenant
follows him. The merchant keeps everything,--clothes and shoes, coffee
and sugar, pork and meal, canned and dried goods, wagons and ploughs,
seed and fertilizer,--and what he has not in stock he can give you an
order for at the store across the way. Here, then, comes the tenant,
Sam Scott, after he has contracted with some absent landlord's agent
for hiring forty acres of land; he fingers his hat nervously until the
merchant finishes his morning chat with Colonel Saunders, and calls
out, "Well, Sam, what do you want?" Sam wants him to "furnish"
him,--i.e., to advance him food and clothing for the year, and perhaps
seed and tools, until his crop is raised and sold. If Sam seems a
favorable subject, he and the merchant go to a lawyer, and Sam executes
a chattel mortgage on his mule and wagon in return for