mand, better
terms in rents; rented farms, varying from forty to a hundred acres,
bear an average rental of about fifty-four dollars a year. The men who
conduct such farms do not long remain renters; either they sink to
metayers, or with a successful series of harvests rise to be
land-owners.

In 1870 the tax-books of Dougherty report no Negroes as landholders.
If there were any such at that time,--and there may have been a
few,--their land was probably held in the name of some white patron,--a
method not uncommon during slavery. In 1875 ownership of land had
begun with seven hundred and fifty acres; ten years later this had
increased to over sixty-five hundred acres, to nine thousand acres in
1890 and ten thousand in 1900. The total assessed property has in this
same period risen from eighty thousand dollars in 1875 to two hundred
and forty thousand dollars in 1900.

Two circumstances complicate this development and make it in some
respects difficult to be sure of the real tendencies; they are the
panic of 1893, and the low price of cotton in 1898. Besides this, the
system of assessing property in the country districts of Georgia is
somewhat antiquated and of uncertain statistical value; there are no
assessors, and each man makes a sworn return to a tax-receiver. Thus
public opinion plays a large part, and the returns vary strangely from
year to year. Certainly these figures show the small amount of
accumulated capital among the Negroes, and the consequent large
dependence of their property on temporary prosperity. They have little
to tide over a few years of economic depression, and are at the mercy
of the cotton-market far more than the whites. And thus the
land-owners, despite their marvellous efforts, are really a transient
class, continually being depleted by those who fall back into the class
of renters or metayers, and augmented by newcomers from the masses. Of
one hundred land-owners in 1898, half had bought their land since 1893,
a fourth between 1890 and 1893, a fifth between 1884 and 1890, and the
rest between 1870 and 1884. In all, one hundred and eighty-five
Negroes have owned land in this county since 1875.

If all the black land-owners who had ever held land here had kept it or
left it in the hands of black men, the Negroes would have owned nearer
thirty thousand acres than the fifteen thousand they now hold. And yet
these fifteen thousand acres are a creditable showing,--a proof of no
lit