Four or five compartments held the contents of each boll; from sixty to eighty bolls were required to yield a pound in the seed; and three or four pounds of seed cotton furnished one pound of lint.  When a boll was wide open a deft picker could empty all of its compartments by one snatch of the fingers; and a specially skilled one could keep both hands flying independently, and still exercise the small degree of care necessary to keep the lint fairly free from the trash of the brittle dead calyxes.  As to the day’s work, a Georgia planter wrote in 1830:  “A hand will pick or gather sixty to a hundred pounds of cotton in the seed, with ease, per day.  I have heard of some hands gathering a hundred and twenty pounds in a day.  The hands on a plantation ought to average sixty-five pounds,” [5] But actual records in the following decades made these early pickers appear very inept.  On Levin Covington’s plantation near Natchez in 1844, in a typical week of October, Bill averaged 220 pounds a day, Dred 205 pounds, Aggy 215, and Delia 185; and on Saturday of that week all the twenty-eight men and boys together picked an average of 160 pounds, and all the eighteen women and girls an average of 125.[6] But these were dwarfed in turn by the pickings on J.W.  Fowler’s Prairie plantation, Coahoma County, Mississippi, at the close of the ante-bellum period.  In the week of September 12 to 17, 1859, Sandy, Carver and Gilmore each averaged about three hundred pounds a day, and twelve other men and five women ranged above two hundred, while the whole gang of fifty-one men and women, boys and girls average 157 pounds each.[7]

[Footnote 5:  American Farmer, II, 359.]

[Footnote 6:  MS. in the Mississippi Department of History and Archives, Jackson, Miss.]

[Footnote 7:  MS. in the possession of W.H.  Stovall, Stovall, Miss.]

The picking required more perseverance than strength.  Dexterity was at a premium, but the labors of the slow, the youthful and the aged were all called into requisition.  When the fields were white with their fleece and each day might bring a storm to stop the harvesting, every boll picked might well be a boll saved from destruction.  Even the blacksmith was called from his forge and the farmer’s children from school to bend their backs in the cotton rows.  The women and children picked steadily unless rains drove them in; the men picked as constantly except when the crop was fairly under control and some other task, such as breaking in the corn, called the whole gang for a day to another field or when the gin house crew had to clear the bins by working up their contents to make room for more seed cotton.

In the Piedmont where the yield was lighter the harvest was generally ended by December; but in the western belt, particularly when rains interrupted the work, it often extended far into the new year.  Lucien Minor, for example, wrote when traveling through the plantations of northern Alabama, near Huntsville, in December, 1823:  “These fields are still white with cotton, which frequently remains unpicked until March or April, when the ground is wanted to plant the next crop."[8] Planters occasionally noted in their journals that for want of pickers the top crop was lost.