[Footnote 1:  In 1914 Kansas and Mississippi each elected eight members of the House of Representatives, but Kansas cast 483,683 votes for her members, while Mississippi cast only 37,185 for hers, less than one-twelfth as many.]

2. Economic Life:  Peonage

Within fifteen years after the close of the war it was clear that the Emancipation Proclamation was a blessing to the poor white man of the South as well as to the Negro.  The break-up of the great plantation system was ultimately to prove good for all men whose slender means had given them little chance before the war.  At the same time came also the development of cotton-mills throughout the South, in which as early as 1880 not less than 16,000 white people were employed.  With the decay of the old system the average acreage of holdings in the South Atlantic states decreased from 352.8 in 1860 to 108.4 in 1900.  It was still not easy for an independent Negro to own land on his own account; nevertheless by as early a year as 1874 the Negro farmers had acquired 338,769 acres.  After the war the planters first tried the wage system for the Negroes.  This was not satisfactory—­from the planter’s standpoint because the Negro had not yet developed stability as a laborer; from the Negro’s standpoint because while the planter might advance rations, he frequently postponed the payment of wages and sometimes did not pay at all.  Then land came to be rented; but frequently the rental was from 80 to 100 pounds of lint cotton an acre for land that produced only 200 to 400 pounds.  In course of time the share system came to be most widely used.  Under this the tenant frequently took his whole family into the cotton-field, and when the crop was gathered and he and the landlord rode together to the nearest town to sell it, he received one-third, one-half, or two-thirds of the money according as he had or had not furnished his own food, implements, and horses or mules.  This system might have proved successful if he had not had to pay exorbitant prices for his rations.  As it was, if the landlord did not directly furnish foodstuffs he might have an understanding with the keeper of the country store, who frequently charged for a commodity twice what it was worth in the open market.  At the close of the summer there was regularly a huge bill waiting for the Negro at the store; this had to be disposed of first, and he always came out just a few dollars behind.  However, the landlord did not mind such a small matter and in the joy of the harvest might even advance a few dollars; but the understanding was always that the tenant was to remain on the land the next year.  Thus were the chains of peonage forged about him.

At the same time there developed a still more vicious system.  Immediately after the war legislation enacted in the South made severe provision with reference to vagrancy.  Negroes were arrested on the slightest pretexts and their labor as that of convicts leased to landowners or other business men.  When, a few years later, Negroes, dissatisfied with the returns from their labor on the farms, began a movement to the cities, there arose a tendency to make the vagrancy legislation still more harsh, so that at last a man could not stop work without technically committing a crime.  Thus in all its hideousness developed the convict lease system.