Everybody was planting cotton; every little valley bloomed with it, and up hill-sides, that further south would have been called waste land, were everywhere to be traced the long undulations of the cotton ridges. As an official report about this time expressed it, “Visions of fortunes were floating before all planters’ eyes. The only trouble was scarcity of laborers. A quarter of a million acres, more or less, were waiting to sprout fortunes under every stroke of the hoe. All men seemed mad. Guerrillas were a light matter; the army-worm nothing. Cotton-seed, and land to scatter it on, and blacks to gather in the golden fiber—and lo! Golconda!” Worst of all, nearly every man was overreaching his means. With capital to carry through a plantation of five hundred acres, he would be attempting a thousand. Negroes were consequently ill-paid; rations were likely to be of the cheapest and scantiest. If the negro, dissatisfied with this specimen of the workings of free labor, broke his contract and ran away, it was a proof that “free niggers would never make cotton without a system of peonage.” “We are the only ones that understand the nigger,” said a few of the more outspoken Mississippians, emboldened by the growing impression that the President, as a Southern man, was gradually coming over to their side. “Wait till Johnson gets things a-going here, and we’ll make a contract law that will make a nigger work.”[39] Meantime, however, the Northerners were doing most of the cotton-planting. Mississippians were quite sincere in believing it impossible to grow cotton with unrestricted free labor, and many of them, frightened at the prospect of having to pay war taxes, and especially at what the more timorous still thought the danger of negro suffrage, were anxious to sell, for ten dollars an acre, lands that before the war readily commanded forty or fifty. Memphis showed even more signs of the universal reaction than Vicksburg. The old inhabitants were more generally back, and a longer immunity from the punishments they had at first dreaded made them bolder. The newspapers were almost as unbridled as in the old secession days in their denunciations of Parson Brownlow, the East Tennessee Unionists, the test oath, and the effort to exclude Rebel voters from the polls. But on one point they had been utterly revolutionized. The man whom most of all they used to “decorate with their censure,”[40] “the drunken tailor from the mountains,” “the po’ white demagogue,” was now the unfortunate subject of their warmest eulogies.