I have conversed with dozens of planters, before and since, whose talk all runs in the same channel. They have no sort of conception of free labor. They do not comprehend any law for controlling laborers, save the law of force. When they speak of a policy of managing free negro laborers, they mean a policy by which they can compel them to work. “Why not depend on the power of wages, if they work, or of want, if they don’t, to settle the labor question?” I asked one. “They’ll work just long enough to get a dollar, and then they’ll desert you in the midst of the picking season, till they’ve spent it all, and have become hungry again.” “But Northern laborers are as anxious to save money and get on in the world as capitalists themselves.” “Northern laborers are like other men; Southern laborers are nothing but niggers, and you can’t make anything else out of them. They’re not controlled by the same motives as white men, and unless you have power to compel them, they’ll only work when they can’t beg or steal enough to keep from starving.” My Georgia planter, after first mistaking me for a Southerner, next mistook me for a plantation seeker, and earnestly advised me to go into the southwestern portion of his State. “You can make an average of half a bale to the acre on all the lands about there. I grow a bale to the acre on my lands. Went home this year after Lee surrendered, and I got my parole, ripped up half the corn my niggers had planted, and put it in cotton in May, and raised fifty bales, worth two hundred and fifty dollars a bale. Such land as that you can get at five dollars an acre. Then it’s far healthier than the rich cotton lands in the west; and you have the best society in the country. Within a few miles of my plantation are half-a-dozen of the very first families in Georgia—the very best society I ever saw!” But he was anxious to sell, nevertheless. There was no use talking about it, the niggers wouldn’t work unless you had the power to compel them to it. Yankees talked mighty big about money bringing them to industrious habits; but, in a month’s trial before he left home, he hadn’t been able to hire a nigger for next year, or to hear of a neighbor who had hired one. The black vagabonds all expected their masters’ lands at Christmas, and the Yankees were putting them up to it. He would take six dollars an acre now for his lands. All through his section (Columbus, Georgia,) lands could still be bought at from three to nine dollars, although prices were now advancing a little. For himself, he always made a bale to the acre; but then his were the best lands in the county. His neighbors never averaged over half a bale. Altogether his plantation was quite an advantageous one. It was only twenty miles from town, and he could get his letters down quite frequently. They were sent in the care of his Columbus friends, and any person from the neighborhood who happened to be in town brought them out.