O'hara's Choice - Leon Uris [83]
And, there was tobacco, a tarnished but still-golden leaf whose producers were getting in step with the world demand. Many tobacco plantations and small holders converted to general farming. A good farmer who used his acres wisely could make a go of it, given the hunting and fishing at hand.
Despite the dilapidation, Barjac Plantation was too promising to cash out.
The bedrock problem of the Eastern Shore was the constant migration of labor, always causing a shortage of fieldhands.
George Barjac calculated as deeply as he could in an effort to match the type of crop he would grow with the type of labor that was available.
Slaves sold for a few hundred dollars for a young girl to as much as twelve hundred for a top field buck. The negatives were providing subsistence and the never-ending problem of runaways.
. . . and thousands of free blacks wanted out and they fled to the cities and the frontier. The most skilled made it to a shipyard, but almost all other work was menial and conditions for free men of color were often as brutal as slavery. Free blacks lived off fish heads, and filled the jails, burdened with long sentences for trivial or imagined offenses. When farming slackened in the winter, the free blacks had to undercut the plantation owners who hired their slaves out to the canneries or as domestics.
There were times when a free black who could not get off the Shore sold himself to a white master.
. . . and the indentured came from Britain, working off their passage in the fields for five to seven years. It was a means for the English to unload their prisons and dump their convicts on the Eastern Shore.
. . . there was contracted prison labor working shackled and collared, a desperate and violent crowd whose only escape was into the arms of sweet death.
This was a place of whippings and mutilations and brandings and yelping bloodhounds.
Some slivers of decency in this black hell were provided by the Quakers, Methodists, and liberal Catholics who formed a kind of barrier against the hard-nosed Anglicans and Presbyterians.
It remained a torturous place, sucking the life out of cheap labor, but never enough labor, to keep up with greed-driven crops.
In the Corps, George Barjac had dealt with Indians and Mexican peasants. Even during his hard military contact, he retained a moral code that kept him on the side of civility.
If, indeed, he was to take over the plantation, he knew he had to make a decision about labor that included a measure of human decency. He had a number of ideas. He would not promise anyone an easy life, but in terms of the day, a relatively fair life.
Barjac came to a gambler’s decision.
Although tobacco was not as golden as it had been, the Maryland leaf had a great number of things going for it, mainly its addictive qualities. Every generation, his own included, had a love-hate affair with the smoking of tobacco, but each new generation would fall under its spell. There would always be a demand for tobacco and it would be a lifelong proposition to rid oneself of the habit.
The question was how to match up the demanding handwork of tobacco with available labor.
Using the sainted Lafayette, Washington, and Barjac names, he charmed his way to heavy financing from France and put his plan into motion.
Barjac added another fifteen hundred acres of land, purchased a sturdy oceangoing schooner, and built a support system of a deep inlet, pier, and warehouse.
In the 1850s, he offered his most productive slaves and some free blacks a lease of up to a hundred acres, a cabin, animals, equipment, seed, vegetable plot, and he guaranteed the purchase of their tobacco crop.
. . . in exchange for half of the harvest.
Those who took the proposition came to realize that sharecropping and credit at the company store meant debt that could never be overcome, but which was passed down from father to son.
To make feudalism work in the nineteenth century, George Barjac played good owner/bad owner with astonishing