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3 i j introduction A New Merchant System the day broke softly in natchez on january 11, 1898, a pleasant, hazy day in the midst of a mild southern winter. The Natchez Democrat predicted the weather would be “Warm, Damp, and Cloudy,” and advised that “a good rain will probably be followed by a freeze,” indicative of the sudden and unpredictable changes that could descend upon that epicenter of the Cotton Kingdom. Natchez was fairly quiet in January, the off-season for cotton planting, and most of the previous year’s cotton crop had already been shipped to market in New Orleans and elsewhere. Business was only “so so on the [Mississippi riverboat] landing,” and in fact, the river was “in an uncertain state” due to possible flooding driven by strong winter storms to the north. In many ways, the ebb and flow of the river controlled the seasons of life in Natchez, but the business of cotton was never very far from anyone’s mind in the Cotton Kingdom, and reminders were everywhere: “The Leathers [steamboat Captain Leathers and his ship] passed south yesterday afternoon with a good sized load of cotton and seed,” and another had “a full load going out to Vicksburg Sunday noon.” Soon Natchez would explode in bustling preparations for the coming year’s crop, but Harrison Ross was already thinking about his.1 Harrison Ross was a black sharecropper. He farmed thirty acres on “Ab Sojourner’s” cotton plantation; he had been farming cotton on Sojourner’s place for about four years, but had been working on shares in the district for many years. He probably had relatives working on other plantations around Adams County or in town, such as Anderson and Mary Ross on Duck Pond plantation, Amelia or Evaline Ross on Cliffs, and Menora, Jesse, and Elbert Ross in the town of Natchez. Perhaps his family had emerged from slavery somewhere in the area. When Ross got up that day in January, he knew that he would meet with his furnishing merchants, 4  Introduction Wolfe Geisenberger and his son Sam, to sign the crop lien agreement for that year’s credit. The firm of Wolfe Geisenberger & Son Company, Dry Goods and Cotton Merchants had been in business since the mid-1860s furnishing the croppers and planters in the area, and they would supply the sixty-one-year-old Harrison and his wife, Veicy, with all the necessities for their survival and to grow a crop of cotton on the Sojourner place with a 60 line of credit. This debt would be secured by a lien on all the cotton they grew on Sojourner’s land, maybe ten or fifteen bales, and they would pay Sojourner two bales as rent for their thirty acres and whatever house they would be offered to live in—possibly a shotgun shack or a former slave cabin left over from an earlier age.2 Ross had known Wolfe Geisenberger for at least eighteen years. He had first done business with him in 1880, when he, together with Veicy and their four daughters, worked for shares on Louis Pipe’s plantation south of Natchez in Kingston. Not much had changed in the intervening years for Ross, as his credit limit on Pipe’s was usually the same amount of 50 a year. But he took his business to another Natchez merchant after 1880 or worked with another cropper under that cropper’s mercantile account, not returning to Geisenberger & Co. until 1895 to work on terms on Ab Sojourner’s plantation. This movement of croppers from one merchant or plantation to another was fairly common among Natchez District sharecroppers and tenants, and Ross may have been part of a larger “squad,” or group, of sharecroppers working for Geisenberger or someone else subsumed under the contract name of a lead person in the interim. But between 1895 and 1898 Ross carried over a supply debt from one year to the next: once in 1897, for 34.35, out of 85 borrowed from Geisenberger in 1896 for goods and supplies. Because of his debts, he was limited in the new crop year to a credit of just 40 in goods, a pretty small amount for a married couple to live on for a year in the late 1890s, much less make a crop of cotton. But he apparently made enough that year to pay off his supply bill with Geisenberger and start fresh in 1898.3 Ross was in the grips...

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