THE LANDLORD The highest position in the tenure ladder is that of landlord. The passing of the old planter and the rise of the new small town merchant into absentee ownership as a speculative venture is shown in the following case." A genuine love of the soil and a desire for the increased social status of the landlord can be seen: Barnes Dickson died soon after the close of the Civil War, and his modest cotton plantation in the Arkansas River bot toms, mortgaged and involved, went into the hands of a factor. He left a son, Willey, age seven, who went to live with his elder brother, Hubert. Hubert had taken to the up lands where land was cheap and was working a "hill farm." Willey went behind the plow and stayed there until he left to teach school. He had never gone beyond the fourth grade, but he got the county school because he could work arith metic, and nobody better prepared applied for the $20 a month job. From school-teaching he went to the little town of Jonesville to keep books for Josh Henry, General Mer chant and Cotton Buyer, who owned a lot of farms and did a furnishing business.
Willey Dickson wanted to be a lawyer, but instead he went to a Memphis, Tennessee, business college for three months and got to be head bookkeeper at Henry's General Merchan dise. When he got a chance he set up in business for himself and because he "knew niggers" he got a lot of furnishing trade. He didn't want to buy cotton, but he did want land. His first farm was a hill farm, his second was a river bottom farm bought from a Swede who had after the Civil War and, not liking cotton farming, had sold out to go West. On this last farm he put a mortgage and three Negro tenant families. The tenants later moved but the mort gage remained. In 1921 his General Merchandise failed be cause of bad cotton debts, but Dickson kept the farms. Since that year the farm has several times failed to pay interest and taxes. He has sold the tenants mules on credit, which they have not yet been able to pay for, and each spring he goes to the bank and borrows $600 at 10 per cent to furnish them through the year. In 1926 he bought another farm,
mortgaged it, and is now furnishing three families. The 1927 flood would have ruined him had not the Red Cross taken over the burden of looking after the tenants. As it was, they made only a third of a crop. Dickson is a business man by necessity and a landowner by choice. To walk over his rent ers' cotton fields on Sunday afternoon is his form of nature worship. If a pretty farm were offered on the block tomorrow he would buy it if he could.
How one cotton planter was tempted to expand and how his speculations failed because of poor seasons is told in the life of Ben II. Tillman, one-time governor of and senator from South Carolina as He said: I cleared money up to 1881 and bought land and mules right along. In that year I ran thirty plows, bought guano, rations, etc., as usual, and the devil tempted me to buy a steam engine and other machinery, amounting to two thou sand dollars, all on credit. My motto was "It takes money to make money, and nothing risk nothing have." To have been entirely free from debt would have made me feel like a "kite without a tail," so I struck out boldly into deep water. Ben Jonson says: "All men are mortal And do have visions." I had mine and they were rose-hued. Uninterrupted success had made me a fool. I was like the "little wanton boys who swim on bladders"; but I did not know how much of a "bladder" cotton was on land impoverished of vegetable mat ter in dry summer.
His biographer continues : The investments were followed by a "dreadful drought" and fearful losses before he was aware, thrust him into the "Red Sea." An unwise optimism led him to attempt to re trieve his fortunes by additional investments. But the result was the purchase of provisions from merchants at "sickening prices," continued crop failures in 1883, 1884, and 1885, a pocketbook "like Bill Arp's when an elephant had trod upon it," and the forced sale of much of the land he had bought.