Submitted by: Cat Edwards
Columbus Texas, March 10 / 68
Dear James,
I arrived in Texas some weeks since & saw a letter from you to D. H. Crisp
informing him of your marriage and that you were pursuing your profession in
Trenton. The profession though hard is one highly honorable and one of great
responsibility and if pursued with that degree of energy spent and will always
ensure success. I know from long experience that by slow degree prosperity
arrives, but rapid is the progress of evil or mismanagement , for although I am
so much reduced as not to have the means to carry me back home without I can
borrow, I do not feel as it has been by any act of my own that I have been so
much reduced, but the misfortune has been brought about by my being destroyed by
the Yankee Government. In freeing my negroes and then trying to farm with free
labor . By hiring I lost each year about $4,000 in gold, owing to the worm
destroying my crop of cotton. They have come four years in succession which has
bankrupt the whole country no one thinks they can realize any more than a
bare subsistence but still it is hard for those who have heretofore lived in
luxury to realize their true situation, and men whom you would have supposed
incapable of doing or thinking of doing anything dishonorable now do things that
the loss of property, it appears the loss of honor has gone with it. I left here
the 20th of last June and when I returned would scarcely have known the same
people the change had been so violent. I sold my crop, corn, cotton, plantation
tools & open cattle, hogs, sheep & mules to Hansford & Willard,
$7,500 in gold. They paid $3,000. I gave their note at sixty days for six
thousand one hundred & sixty-five dollars in currency, when my agent, Dr. D.
H. Crisp & R. Y. Cook, when to sell it out, the Bureau agent trumped up a
Bogus Claim of the negroes and forbid the sale, so that the Yankees could run
the crop off & sell it which they done before I could have the fraudulent
claims set up by him and the negroes set aside and adjudged in my favor. Now
there is scarcely anything left, not enough to pay off what I owing in the
country that I am really worse off than I ever was before. It is hard for me to
realize that I am owing money without the ability to pay. No one that owes me
seems to think they ought to pay, that I can do without it because I was once
independant. I bought me a small place in Brazil with a good mud house on it
with a few hands and will try and make a support by raising a little coffee
& living on a small scale. I feel my energies declining as age advances on
me. I shall in a few days be in my 70th year, which is all that is allotted to
man though some are permitted to pass that time. I left Richard at the plow
handles trying to raise a little corn & cotton to make a living. I shall
abandon the cotton as soon as I can get coffee trees a bearing which takes 3
years to make half crop, 5 years full crop, then they continue to bear well for
30 years. We have a tolerable American society, say some 23 families, among
them, Col. A. T. Oliver, T. B. White, I. S. White, John Perkins from Texas, the
others from Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia & South Carolina, all once rich,
but now broken up but gone to work with a will. A. T. Oliver is plowing, his
wife & daughters milking and cooking, cheerfully trying to get in a
situation to do well again. They have bought 3 negroes which will relieve them
from cooking & washing. It is a very great change that has come over all our
settlers, from affluence to poverty but we have a free government where a white
man is white and a negro black without any Bureau to make us equal or below the
negroes. I suppose that all the Southern States are in the same predicament of
degradation by the negro rule - I am in hopes you realize the situation and
rouse yourself to combat. With the world as it is, not as it was, there is
nothing like a will to succeed . Remember kindly to your Aunt Betsy & Aly
and all the relatives.
Affectionately your father,
John H. Crisp
P. S. - Kennie has married Dr. John C. Jones of Gonzales, who is doing a
fine practice. He graduated in Edinburgh & Paris & attended a course of
lectures in the Dublin & London Hospitals & was Surgeon in Chief to
Hoods Brigade of his Army in Virginia.
