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Alabama can produce. But wool usually sells at double the price of cotton at its home market; hence a tax on wool parallel with that on cotton should be six cents per pound. Yet Congress, instead of taxing wool until it stands on an equal footing with cotton, or removing the tax from cotton until it stands on an equal footing with wool, keeps a tax on cotton which does not increase the market value anywhere, and puts a high protective duty on all imported wool, which largely increases the home value of the native article. It is well enough to protect American wool, but why thus oppress American cotton? Is it magnanimous? Is it just? Is it encouraging Southern emigration? Is it not rather poor statesmanship, and blind sectional legislation?

This, however, is not the worst feature of it. This little tax of three cents per pound on cotton produces actual destitution and suffering among the freedmen. I have assisted in the settlement of accounts with freedmen, on perhaps fifty plantations in Alabama during the winter, and know perhaps well their condition. The following statement of the situation on one plantation will illustrate that on hundreds of others. In the latter part of December I visited one plantation, lying about ten miles up the Tombigbee river, for the purpose of settling with the freedmen. There was made on the place less than one thousand pounds of cotton to the hand, and no corn. It was an average cotton crop for last year in this section of the country. The freedmen were to receive as wages their rations of cornmeal and pork, and one-fourth of their crop, which are the usual terms given this year.

They were sick home, and had bought some clothing, a little sugar, flour, &c, from their employer, promising their crop in payment. At the settlement it was found that some had overdrawn their accounts, some come out with five dollars due them, and one or two had as high as thirty dollars coming to them for their year's labor. All were ragged, their children were naked; all now, without food and many without money. Yet the Government tax on cotton belonging to the freedmen on this plantation was nearly six hundred dollars, enough to have comfortably clothed most of them. Sad, naked, and hungry, they left this plantation to look for other homes, little dreaming that the Government that had sent them free was now actually taking the food from their mouths and the clothes from their backs, under the mistaken notion that it was only making rebels pay a part of the national debt. 

Such is the actual situation upon hundreds of plantations in Alabama. Yet Bureau officers are required to urge the freedmen to educate their children, to save their money in order to buy stock and tools with which to farm on their own account. Congress has now given freedmen the ballot, while it takes away much of their bread and bacon. Had the freedmen themselves been given their choice between the two, I fancy they would have chosen the latter. They can not eat ballots, nor wear ballots, and I judge that about the first use the make of them will be toward removing this cotton tax, which now bears so heavily upon their industry.

Pierce Burton.