Sunday, January 30, 2022

William T. Sherman to Ellen Ewing Sherman, April 15, 1860

LOUISIANA STATE SEMINARY, ALEXANDRIA, April 15, 1860.

This is Sunday. Some of the cadets have gone to church, some fishing and the balance are walking about. The Board of Supervisors are now sitting in a large room only two removed from me, and I hear them wrangling and quarreling over points of discipline and instruction which they have been now discussing for two days.

They have authorized me to make plans and estimates for the two houses. And I expect a builder to be out any moment to help me estimate. The Board approve my selection of the site for the two new houses, and I believe the one selected for ours the best, being on a fine high point, distant from the college building yet overlooking its grounds. There is a fine spring near by. The weather continues warm and excessively dry and all are praying for rain to bring up the corn and cotton which has been planted for a month.

I have your several letters asking the price of servants, etc., but I cannot answer as all servants here are scarce and most everybody owns their own. I suppose ten dollars a month will hire a black woman but it is impossible to hire a strong man fit for field work at less than $25 a month and board. If Emily and Gertrude come with you we will still need a man and maybe a black girl, as white girls won't work down here long. Still we can agree to pay them a bonus if they stay a year. But as I wrote you there is no chance of your coming down for a long time, may be November.

Dr. Smith one of the supervisors, a physician of long standing, says that October and November are the sickly months. July and August though hot are perfectly healthy. So that he favors those months as the vacation. So great is the variation of opinion that I let them fight it out as it is proper that they who have lived here all their lives should determine the question. I hope to get the builders to work in the course of a month but all such things proceed so slowly here that I doubt if we can finish this year. Nobody seems to pay any attention to time or appointments.

Red River too has already begun to fall and soon will be navigated only by the smallest kind of boats and it will be next to impossible to procure anything from New Orleans, the only point where furniture can be had. The stores in Alexandria contain nothing of the kind. Indeed California in its worst days had a better market than this country. There are no farmers here. The planters produce only cotton and sugar on a large scale and deem it beneath their dignity to raise anything for market. Some of the negroes raise a few sweet potatoes, corn, etc., which they sell about Christmas time, but all the year else everything must come from New Orleans. We are now paying for corn one dollar and ten cents a bushel and hay costs about forty-eight dollars a ton. Everything is proportional, so that I doubt if my four thousand dollars will more than barely maintain us.

SOURCE: Walter L. Fleming, General W.T. Sherman as College President, p. 200-2

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