This posting is the result of a comment made by a visitor to one of my recent postings:

https://thekingoftexas.wordpress.com/2009/08/01/alabama-cotton-fields-old-black-joe/

Some thoughts on picking cotton: (excerpted from the above posting):

While in basic military training near the mid-way point in the past century, I was discussing cotton-picking with a new-found friend from Aspermont, Texas. I mentioned that at the tender age of 11, I picked cotton in Mississippi for a few days for a penny a pound. I was never able to pick 100 pounds in order to reach the dollar-a-day wage. Some adult males picked as much as 200 pounds in one day by working from dawn to dusk. Early in the season, when the cotton was heavy on the stalks, pickers earned a penny a pound, but later in the season when the cotton was sparse on the stalks, the rate rose to two-cents a pound (it was sparse when I picked it, but my never-indulgent step-father paid me only a penny a pound).

Bummer.

The visitor’s comment follows—anyone interested in stylishness and originality in photography—photography with phlair, so to speak—should check out his work here:

http://burstmode.wordpress.com/

Interesting term: Bummer. Bummers were the foragers associated with Sherman’s army as it marched through the old South. In the march through Georgia and South Carolina, they tended to take and occasionally burn. Bummer became a very negative term, indeed. But there is more…

To bum something, say a cigarette, means that the borrowed item is not expected to be paid back or that the borrowed item will not be returned, like a cigarette. Meaning is a little different from what the Bummers did…

In the final phase of Sherman’s march through North Carolina, it was apparent the Confederacy was in collapse. Additionally, North Carolina had never been a Confederate hotspot (unlike Sought Carolina) and it had lots of Yankee sympathizers, so Sherman instructed the Bummers to pay for items in chits. A farmer that had lost all his chickens to a bummer and received a chit in return had been bummed or, the bummer had bummed the chickens from him because the farmer never expected to see payment. Oddly, Sherman paid and the final significant battle of the Civil War was fought outside Bentonville, NC.

No idea why I told you all this. . .

And this is my reply to the visitor’s comment:

Whatever your reason for telling me, thanks for sharing this Civil War tidbit. I’m familiar with some of that conflict’s many oddities, but I was not aware that Sherman’s foragers were called “bummers” because of their proclivity to take items without repaying.

Considering Sherman’s scorched-earth policy on his march to the sea—a policy established to deny the enemy food, shelter and transportation—the foragers, having appropriated everything useful to the campaign, would have been the logical ones to torch everything that remained and thus would have—or at least could have—been known as ‘burners.” Perhaps some astute southern wag (there were—and are—a few such), watching his crops and home burning after failing to receive remuneration (other than a chit) from the foragers and given the similarity of the terms, referred to the foragers as “burners” rather than bummers, and the term stuck. Come to think of it, that same wag may have given the same treatment to the word “chit.” Not by coining a new word, necessarily, but by using a rhyming word which, coincidentally, also utilized only four letters.

I freely proffer this alternate explanation for the origin of the term “bummers” to all present and future historians for their use in revising the history of the War Between the States. As is all history, the history of the Civil War is constantly being rewritten, and perhaps future revisions will show that “bummers” actually evolved from “burners.”

And perhaps not.

One of Civil War historian James Street’s books deals primarily with such oddities—a small tome, but fascinating reading. It includes the story of a child birthed by a virgin southern belle, the result of a pregnancy caused by the errant path of a mini-ball fired from a Yankee rifle. The round pierced the lady’s outer and inner clothing (if any) and came (no pun intended) to rest in the specific location of the lady’s interior which could cause a pregnancy. The mini-ball had apparently passed through a soldier’s genitals enroute to its final resting place. We may safely assume that the unlucky target was a soldier of the South—either that or the southern belle was on the wrong side of the battle lines. Of all the oddities of the War Between the States, this is my all-time favorite. It’s been discounted, of course, but it’s still my favorite.