re: "they look like they just came from the fields" - racist?

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Why do people think that only slaves picked cotton? It's patently false.

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There has been a lot of cotton picked since 1865 - and it was done by a lot of poor people, black and white. "Sharecroppers" I think they were called, until machines largely replaced them.

People forget how manpower intensive it was - a good cotton picking machine wasn't widely used until the Depression.

Ironically, a machine (the Whitney Gin) made the very labor-intensive act of cotton farming economically feasible in the 19th century. But a machine didn't free man from the labor until over 100 years later (thus, slavery was continued to feed those gins.)

Which is another reason why I bristle at Southern white folks in the 21st century have to bear all the negative stigma of slavery. EVERYBODY was using American cotton in the first half of the 19th century - Europe (particularly England) and the Yankees - their linen mills absolutely required the cotton that slaves were producing in the Cotton Belt. Everyone benefitted from it and the slaveowners were a convenient and visible scapegoat - who obviously deserved their portion of the fault and, collectively, were responsible for the direct abuses of that peculiar institution.

But, they weren't alone - they weren't holding slaves and producing cotton for their own amusement, that's for certain.