I’m white and I picked more cotton than I ever wanted to. So there were plenty of whites willing to do it. I chopped cotton, too. Never had to pull indigo, though.
And by the way, the blacks got paid the same as whites. In the sixties the pay was $3.00 per hundred pounds.
A lot of people don’t realize some slaves were paid back in the old South, and some of those saved up and bought their own freedom.
1760s to mid 1860s is what I was writing about, as far as cotton pickin’ goes. It became a moot point in 1865.