University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XIII
TYPES OF LARGE PLANTATIONS

THE tone and method of a plantation were determined
partly by the crop and the lie of the land, partly by the
characters of the master and his men, partly by the local
tradition. Some communities operated on the basis of timework,
or the gang system; others on piece-work or the task system.
The former was earlier begun and far more widely spread,
for Sir Thomas Dale used it in drilling the Jamestown settlers at
their work, it was adopted in turn on the "particular" and private
plantations thereabout, and it was spread by the migration of
the sons and grandsons of Virginia throughout the middle and
western South as far as Missouri and Texas. The task system,
on the other hand, was almost wholly confined to the rice coast.

The gang method was adaptable to operations on any scale.
If a proprietor were of the great majority who had but one or
two families of slaves, he and his sons commonly labored alongside
the blacks, giving not less than step for step at the plow
and stroke for stroke with the hoe. If there were a dozen or
two working hands, the master, and perhaps the son, instead of
laboring manually would superintend the work of the plow
and hoe gangs. If the slaves numbered several score the master
and his family might live in leisure comparative or complete,
while delegating the field supervision to an overseer, aided perhaps
by one or more slave foremen. When an estate was inherited
by minor children or scattered heirs, or where a single proprietor
had several plantations, an overseer would be put into
full charge of an establishment so far as the routine work was
concerned; and when the plantations in one ownership were
quite numerous or of a great scale a steward might be employed
to supervise the several overseers. Thus in the latter part of the

eighteenth century, Robert Carter of Nomoni Hall on the Potomac
had a steward to assist in the administration of his many
scattered properties, and Washington after dividing the Mount
Vernon lands into several units had an overseer upon each and
a steward for the whole during his own absence in the public
service. The neighboring estate of Gunston Hall, belonging to
George Mason, was likewise divided into several units for the
sake of more detailed supervision. Even the 103 slaves of
James Mercer, another neighbor, were distributed on four plantations
under the management in 1771 of Thomas Oliver. Of
these there were 54 slaves on Marlborough, 19 on Acquia, 12 on
Belviderra and 9 on Accokeek, besides 9 hired for work elsewhere.
Of the 94 not hired out, 64 were field workers. Nearly
all the rest, comprising the house servants, the young children, the
invalids and the superannuated, were lodged on Marlborough,
which was of course the owner's "home place." Each of the four
units had its implements of husbandry, and three of them had tobacco
houses; but the barn and stables were concentrated on
Marlborough. This indicates that the four plantations were
parts of a single tract so poor in soil that only pockets here and
there would repay cultivation.[1] This presumption is reinforced
by an advertisement which Mercer published in 1767: "Wanted
soon, . . . a farmer who will undertake the management of
about 80 slaves, all settled within six miles of each other, to be
employed in making of grain."[2] In such a case the superintendent
would combine the functions of a regular overseer on
the home place with those of a "riding boss" inspecting the work
of the three small outlying squads from time to time. Grain
crops would facilitate this by giving more frequent intermissions
than tobacco in the routine. The Mercer estate might indeed be
more correctly described as a plantation and three subsidiary
farms than as a group of four plantations. The occurrence of tobacco
houses in the inventory and of grain crops alone in the advertisement
shows a recent abandonment of the tobacco staple;
and the fact of Mercer's financial embarrassment[3] suggests, what
was common knowledge, that the plantation system was ill suited
to grain production as a central industry.

The organization and routine of the large plantations on the
James River in the period of an agricultural renaissance are illustrated
in the inventory and work journal of Belmead, in Powhatan
County, owned by Philip St. George Cocke and superintended
by S. P. Collier.[4] At the beginning of 1854 the 125
slaves were scheduled as follows: the domestic staff comprised
a butler, two waiters, four housemaids, a nurse, a laundress, a
seamstress, a dairy maid and a gardener; the field corps had
eight plowmen, ten male and twelve female hoe hands, two
wagoners and four ox drivers, with two cooks attached to its
service; the stable and pasture staff embraced a carriage driver,
a hostler, a stable boy, a shepherd, a cowherd and a hog herd;
in outdoor crafts there were two carpenters and five stone masons;
in indoor industries a miller, two blacksmiths, two shoemakers,
five women spinners and a woman weaver; and in addition
there were forty-five children, one invalid, a nurse for the
sick, and an old man and two old women hired off the place,
and finally Nancy for whom no age, value or classification is
given. The classified workers comprised none younger than sixteen
years except the stable boy of eleven, a waiter of twelve,
and perhaps some of the housemaids and spinners whose ages
are not recorded. At the other extreme there were apparently
no slaves on the plantation above sixty years old except Randal,
a stone mason, who in spite of his sixty-six years was valued
at $300, and the following who had no appraisable value: Old
Jim the shepherd, Old Maria the dairy maid, and perhaps two
of the spinners. The highest appraisal, $800, was given to Payton,

an ox driver, twenty-eight years old. The $700 class comprised
six plowmen, five field hands, the three remaining ox
drivers, both wagoners, both blacksmiths, the, carriage driver,
four stone masons, a carpenter, and Ned the twenty-eight year
old invalid whose illness cannot have been chronic. The other
working men ranged between $250 and $500 except the two
shoemakers whose rating was only $200 each. None of the
women were appraised above $400, which was the rating also of
the twelve and thirteen year old boys. The youngest children
were valued at $100 each. These ratings were all quite conservative
for that period. The fact that an ox driver overtopped all
others in appraisal suggests that the artisans were of little skill.
The masons, the carpenters and various other specialists were
doubtless impressed as field hands on occasion.

The livestock comprised twelve mules, nine work horses, a
stallion, a brood mare, four colts, six pleasure horses and "William's
team" of five head; sixteen work oxen, a beef ox, two
bulls, twenty-three cows, and twenty-six calves; 150 sheep and
115 swine. The implements included two reaping machines,
three horse rakes, two wheat drills, two straw cutters, three
wheat fans, and a corn sheller; one two-horse and four four-horse
wagons, two horse carts and four ox carts; nine one-horse
and twelve two-horse plows, six colters, six cultivators, eight
harrows, two earth scoops, and many scythes, cradles, hoes, poleaxes
and miscellaneous farm implements as well as a loom and
six spinning wheels.

The bottom lands of Belmead appear to have been cultivated
in a rotation of tobacco and corn the first year, wheat the second
and clover the third, while the uplands had longer rotations with
more frequent crops of clover and occasional interspersions of
oats. The work journal of 1854 shows how the gang dovetailed
the planting, cultivation, and harvesting of the several
crops and the general upkeep of the plantation.

On specially moist days from January to the middle of April
all hands were called to the tobacco houses to strip and prize-the
cured crop; when the ground was frozen they split and hauled
firewood and rails, built fences, hauled stone to line the ditches

or build walls and culverts, hauled wheat to the mill, tobacco and
flour to the boat landing, and guano, land plaster, barnyard manure
and straw to the fields intended for the coming tobacco crop;
and in milder dry weather they spread and plowed in these
fertilizers, prepared the tobacco seed bed by heaping and burning
brush thereon and spading it mellow, and also sowed clover
and oats in their appointed fields. In April also the potato patch
and the corn fields were prepared, and the corn planted; and
the tobacco bed was seeded at the middle of the month. In
early May the corn began to be plowed, and the soil of the tobacco
fields drawn by hoes into hills with additional manure in
their centers. From the end of May until as late as need be in
July the occurrence of every rain sent all hands to setting the
tobacco seedlings in their hills at top speed as long as the ground
stayed wet enough to give prospect of success in the process. In
the interims the corn cultivation was continued, hay was harvested
in the clover fields and the meadows, and the tobacco fields
first planted began to be scraped with hoe and plow. The latter
half of June was devoted mainly to the harvesting of small
grain with the two reaping machines and the twelve cradles; and
for the following two months the main labor force was divided
between threshing the wheat and plowing, hoeing, worming
and suckering the tobacco, while the expert Daniel was day after
day steadily topping the plants. In late August the plows began
breaking the fallow fields for wheat. Early in September
the cutting and housing of tobacco began, and continued at intervals
in good weather until the middle of October. Then the
corn was harvested and the sowing of wheat was the chief concern
until the end of November when winter plowing was
begun for the next year's tobacco. Two days in December were
devoted to the housing of ice; and Christmas week, as well as
Easter Monday and a day or two in summer and fall brought
leisure. Throughout the year the overseer inspected the negroes'
houses and yards every Sunday morning and regularly reported
them in good order.

The greatest of the tobacco planters in this period was Samuel
Hairston, whose many plantations lying in the upper Piedmont on

both sides of the Virginia-North Carolina boundary were reported
in 1854 to have slave populations aggregating some 1600
souls, and whose gardens at his homestead in Henry County,
Virginia, were likened to paradise. Of his methods of management
nothing more is known than that his overseers were systematically
superintended and that his negroes were commonly
both fed and clothed with the products of the plantations themselves.[5]

In the eastern cotton belt a notable establishment of earlier
decades was that of Governor David R. Williams, who began
operations with about a hundred slaves in Chesterfield County,
South Carolina, near the beginning of the nineteenth century and
increased their number fivefold before his death in 1830. While
each of his four plantations gave adequate yields of the staple as
well as furnishing their own full supplies of corn and pork, the
central feature and the chief source of prosperity was a great
bottom tract safeguarded from the floods of the Pee Dee by a
levee along the river front. The building of this embankment
was but one of many enterprises which Williams undertook in
the time spared from his varied political and military services.
Others were the improvement of manuring methods, the breeding
of mules, the building of public bridges, the erection and
management of a textile factory, the launching of a cottonseed
oil mill, of which his talents might have made a success even in
that early time had not his untimely death intervened. The prosperity
of Williams' main business in the face of his multifarious
diversions proves that his plantation affairs were administered
in thorough fashion. His capable wife must have supplemented
the husband and his overseers constantly and powerfully in the
conduct of the routine. The neighboring plantation of a kinsman,
Benjamin F. Williams, was likewise notable in after years
for its highly improved upland fields as well as for the excellent
specialized work of its slave craftsmen.[6]

In the fertile bottoms on the Congaree River not far above
Columbia, lay the well famed estate of Colonel Wade Hampton
which in 1846 had some sixteen hundred acres of cotton and
half as much of corn. The traveler, when reaching it after long
faring past the slackly kept fields and premises common in the
region, felt equal enthusiasm for the drainage and the fencing,
the avenues, the mansion and the mill, the stud of blooded horses,
the herd of Durham cattle, the flock of long-wooled sheep, and
the pens of Berkshire pigs.[7] Senator McDuffie's plantation in
the further uplands of the Abbeville district was likewise prosperous
though on a somewhat smaller scale. Accretions had enlarged
it from three hundred acres in 1821 to five thousand in
1847, when it had 147 slaves of all ages. Many of these were
devoted to indoor employments, and seventy were field workers
using twenty-four mules. The 750 acres in cotton commonly
yielded crops of a thousand pounds in the seed; the 325 acres in
corn gave twenty-five or thirty bushels; the 300 in oats, fifteen
bushels; and ten acres in peas, potatoes and squashes yielded
their proportionate contribution.[8]

The conduct and earnings of a cotton plantation fairly typical
among those of large scale, may be gathered from the overseer's
letters and factor's accounts relating to Retreat, which lay in
Jefferson County, Georgia. This was one of several establishments
founded by Alexander Telfair of Savannah and inherited
by his two daughters, one of whom became the wife of W. B.
Hodgson. For many years Elisha Cain was its overseer. The
first glimpse which the correspondence affords is in the fall of
1829, some years after Cain had taken charge. He then wrote
to Telfair that many of the negroes young and old had recently
been ill with fever, but most of them had recovered without a
physician's aid. He reported further that a slave named John
had run away "for no other cause than that he did not feel disposed
to be governed by the same rules and regulations that the

other negroes on the land are governed by." Shortly afterward
John returned and showed willingness to do his duty. But now
Cain encountered a new sort of trouble. He wrote Telfair in
January, 1830: "Your negroes have a disease now among them
that I am fully at a loss to know what I had best to do. Two of
them are down with the venereal disease, Die and Sary. Doctor
Jenkins has been attending Die four weeks, and very little
alteration as I can learn. It is very hard to get the truth; but
from what I can learn, Sary got it from Friday." A note appended
to this letter, presumably by Telfair, reads: "Friday is
the house servant sent to Retreat every summer. I have all the
servants examined before they leave Savannah."

In a letter of February, 1831, Cain described his winter work
and his summer plans. The teams had hauled away nearly all
the cotton crop of 205 bales; the hog killing had yielded thirteen
thousand pounds of pork, from which some of the bacon and
lard was to be sent to Telfair's town house; the cotton seed were
abundant and easily handled, but they were thought good for
fertilizing corn only; the stable and cowpen manure was embarrassingly
plentiful in view of the pressure of work for the mules
and oxen; and the encumbrance of logs and brush on the fields
intended for cotton was straining all the labor available to clear
them. The sheep, he continued, had not had many lambs; and
many of the pigs had died in spite of care and feeding; but "the
negroes have been healthy, only colds, and they have for some
time now done their work in as much peace and have been as
obedient as I could wish."

One of the women, however, Darkey by name, shortly became
a pestilent source of trouble. Cain wrote in 1833 that her termagant
outbreaks among her fellows had led him to apply a "moderate
correction," whereupon she had further terrorized her
housemates by threats of poison. Cain could then only unbosom
himself to Telfair: "I will give you a full history of my belief
of Darkey, to wit: I believe her disposition as to temper is as
bad as any in the whole world. I believe she is as unfaithful as
any I have ever been acquainted with. In every respect I believe
she has been more injury to you in the place where she is

than two such negroes would sell for. . . . I have tryed and
done all I could to get on with her, hopeing that she would mend;
but I have been disappointed in every instant. I can not hope
for the better any longer."

The factor's record becomes available from 1834, with the
death of Telfair. The seventy-six pair of shoes entered that
year tells roughly the number of working hands, and the ninety-six
pair in 1842 suggests the rate of increase. Meanwhile the
cotton output rose from 166 bales of about three hundred pounds
in 1834 to 407 bales of four hundred pounds in the fine weather
of 1841. In 1836 an autumn report from Cain is available, dated
November 20. Sickness among the negroes for six weeks past
had kept eight or ten of them in their beds; the resort to Petit
Gulf seed had substantially increased the cotton yield; and the
fields were now white with a crop in danger of ruin from storms.
"My hands," he said, "have picked well when they were able,
and some of them appear to have a kind of pride in making a
good crop." A gin of sixty saws newly installed had proved too
heavy for the old driving apparatus, but it was now in operation
with shifts of four mules instead of two as formerly. This
pressure, in addition to the hauling of cotton to market had
postponed the gathering of the corn crop. The corn would prove
adequate for the plantation's need, and the fodder was plentiful,
but the oats had been ruined by the blast. The winter cloth supply
had been spun and woven, as usual, on the place; but Cain
now advised that the cotton warp for the jeans in future be
bought. "The spinning business on this plantation," said he,
"is very ungaining. In the present arrangement there is eight
hands regular employed in spinning and weaving, four of which
spin warpe, and it could be bought at the factory at 120 dollars
annually. Besides, it takes 400 pounds of cotton each year, leaveing
60 dollars only to the four hands who spin warp. . . . These
hands are not old negroes, not all of them. Two of Nanny's
daughters, or three I may say, are all able hands . . . and these
make neither corn nor meat. Take out $20 to pay their borde,
and it leaves them in debt. I give them their task to spin, and they

say they cannot do more. That is, they have what is jenerly given
as a task."

In 1840 Cain raised one of the slaves to the rank of driver,
whereupon several of the men ran away in protest, and Cain was
impelled to defend his policy in a letter to Mary Telfair, explaining
that the new functionary had not been appointed "to lay off
tasks and use the whip." The increase of the laborers and the
spread of the fields, he said, often required the working of three
squads, the plowmen, the grown hoe hands, and the younger
hoe hands. "These separate classes are frequently separate a
considerable distance from each other, and so soon as I am absent
from either they are subject to quarrel and fight, or to idle
time, or beat and abuse the mules; and when called to account
each negro present when the misconduct took place will deny all
about the same. I therefore thought, and yet believe, that for
the good order of the plantation and faithful performance of
their duty, it was proper to have some faithful and trusty hand
whose duty it should be to report to me those in fault, and that
is the only dread they have of John, for they know he is not
authorized to beat them. You mention in your letter that you
do not wish your negroes treated with severity. I have ever
thought my fault on the side of lenity; if they were treated severe
as many are, I should not be their overseer on any consideration."
In the same letter Cain mentioned that the pork made
on the place the preceding year had yielded eleven monthly allowances
to the negroes at the rate of 1050 pounds per month,
and that the deficit for the twelfth month had been filled as usual
by a shipment from Savannah.

From 407 bales in 1841 the cotton output fell rapidly, perhaps
because of restriction prompted by the low prices, to 198 bales in
1844. Then it rose to the maximum of 438 bales in 1848. Soon
afterwards Cain's long service ended, and after two years during
which I. Livingston was in charge, I. N. Bethea was engaged
and retained for the rest of the ante-bellum period. The cotton
crops in the 'fifties did not commonly exceed three hundred bales
of a weight increasing to 450 pounds, but they were supplemented
to some extent by the production of wheat and rye for

market. The overseer's wages were sometimes as low as $600,
but were generally $1000 a year. In the expense accounts the
annual charges for shoes, blankets and oznaburgs were no more
regular than the items of "cotton money for the people." These
sums, averaging about a hundred dollars a year, were distributed
among the slaves in payment for the little crops of nankeen cotton
which they cultivated in spare time on plots assigned to the
several families. Other expense items mentioned salt, sugar,
bacon, molasses, tobacco, wool and cotton cards, loom sleighs,
mules and machinery. Still others dealt with drugs and doctor's
bills. In 1837, for example, Dr. Jenkins was paid $90 for
attendance on Priscilla. In some years the physician's payment
was a round hundred dollars, indicating services on contract
In May, 1851, there are debits of $16.16 for a constable's reward,
a jail fee and a railroad fare, and of $1.30 for the purchase of a
pair of handcuffs, two padlocks and a trace chain. These constitute
the financial record of a runaway's recapture.

From 1834 to 1841 the gross earnings on Retreat ranged between
eight and fifteen thousand dollars, of which from seven to
twelve thousand each year was available for division between
the owners. The gross then fell rapidly to $4000 in 1844, of
which more than half was consumed in expenses. It then rose
as rapidly to its maximum of $21,300 in 1847, when more than
half of it again was devoted to current expenses and betterments.
Thereafter the range of the gross was between $8000 and $17,000
except for a single year of crop failure, 1856, when the 109
bales brought $5750. During the 'fifties the current expenses
ranged usually between six and ten thousand dollars, as compared
with about one third as much in the 'thirties. This is explained
partly by the resolution of the owners to improve the
fields, now grown old, and to increase the equipment. For the
crop of 1856, for example, purchases were made of forty tons
of Peruvian guano at $56 per ton, and nineteen tons of Mexican
guano, at $25 a ton. In the following years lime, salt and dried
blood were included in the fertilizer purchases. At length Hodgson
himself gave over his travels and his ethnological studies to
take personal charge on Retreat. He wrote in June, 1859, to his

friend Senator Hammond, of whom we have seen something in
the preceding chapter, that he had seriously engaged in "high
farming," and was spreading huge quantities of fertilizers. He
continued: "My portable steam engine is the delicia domini and
of overseer too. It follows the reapers beautifully in a field of
wheat, 130 acres, and then in the rye fields. In August it will
be backed up to the gin house and emancipate from slavery
eighteen mules and four little nigger drivers."[9]

The factor's books for this plantation continue their records
into the war time. From the crop of 1861 nothing appears to
have been sold but a single bale of cotton, and the year's deficit
was $6,721. The proceeds from the harvests of 1862 were $500
from nineteen bales of cotton, and some $10,000 from fodder,
hay, peanuts and corn. The still more diversified market produce
of 1863 comprised also wheat, which was impressed by the
Confederate government, syrup, cowpeas, lard, hams and vinegar.
The proceeds were $17,000 and the expenses about $9000,
including the overseer's wages at $1300 and the purchase of 350
bushels of peanuts from the slaves at $1.50 per bushel. The reckonings
in the war period were made of course in the rapidly depreciating
Confederate currency. The stoppage of the record
in 1864 was doubtless a consequence of Sherman's march
through Georgia.[10]

In the western cotton belt the plantations were much like those
of the eastern, except that the more uniform fertility often permitted
the fields to lie in solid expanses instead of being sprawled
and broken by waste lands as in the Piedmont The scale of operations
tended accordingly to be larger. One of the greatest
proprietors in that region, unless his display were far out of proportion
to his wealth, was Joseph A. S. Acklen whose group of
plantations was clustered near the junction of the Red and Mississippi
Rivers. In 1859 he began to build a country house on
the style of a Gothic castle, with a great central hall and fifty

rooms exclusive of baths and closets.[11] The building was expected
to cost $150,000, and the furnishings $125,000 more.
Acklen's rules for the conduct of his plantations will be discussed
in another connection;[12] but no description of his estate or his
actual operations is available.

Olmsted described in detail a plantation in the neighborhood
of Natchez. Its thirteen or fourteen hundred acres of cotton,
corn and incidental crops were tilled by a plow gang of thirty
'and a hoe gang of thirty-seven, furnished by a total of 135 slaves
on the place. A driver cracked a whip among the hoe hands,
occasionally playing it lightly upon the shoulders of one or another
whom he thought would be stimulated by the suggestion,
"There was a nursery for sucklings at the quarters, and twenty
women at this time left their work four times a day, for half an
hour, to nurse the young ones, and whom the overseer counted as
half hands-that is, expected to do half an ordinary day's
work." At half past nine every night the hoe and plow foremen,
serving alternately, sounded curfew on a horn, and half an
hour afterward visited each cabin to see that the households were
at rest and the fires safely banked. The food allowance was a
peck of corn and four pounds of pork weekly. Each family,
furthermore, had its garden, fowl house and pigsty; every
Christmas the master distributed among them coffee, molasses,
tobacco, calico and "Sunday tricks" to the value of from a thousand
to fifteen hundred dollars; and every man might rive boards
in the swamp on Sundays to buy more supplies, or hunt and fish
in leisure times to vary his family's fare. Saturday afternoon
was also free from the routine. Occasionally a slave would run
away, but he was retaken sooner or later, sometimes by the aid
of dogs. A persistent runaway was disposed of by sale.[13]

Another estate in the same district which Olmsted observed
more cursorily, comprised four adjoining plantations, each with
its own stables and quarter, each employing more than a hundred
slaves under a separate overseer, and all directed by a steward

whom the traveler described as cultured, poetic and delightful.
An observation that women were at some of the plows
prompted Olmsted to remark that throughout the Southwest the
slaves were worked harder as a rule than in the easterly and
northerly slaveholding states. On the other hand he noted: "In
the main the negroes appeared to be well cared for and abundantly
supplied with the necessaries of vigorous physical existence.
A large part of them lived in commodious and well built
cottages, with broad galleries in front, so that each family of
five had two rooms on the lower floor and a large loft. The remainder
lived in log huts, small and mean in appearance;[14] but
those of their overseers were little better, and preparations were
being made to replace all of these by neat boarded cottages."

In the sugar district Estwick Evans when on his "pedestrious
tour" in 1817 found the shores of the Mississippi from a hundred
miles above New Orleans to twenty miles below the city in
a high state of cultivation. "The plantations within these limits,"
he said, "are superb beyond description. . . . The dwelling
houses of the planters are not inferior to any in the United
States, either with respect to size, architecture, or the manner in
which they are furnished. The gardens and yards contiguous to
them are formed and decorated with much taste. The cotton,
sugar and ware houses are very large, and the buildings for the
slaves are well finished. The latter buildings are in some cases
forty or fifty in number, and each of them will accommodate ten
or twelve persons. . . . The planters here derive immense profits
from the cultivation of their estates.[15] The yearly income from
them is from twenty thousand to thirty thousand dollars."

Gross proceeds running into the tens of thousands of dollars
were indeed fairly common then and afterward among Louisiana
sugar planters, for the conditions of their industry conduced
strongly to a largeness of plantation scale. Had railroad facilities
been abundant a multitude of small cultivators might have
shipped their cane to central mills for manufacture, but as things

were the weight and the perishableness of the cane made milling
within the reach of easy cartage imperative. It was inexpedient
even for two or more adjacent estates to establish a joint mill,
for the imminence of frost in the harvest season would make
wrangles over the questions of precedence in the grinding almost
inevitable. As a rule, therefore, every unit in cane culture was
also a unit in sugar manufacture. Exceptions were confined to
the scattering instances where some small farm lay alongside a
plantation which had a mill of excess capacity available for custom
grinding on slack days.

The type of plantation organization in the sugar bowl was
much like that which has been previously described for Jamaica.
Mules were used as draught animals instead of oxen, however,
on account of their greater strength and speed, and all the seeding
and most of the cultivation was done with deep-running plows.
Steam was used increasingly as years passed for driving the
mills, railways were laid on some of the greater estates for hauling
the cane, more suitable varieties of cane were introduced,
guano was imported soon after its discovery to make the rich
fields yet more fertile, and each new invention of improved mill
apparatus was readily adopted for the sake of reducing expenses.
In consequence the acreage cultivated per hand came to be several
times greater than that which had prevailed in Jamaica's
heyday. But the brevity of the growing season kept the saccharine
content of the canes below that in the tropics, and together
with the mounting price of labor made prosperity depend
in some degree upon protective tariffs. The dearth of land
available kept the sugar output well below the domestic demand,
though the molasses market was sometimes glutted.

A typical prosperous estate of which a description and a diary
are extant[16] was that owned by Valcour Aime, lying on the right
bank of the Mississippi about sixty miles above New Orleans.
Of the 15,000 acres which it comprised in 1852, 800 were in cane,
300 in corn, 150 in crops belonging to the slaves, and most of the
rest in swampy forest from which two or three thousand cords

of wood were cut each year as fuel for the sugar mill and the
boiling house. The slaves that year numbered 215 of all ages,
half of them field hands,[17] and the mules 64. The negroes were
well housed, clothed and fed; the hospital and the nursery were
capacious, and the stables likewise. The mill was driven by an
eighty-horse-power steam engine, and the vacuum pans and the
centrifugals were of the latest types. The fields were elaborately
ditched, well manured, and excellently tended. The land was valued
at $360,000, the buildings at $100,000, the machinery at $60,000,
the slaves at $170,000, and the livestock at $11,000; total,
$701,000. The crop of 1852, comprising 1,300,000 pounds of
white centrifugal sugar at 6 cents and 60,000 gallons of syrup at
36 cents, yielded a gross return of almost $100,000. The expenses
included 4,629 barrels of coal from up the river, in addition
to the outlay for wages and miscellaneous supplies.

In the routine of work, each January was devoted mainly to
planting fresh canes in the fields from which the stubble canes or
second rattoons had recently been harvested. February and
March gave an interval for cutting cordwood, cleaning ditches,
and such other incidentals as the building and repair of the plantation's
railroad. Warm weather then brought the corn planting
and cane and corn cultivation. In August the laying by of
the crops gave time for incidentals again. Corn and hay were
now harvested, the roads and premises put in order, the cordwood
hauled from the swamp, the coal unladen from the barges,
and all things made ready for the rush of the grinding season
which began in late October. In the first phase of harvesting the
main gang cut and stripped the canes, the carters and the railroad
crew hauled them to the mill, and double shifts there kept
up the grinding and boiling by day and by night. As long as the
weather continued temperate the mill set the pace for the cutters.
But when frost grew imminent every hand who could wield a
knife was sent to the fields to cut the still standing stalks and secure

them against freezing. For the first few days of this phase,
the stalks as fast as cut were laid, in their leaves, in great mats
with the tops turned south to prevent the entrance of north winds,
with the leaves of each layer covering the butts of that below, and
with a blanket of earth over the last butts in the mat. Here these
canes usually stayed until January when they were stripped and
strewn in the furrows of the newly plowed "stubble" field as
the seed of a new crop. After enough seed cane were "matlayed,"
the rest of the cut was merely laid lengthwise in the adjacent
furrows to await cartage to the mill.[18] In the last phase
of the harvest, which followed this work of the greatest emergency,
these "windrowed" canes were stripped and hauled, with
the mill setting the pace again, until the grinding was ended, generally
in December.

Another typical sugar estate was that of Dr. John P. R. Stone,
comprising the two neighboring though not adjacent plantations
called Evergreen and Residence, on the right bank of the Mississippi
in Iberville Parish. The proprietor's diary is much like
Aime's as regards the major crop routine but is fuller in its mention
of minor operations. These included the mending and
heightening of the levee in spring, the cutting of staves, the shaving
of hoops and the making of hogsheads in summer, and, in
their fitting interims, the making of bricks, the sawing of lumber,
enlarging old buildings, erecting new ones, whitewashing,
ditching, pulling fodder, cutting hay, and planting and harvesting
corn, sweet potatoes, pumpkins, peas and turnips. There is occasional
remark upon the health of the slaves, usually in the way
of rejoicing at its excellence. Apparently no outside help was
employed except for an Irish carpenter during the construction
of a sugar house on Evergreen in 1850.[19] The slaves on Evergreen
in 1850 numbered 44 between the ages of 15 and 60 years
and 26 children; on Residence, 25 between 15 and 65 years and

6 children.[20] The joint crop in 1850, ground in the Residence
mill, amounted to 312 hogsheads of brown sugar and sold for
4 3/4 to 5 cents a pound; that of the phenomenal year 1853, when
the Evergreen mill was also in commission, reached 520 hogsheads
on that plantation and 179 on Residence, but brought only
3 cents a pound. These prices were much lower than those of
white sugar at the time; but as Valcour Aime found occasion to
remark, the refining reduced the weight of the product nearly as
much as it heightened the price, so that the chief advantage of
the centrifugals lay in the speed of their process.

All of the characteristic work in the sugar plantation routine
called mainly for able-bodied laborers. Children were less used
than in tobacco and cotton production, and the men and women,
like the mules, tended to be of sturdier physique. This was the
result partly of selection, partly of the vigorous exertion required.

Among the fourteen hundred and odd sugar plantations of
this period, the average one had almost a hundred slaves of all
ages, and produced average crops of nearly three hundred hogsheads
or a hundred and fifty tons. Most of the Anglo-Americans
among the planters lived about Baton Rouge and on the Red
River, where they or their fathers had settled with an initial purpose
of growing cotton. Their fellows who acquired estates in
the Creole parishes were perhaps as often as otherwise men who
had been merchants and not planters in earlier life. One of
these had removed from New York in the eighteenth century and
had thriven in miscellaneous trade at Pensacola and on the Mississippi.
In 1821 he bought for $140,000 a plantation and its
complement of slaves on Bayou Lafourche, and he afterward acquired
a second one in Plaquemines Parish. In the conduct of
his plantation business he shrewdly bought blankets by the bale in
Philadelphia, and he enlarged his gang by commissioning agents
to buy negroes in Virginia and Maryland. The nature of the
instructions he gave may be gathered from the results, for there
duly arrived in several parcels between 1828 and 1832, fully covered

by marine insurance for the coastwise voyage, fifty slaves,
male and female, virtually all of whom ranged between the ages
of ten and twenty-five years.[21] This planter prospered, and his
children after him; and while he may have had a rugged nature,
his descendants to-day are among the gentlest of Louisianians,
Another was Duncan F. Kenner, who was long a slave trader
with headquarters at New Orleans before he became a planter
in Ascension Parish on a rapidly increasing scale. His crop advanced
from 580 hogsheads in 1849 to 1,370 hogsheads in 1853
and 2,002 hogsheads in 1858 when he was operating two mills,
one equipped with vacuum pans and the other with Rillieux apparatus.[22]
A third example was John Burnside, who emigrated
from the North of Ireland in his youth rose rapidly from grocery
clerk in upland Virginia to millionaire merchant in New Orleans,
and then in the fifties turned his talents to sugar growing.
He bought the three contiguous plantations of Col. J. S.
Preston lying opposite Donaldsonville, and soon added a fourth
one to the group. In 1858 his aggregate crop was 3,701 hogsheads;
and in 1861 his fields were described by William H. Russell
as exhibiting six thousand acres of cane in an unbroken
tract. By employing squads of immigrant Irishmen for ditching
and other severe work he kept his literally precious negroes, well
housed and fed, in fit condition for effective routine under his
well selected staff of overseers.[23] Even after the war Burnside
kept on acquiring plantations, and with free negro labor kept on
making large sugar crops. At the end of his long life, spent frugally
as a bachelor and somewhat of a recluse, he was doubtless
by far the richest man in all the South. The number of planters
who had been merchants and the frequency of partnerships and
corporations operating sugar estates, as well as the magnitude of
scale characteristic of the industry, suggest that methods of a
strictly business kind were more common in sugar production
than in that of cotton or tobacco. Domesticity and paternalism
were nevertheless by no means alien to the sugar régime.

Virtually all of the tobacco, short staple cotton and sugar plantations
were conducted on the gang system. The task system, on
the other hand, was instituted on the rice coast, where the drainage
ditches checkering the fields into half or quarter acre plots
offered convenient units of performance in the successive processes.
The chief advantage of the task system lay in the ease
with which it permitted a planter or an overseer to delegate much
of his routine function to a driver. This official each morning
would assign to each field hand his or her individual plot, and
spend the rest of the day in seeing to the performance of the
work. At evening or next day the master could inspect the results
and thereby keep a check upon both the driver and the
squad. Each slave when his day's task was completed had at his
own disposal such time as might remain. The driver commonly
gave every full hand an equal area to be worked in the same way,
and discriminated among them only in so far as varying conditions
from plot to plot would permit the assignment of the
stronger and swifter workmen to tracts where the work required
was greater, and the others to plots where the labor was less.
Fractional hands were given fractional tasks, or were combined
into full hands for full tasks. Thus a woman rated at three
quarters might be helped by her own one quarter child, or two
half-hand youths might work a full plot jointly. The system
gave some stimulus to speed of work, at least from time to time,
by its promise of afternoon leisure in reward. But for this prospect
to be effective the tasks had to be so limited that every laborer
might have the hope of an hour or two's release as the
fruit of diligence. The performance of every hand tended accordingly
to be standardized at the customary accomplishment of
the weakest and slowest members of the group. This tendency,
however, was almost equally strong in the gang system also.

The task acre was commonly not a square of 210 feet, but a
rectangle 300 feet long and 150 feet broad, divided into square
halves and rectangular quarters, and further divisible into "compasses"
five feet wide and 150 feet long, making one sixtieth of

an acre. The standard tasks for full hands in rice culture were
scheduled in 1843 as follows: plowing with two oxen, with
the animals changed at noon, one acre; breaking stiff land with
the hoe and turning the stubble under, ten compasses; breaking
such land with the stubble burnt off, or breaking lighter land, a
quarter acre or slightly more; mashing the clods to level the field,
from a quarter to half an acre; trenching the drills, if on well prepared
land, three quarters of an acre; sowing rice, from three to
four half-acres; covering the drills, three quarters; the first hoeing,
half an acre, or slightly less if the ground were lumpy and
the drills hard to clear; second hoeing, half an acre, or slightly
less or more according to the density of the grass; third hoeing
with hand picking of the grass from the drills, twenty compasses;
fourth hoeing, half an acre; reaping with the sickle, three quarters,
or much less if the ground were new and cumbered or if
the stalks were tangled; and threshing with the flail, six hundred
sheaves for the men, five hundred for the women.[24] Much of
the incidental work was also done by tasks, such as ditching, cutting
cordwood, squaring timber, splitting rails, drawing staves
and hoop poles, and making barrels. The scale of the crop was
commonly five acres of rice to each full hand, together with about
half as much in provision crops for home consumption.

Under the task system, Olmsted wrote: "most of the slaves
work rapidly and well. . . . Custom has settled the extent of the
task, and it is difficult to increase it. The driver who marks it
out has to remain on the ground until it is finished, and has no
interest in over-measuring it; and if it should be systematically
increased very much there is the danger of a general stampede
to the 'swamp'—a danger a slave can always hold before his master's
cupidity. . . . It is the driver's duty to make the tasked
hands do their work well.[25] If in their haste to finish it they
neglect to do it properly he 'sets them back,' so that carelessness
will hinder more than it hastens the completion of their tasks."
But Olmsted's view was for once rose colored. A planter who
lived in the regime wrote: "The whole task system. . . is one

that I most unreservedly disapprove of, because it promotes idleness,
and that is the parent of mischief."[26] Again the truth lies
in the middle ground. The virtue or vice of the system, as with
the gang alternative, depended upon its use by a diligent master
or its abuse by an excessive delegation of responsibility.

That the tide when taken at the flood on the rice coast as elsewhere
would lead to fortune is shown by the career of the greatest
of all rice planters, Nathaniel Heyward. At the time of his
birth, in 1766, his father was a planter on an inland swamp near
Port Royal. Nathaniel himself after establishing a small plantation
in his early manhood married Harriett Manigault, an
heiress with some fifty thousand dollars. With this, when both
lands and slaves were cheap, Heyward bought a tide-land tract
and erected four plantations thereon, and soon had enough accrued
earnings to buy the several inland plantations of the Gibbes
brothers, who had fallen into debt from luxurious living. With
the proceeds of his large crops at high prices during the great
wars in Europe, he bought more slaves year after year, preferably
fresh Africans as long as that cheap supply remained available,
and he bought more land when occasion offered. Joseph
Manigault wrote of him in 1806: "Mr. Heyward has lately
made another purchase of land, consisting of 300 acres of tide
swamp, joining one of his Combahee plantations and belonging
to the estate of Mrs. Bell. I believe he has made a good bargain.
It is uncleared and will cost him not quite £20 per acre.
I have very little doubt that he will be in a few years, if he lives,
the richest, as he is the best planter in the state. The Cooper
River lands give him many a long ride." Heyward was venturesome
in large things, conservative in small. He long continued
to have his crops threshed by hand, saying that if it were done
by machines his darkies would have no winter work; but when
eventually he instituted mechanical threshers, no one could discern
an increase of leisure. In the matter of pounding mills
likewise, he clung for many years to those driven by the tides
and operating slowly and crudely; but at length he built two new
ones driven by steam and so novel and complete in their apparatus

as to be the marvels of the countryside. He necessarily
depended much upon overseers; but his own frequent visits of inspection
and the assistance rendered by his sons kept the scattered
establishments in an efficient routine. The natural increase
of his slaves was reckoned by him to have ranged generally between
one and five per cent annually, though in one year it rose
to seven per cent. At his death in 1851 he owned fourteen rice
plantations with fields ranging from seventy to six hundred acres
in each, and comprising in all 4,390 acres in cultivation. He had
also a cotton plantation, much pine land and a sawmill, nine residences
in Charleston, appraised with their furniture at $180,000;
securities and cash to the amount of $200,000; $20,000
worth of horses, mules and cattle; $15,000 worth of plate; and
$3000 worth of old wine. His slaves, numbering 2,087 and appraised
at an average of $550, made up the greater part of his
two million dollar estate. His heirs continued his policy. In
1855, for example, they bought a Savannah River plantation called
Fife, containing 500 acres of prime rice land at $150 per acre,
together with its equipment and 120 slaves, at a gross price of
$135,600.[27]

The history of the estate of James Heyward, Nathaniel's
brother, was in striking contrast with this. When on a tour in
Ireland he met and married an actress, who at his death in 1796
inherited his plantation and 214 slaves. Two suitors for the
widow's hand promptly appeared in Alexander Baring, afterwards
Lord Ashburton, and Charles Baring, his cousin. Mrs.
Heyward married the latter, who increased the estate to seven
or eight hundred acres in rice, yielding crops worth from twelve
to thirty thousand dollars. But instead of superintending its
work in person Baring bought a large tract in the North Carolina
mountains, built a house there, and carried thither some
fifty slaves for his service. After squandering the income for
nearly fifty years, he sold off part of the slaves and mortgaged
the land; and when the plantation was finally surrendered in settlement

of Baring's debts, it fell into Nathaniel Heyward's possession.[28]

Another case of absentee neglect, made notorious through
Fanny Kemble's Journal, was the group of rice and sea-island
cotton plantations founded by Senator Pierce Butler on and
about Butler's Island near the mouth of the Altamaha Riven
When his two grandsons inherited the estate, they used it as a
source of revenue but not as a home. One of these was Pierce
Butler the younger, who lived in Philadelphia. When Fanny
Kemble, with fame preceding her, came to America in 1832, he
became infatuated, followed her troupe from city to city, and
married her in 1834. The marriage was a mistake. The slaveholder's
wife left the stage for the time being, but retained a
militant English abolitionism. When in December, 1838, she
and her husband were about to go South for a winter on the
plantations, she registered her horror of slavery in advance, and
resolved to keep a journal of her experiences and observations.
The resulting record is gloomy enough. The swarms of negroes
were stupid and slovenly, the cabins and hospitals filthy,
the women overdriven, the overseer callous, the master indifferent,
and the new mistress herself, repudiating the title, was more
irritable and meddlesome than helpful.[29] The short sojourn
was long enough. A few years afterward the ill-mated pair
were divorced and Fanny Kemble resumed her own name and
career. Butler did not mend his ways. In 1859 his half of the
slaves, 429 in number, were sold at auction in Savannah to pay
his debts.

A pleasanter picture is afforded by the largest single unit in
rice culture of which an account is available. This was the plantation
of William Aiken, at one time governor of South Carolina,
occupying Jehossee Island near the mouth of the Edisto
River. It was described in 1850 by Solon Robinson, an Iowa
farmer then on tour as correspondent for the American Agriculturist.
The two or three hundred acres of firm land above

tide comprised the homestead, the negro quarter, the stables, the
stock yard, the threshing mill and part of the provision fields
Of the land which could be flooded with the tide, about fifteen
hundred acres were diked and drained. About two-thirds of
this appears to have been cropped in rice each year, and the rest
in corn, oats and sweet potatoes. The steam-driven threshing
apparatus was described as highly efficient. The sheaves were
brought on the heads of the negroes from the great smooth stack
yard, and opened in a shed where the scattered grain might be
saved. A mechanical carrier led thence to the threshing machines
on the second floor, whence the grain descended through
a winnowing fan. The pounding mill, driven by the tide, was
a half mile distant at the wharf, whence a schooner belonging to
the plantation carried the hulled and polished rice in thirty-ton
cargoes to Charleston. The average product per acre was about
forty-five bushels in the husk, each bushel yielding some-thirty
pounds of cleaned rice, worth about three cents a pound. The
provision fields commonly fed the force of slaves and mules; and
the slave families had their own gardens and poultry to supplement
their fare. The rice crops generally yielded some twenty-five
thousand dollars in gross proceeds, while the expenses, including
the two-thousand-dollar salary of the overseer, commonly
amounted to some ten thousand dollars. During the summer
absence of the master, the overseer was the only white man
on the place. The engineers, smiths, carpenters and sailors were
all black, "The number of negroes upon the place," wrote Robinson,
"is just about 700, occupying 84 double frame houses, each
containing two tenements of three rooms to a family besides the
cockloft. . . . There are two common hospitals and a 'lying-in
hospital,' and a very neat, commodious church, which is well
filled every Sabbath. . . . Now the owner of all this property
lives in a very humble cottage, embowered in dense shrubbery
and making no show. . . . He and his family are as plain and
unostentatious in their manners as the house they live in. . . .
Nearly all the land has been reclaimed and the buildings, except
the house, erected new within the twenty years that Governor
Aiken has owned the island. I fully believe that he is more
concerned to make his people comfortable and happy than he is
to make money."[30] When the present writer visited Jehossee in
the harvest season sixty years after Robinson, the fields were
dotted with reapers, wage earners now instead of slaves, bat still
using sickles on half-acre tasks; and the stack yard was aswarm
with sable men and women carrying sheaves on their heads and
chattering as of old in a dialect which a stranger can hardly understand.
The ante-bellum hospital and many of the cabins in
their far-thrown quadruple row were still standing. The site of the
residence, however, was marked only by desolate chimneys, a live-oak
grove and a detached billiard room, once elegant but now
ruinous, the one indulgence which this planter permitted himself.

The ubiquitous Olmsted chose for description two rice plantations
operated as one, which he inspected in company with the
owner, whom he calls "Mr. X." Frame cabins at intervals of
three hundred feet constituted the quarters; the exteriors were
whitewashed, the interiors lathed and plastered, and each family
had three rooms and a loft, as well as a chicken yard and pigsty
not far away. "Inside, the cabins appeared dirty and disordered,
which was rather a pleasant indication that their home
life was not much interfered with, though I found certain police
regulations enforced." Olmsted was in a mellow mood that day.
At the nursery "a number of girls eight or ten years old were
occupied in holding and tending the youngest infants. Those a
little older—the crawlers-were in the pen, and those big enough
to toddle were playing on the steps or before the house. Some
of these, with two or three bigger ones, were singing and dancing
about a fire they had made on the ground. . . . The nurse
was a kind-looking old negro woman. . . . I watched for half
an hour, and in all that time not a baby of them began to cry;
nor have I ever heard one, at two or three other plantation nurseries
which I have visited." The chief slave functionary was
a "gentlemanly-mannered mulatto who . . . carried by a strap
at his waist a very large bunch of keys and had charge of all the
stores of provisions, tools and materials on the plantations, as

well as of their produce before it was shipped to market. He
weighed and measured out all the rations of the slaves and the
cattle. . . . In all these departments his authority was superior
to that of the overseer; . . . and Mr. X. said he would trust him
with much more than he would any overseer he had ever known."
The master explained that this man and the butler, his brother,
having been reared with the white children, had received special
training to promote their sense of dignity and responsibility.
The brothers, Olmsted further observed, rode their own horses
the following Sunday to attend the same church as their master,
and one of them slipped a coin into the hand of the boy who had
been holding his mount. The field hands worked by tasks under
their drivers. "I saw one or two leaving the field soon after one
o'clock, several about two; and between three and four I met a
dozen men and women coming home to their cabins, having finished
their day's work." As to punishment, Olmsted asked how
often it was necessary. The master replied: "'Sometimes perhaps
not once for two or three weeks; then it will seem as if the
devil had gotten into them all and there is a good deal of it.'"
As to matings: "While watching the negroes in the field, Mr.
X. addressed a girl who was vigorously plying a hoe near us:
Is that Lucy?—Ah, Lucy, what's this I hear about you?' The
girl simpered, but did not answer or discontinue her work.
'What is this I hear about you and Sam, eh?' The girl grinned
and still hoeing away with all her might whispered 'Yes, sir.'
'Sam came to see me this morning.' 'If master pleases.' 'Very
well; you may come up to the house Saturday night, and your
mistress will have something for you.'"[31] We may hope that
the pair whose prospective marriage was thus endorsed with the
promise of a bridal gift lived happily ever after.

The most detailed record of rice operations available is that
made by Charles Manigault from the time of his purchase in
1833 of "Gowrie," on the Savannah River, tweleve miles above the
city of Savannah.[32] The plantation then had 220 acres in rice

fields, 80 acres unreclaimed, a good pounding mill, and 50 slaves.
The price of $40,000 was analyzed by Manigault as comprising
$7500 for the mill, $70 per acre for the cleared, and $37 for the
uncleared, and an average of $300 for the slaves. His maintenance
expense per hand he itemized at a weekly peck of corn,
$13 a year; summer and winter clothes, $7; shoes, $1; meat at
times, salt, molasses and medical attention, not estimated. In
reward for good service, however, Manigault usually issued
broken rice worth $2.50 per bushel, instead of corn worth $1.
Including the overseer's wages the current expense for the plantation
for the first six years averaged about $2000 annually.
Meanwhile the output increased from 200 barrels of rice in 1833
to 578 in 1838. The crop in the latter year was particularly
notable, both in its yield of three barrels per acre, or 16 1/2 barrels
per working hand, and its price of four cents per pound of $24
per barrel. The net proceeds of the one crop covered the purchase
in 1839 of two families of slaves, comprising sixteen persons,
mostly in or approaching their prime, 'at a price of $640
each.

Manigault and his family were generally absent every summer
and sometimes in winter, at Charleston or in Europe, and once
as far away as China. His methods of administration may be
gathered from his letters, contracts and memoranda. In January,
1848, he wrote from Naples to I. F. Cooper whom his factor
had employed at $250 a year as a new overseer on Gowrie:
"My negroes have the reputation of being orderly and well disposed;
but like all negroes they are up to anything if not watched
and attended to. I expect the kindest treatment of them from
you, for this has always been a principal thing with me. I never
suffer them to work off the place, or exchange work with any
plantation. . . . It has always been my plan to give out allowance
to my negroes on Sunday in preference to any other day,
because this has much influence in keeping them at home that
day, whereas if they received allowance on Saturday for instance
some of them would be off with it that same evening to
the shops to trade, and perhaps would not get back until Monday

morning. I allow no strange negro to take a wife on my
place, and none of mine to keep a boat.[33]

A few years after this, Manigault bought an adjoining plantation,
"East Hermitage," and consolidated it with Gowrie, thereby
increasing his rice fields to 500 acres and his slaves to about 90
of all ages. His draught animals appear to have comprised
merely five or six mules. A new overseer, employed in 1853 at
wages of $500 together with corn and rice for his table and the
services of a cook and a waiting boy, was bound by a contract
stipulating the duties described in the letter to Cooper above
quoted, along with a few additional items. He was, for example,
to procure a book of medical instructions and a supply of the
few requisite "plantation medicines" to be issued to the nurses
with directions as needed. In case of serious injury to a slave,
however, the sufferer was to be laid upon a door and sent by the
plantation boat to Dr. Bullock's hospital in Savannah. Except
when the work was very pressing the slaves were to be sent home
for the rest of the day upon the occurrence of heavy rains in the
afternoon, for Manigault had found by experience "that always
after a complete wetting, particularly in cold rainy weather in
winter or spring, one or more of them are made sick and lie up,
and at times serious illness ensues."[34]

In 1852 and again in 1854 storms and freshets heavily injured
Manigault's crops, and cholera decimated his slaves. In 1855
the fields were in bad condition because of volunteer rice, and the
overseer was dying of consumption. The slaves, however, were
in excellent health, and the crop, while small, brought high prices
because of the Crimean war. In 1856 a new overseer named
Venters handled the flooding inexpertly and made but half a
crop, yielding $12,660 in gross proceeds. For the next year
"Venters was retained, on the maxim "never change an overseer
if you can help it," and nineteen slaves were bought for $11,850
to fill the gaps made by the cholera. Furthermore a tract of pine
forest was bought to afford summer quarters for the negro children,
who did not thrive on the malarial plantation, and to provide

a place of isolation for cholera cases. In 1857 Venters
made a somewhat better crop, but as Manigault learned and
wrote at the end of the year, "elated by a strong and very false
religious feeling, he began to injure the plantation a vast deal,
placing himself on a par with the negroes by even joining in with
them at their prayer meetings, breaking down long established
discipline which in every case is so difficult to preserve, favoring
and siding in any difficulty with the people against the drivers,
besides causing numerous grievances." The successor of
the eccentric Venters in his turn proved grossly neglectful; and it
was not until the spring of 1859 that a reliable overseer was
found in William Capers, at a salary of $1000. Even then the
year's experience was such that at its end Manigault recorded the
sage conclusion: "The truth is, on a plantation, to attend to
things properly it requires both master and overseer."

The affairs of another estate in the Savannah neighborhood,
"Sabine Fields," belonging to the Alexander Telfair estate,
may be gleaned from its income and expense accounts. The
purchases of shoes indicate a working force of about thirty
hands. The purchases of woolen clothing and waterproof hats
tell of adequate provision against inclement weather; but the
scale of the doctor's bills suggest either epidemics or serious
occasional illnesses. The crops from 1845 to 1854 ranged between
seventeen and eighty barrels of rice; and for the three remaining
years of the record they included both rice and sea-island
cotton. The gross receipts were highest at $1,695 in 1847
and lowest at $362 in 1851; the net varied from a surplus of
$995 in 1848 to a deficit of $2,035 in the two years 1853 and 1854
for which the accounting was consolidated. Under E. S. Mell,
who was overseer until 1854 at a salary of $350 or less, there
were profits until 1849, losses thereafter. The following items
of expense in this latter period, along with high doctor's bills,
may explain the reverse: for taking a negro from the guardhouse,
$5; for court costs in the case of a boy prosecuted for larceny,
$9.26; jail fees of Cesar, $2.69; for the apprehension of a
runaway, $5; paid Jones for trying to capture a negro, $5. In
February, 1854, Mell was paid off, and a voucher made record

of a newspaper advertisement for another overseer. What happened
to the new incumbent is told by the expense entries of
March 9, 1855: "Paid . . . amount Jones' bill for capturing
negroes, $25. Expenses of Overseer Page's burial as follows,
Ferguson's bill, $25; Coroner's, $14; Dr. Kollock's, $5; total
$69." A further item in 1856 of twenty-five dollars paid for the
arrest of Bing and Tony may mean that two of the slaves who
shared in the killing of the overseer succeeded for a year in
eluding capture, or it may mean that disorders continued under
Page's successor.[35]

Other lowland plantations on a scale similar to that of Sabine
Fields showed much better earnings. One of these, in Liberty
County, Georgia, belonged to the heirs of Dr. Adam Alexander of
Savannah. It was devoted to sea-island cotton in the 'thirties,
but rice was added in the next decade. While the output fluctuated,
of course, the earnings always exceeded the expenses and
sometimes yielded as much as a hundred dollars per hand for
distribution among the owners.[36]

The system of rice production was such that plantations with
less than a hundred acres available for the staple could hardly
survive in the competition. If one of these adjoined another estate
it was likely to be merged therewith; but if it lay in isolation
the course of years would probably bring its abandonment. The
absence of the proprietors every summer in avoidance of malaria,
and the consequent expense of overseer's wages, hampered,
operations on a small scale, as did also the maintenance of special
functionaries among the slaves, such as drivers, boatswains,
trunk minders, bird minders, millers and coopers. In 1860 Louis
Manigault listed the forty-one rice plantations on the Savannah.
River and scheduled their acreage in the crop. Only one of them,
had as little as one hundred acres in rice, and it seems to have
been an appendage of a larger one across the river. On the
other hand, two of them had crops of eleven hundred, and two
more of twelve hundred acres each. The average was about 425

acres per plantation, expected to yield about 1200 pounds of rice
per acre each year.[37] A census tabulation in 1850, ignoring any
smaller units, numbered the plantations which produced annually
upwards of 20,000 pounds of rice at 446 in South Carolina, 80
in Georgia, and 25 in North Carolina.[38]

Indigo and sea-island cotton fields had no ditches dividing them
permanently into task units; but the fact that each of these in its
day was often combined with rice on the same plantations, and
that the separate estates devoted to them respectively lay in the
region dominated by the rice régime, led to the prevalence of the
task system in their culture also. The soils used for these crops
were so sandy and light, however, that the tasks, staked off each
day by the drivers, ranged larger than those in rice. In the cotton
fields they were about half an acre per hand, whether for
listing, bedding or cultivation. In the collecting and spreading
of swamp mud and other manures for the cotton the work was
probably done mostly by gangs rather than by task, since the units
were hard to measure. In cotton picking, likewise, the conditions
of the crop were so variable and the need of haste so great
that time work, perhaps with special rewards for unusually heavy
pickings, was the common resort. Thus the lowland cotton
régime alternated the task and gang systems according to the
work at hand; and even the rice planters of course abandoned all
thoughts of stinted performance when emergency pressed, as in
the mending of breaks in the dikes, or when joint exertion was
required, as in log rolling, or when threshing and pounding with
machinery to set the pace.

That the task system was extended sporadically into the South
Carolina Piedmont, is indicated by a letter of a certain Thomas
Parker of the Abbeville district, in 1831,[39] which not only described
his methods but embodied an essential plantation precept.
He customarily tasked his hoe hands, he said, at rates determined
by careful observation as just both to himself and the workers.
These varied according to conditions, but ranged usually about

three quarters of an acre. He continued: "I plant six acres of
cotton to the hand, which is about the usual quantity planted in
my neighborhood. I do not make as large crops as some of my
neighbors. I am content with three to three and a half bales of
cotton to the hand, with my provisions and pork; but some few
make four bales, and last year two of my neighbors made five
bales to the hand. In such cases I have vanity enough, however,
to attribute this to better lands. I have no overseer, nor indeed
is there one in the neighborhood. We personally attend to our
planting, believing that as good a manure as any, if not the best
we can apply to our fields, is the print of the master's footstep."