American Negro Slavery by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

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[Footnote 4: These records are in the possession of Wm. Bridges of
Richmond, Va. For copies of them, as well as for many other valuable items,
I am indebted to Alfred H. Stone of Dunleith, Miss.]

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, pole-axes 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]

[Footnote 5: William Chambers, _American Slavery and Colour_ (London,
1857), pp. 194, 195, quoting a Richmond newspaper of 1854.]

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]

[Footnote 6: Harvey T. Cooke, _The Life and Legacy of David Rogerson
Williams_ (New York, 1916), chaps. XIV, XVI, XIX, XX, XXV. This book,
though bearing a New York imprint, is actually published, as I have been at
pains to learn, by Mr. J.W. Norwood of Greenville, South Carolina.]

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]

[Footnote 7: Described by R.L. Allen in the _American Agriculturist_, VI,
20, 21.]

[Footnote 8: _DeBow's Review_, VI, 149.]

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 imployed 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]

[Footnote 9: MS. among the Hammond papers in the Library of Congress.]

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]

[Footnote 10: The Retreat records are in the possession of the Georgia
Historical Society, trustee for the Telfair Academy of Art, Savannah, Ga.
The overseer's letters here used are printed in _Plantation and Frontier_,
I, 314, 330-336, II, 39, 85.]

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.

[Footnote 11: _Federal Union_ (Milledgeville, Ga.), Aug. 2, 1859.]

[Footnote 12: Below, pp. 262 ff.]

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]

[Footnote 13: F.L. Olmsted, _A Journey in the Back Country_ (New York,
1860), pp. 46-54.]

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."

[Footnote 14: Olmsted, _Back Country_, pp. 72-92.]

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."

[Footnote 15: Estwick Evans, _A Pedestrious Tour ... through the Western
States and Territories_ (Concord, N.H., 1817), p. 219, reprinted in R.G.
Thwaites ed., _Early Western Travels_, VIII, 325, 326.]

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.