American Negro Slavery by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

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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.

[Footnote 16: _Harper's Magasine_, VII, 758, 759 (November, 1853);
Valcour Aime, _Plantation Diary_ (New Orleans, 1878), partly reprinted in
_Plantation and Frontier_, I, 214, 230.]

[Footnote 17: According to the MS. returns of the U.S. census of 1850
Aime's slaves at that time numbered 231, of whom 58 were below fifteen
years old, 164 were between 15 and 65, and 9 (one of them blind, another
insane) were from 66 to 80 years old. Evidently there was a considerable
number of slaves of working age not classed by him as field hands.]

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 "mat-layed," 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.

[Footnote 18: These processes of matlaying and windrowing are described in
L. Bouchereau, _Statement of the Sugar and Rice Crops made in Louisiana in
1870-71_ (New Orleans, 1871), p. xii.]

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.

[Footnote 19: Diary of Dr. J.P.R. Stone. MS. in the possession of Mr. John
Stone Ware, White Castle, La. For the privilege of using the diary I
am indebted to Mr. V. Alton Moody of the University of Michigan, now
Lieutenant in the American Expeditionary Force in France.]

[Footnote 20: MS. returns in the U.S. Census Bureau, data procured through
the courtesy of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and Mr.(now
Lieutenant) V. Alton Moody.]

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 regime.

[Footnote 21: MSS. in private possession, data from which were made
available through the kindness of Mr. V.A. Moody.]

[Footnote 22: The yearly product of each sugar plantation in Louisiana
between 1849 and 1858 is reported in P.A. Champonier's _Annual Statement_
of the crop. (New Orleans, 1850-1859).]

[Footnote 23: William H. Russell, _My Diary North and South_ (Boston,
1863), pp. 268-279]

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.

[Footnote 24: Edmund Ruffin, _Agricultural Survey of South Carolina_
(Columbia, 1843), p. 118.]

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.

[Footnote 25: Olmsted, _Seaboard Slave States_, pp. 435, 436.]

[Footnote 26: J.A. Turner, ed., _Cotton Planter's Manual_, p. 34.]

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 L20 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]

[Footnote 27: MSS. in the possession of Mrs. Hawkins K. Jenkins, Pinopolis,
S.C., including a "Memoir of Nathaniel Heyward," written in 1895 by Gabriel
E. Manigault.]

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]

[Footnote 28: Notes by Louis Manigault of a conversation with Nathaniel
Heyward in 1846. M.S. in the collection above mentioned.]

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 River. 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.

[Footnote 29: Frances Anne Kemble, _Journal of a Residence on a Georgia
Plantation in 1838-1839_(London, 1863).]

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, but 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.