[17] This may be compared with the town of Springfield, county of Sangammon, Illinois, in which, with a population of 19,228 (nearer to that of Natchez than any other town I observe in the Free States), the number of registered school children is 3,300, the public libraries contain 20,000 volumes, and the churches can accommodate 28,000 sitters.
[18] “The Washington Remedies—To Planters and Others.—These Remedies, now offered to the public under the title of the Washington Remedies, are composed of ingredients, many of which are not even known to Botany. No apothecary has them for sale; they are supplied to the subscriber by the native red-men of Louisiana. The recipes by which they are compounded have descended to the present possessor, M. A. Micklejohn, from ancestors who obtained them from the friendly Indian tribes, prior to and during the Revolution, and they are now offered to the public with that confidence which has been gained from a knowledge of the fact that during so long a series of years there has never been known an instance in which they have failed to perform a speedy and permanent cure. The subscribers do not profess these remedies will cure every disarrangement of the human system, but in such as are enumerated below they feel they cannot fail. The directions for use have only to be strictly followed, and however despairing the patient may have been he will find cause for blissful hope and renewed life.
“These preparations are no Northern patent humbug, but are manufactured in New Orleans by a Creole, who has long used them in private practice, rescuing many unfortunate victims of disease from the grave, after they have been given up by their physicians as incurable, or have been tortured beyond endurance by laceration and painful operations.”
[19] “The bacon is almost entirely imported from the Northern States, as well as a considerable quantity of Indian corn. This is reckoned bad management by intelligent planters. * * * On this plantation as much Indian corn was raised as was needed, but little bacon, which was mostly imported from Ohio. The sum annually paid for this article was upwards of eight hundred pounds. Large plantations are not suited to the rearing of hogs; for it is found almost impossible to prevent the negroes from stealing and roasting the pigs.” Mr. Russell, visiting the plantation of a friend near Natchez.—North America: its Agriculture, etc., p. 265.
[20] This would give at this season hardly less than sixteen hours of plodding labour, relieved by but one short interval of rest, during the daylight, for the hoe-gang. It is not improbable. I was accustomed to rise early and ride late, resting during the heat of the day, while in the cotton district, but I always found the negroes in the field when I first looked out, and generally had to wait for the negroes to come from the field to have my horse fed when I stopped for the night. I am told, however, and I believe, that it is usual in the hottest weather, to give a rest of an hour or two to all hands at noon. I never happened to see it done. The legal limit of a slave’s day’s work in South Carolina is fifteen hours.
[21] I was told by a gentleman in North Carolina, that the custom of supplying molasses to negroes in Mississippi, was usually mentioned to those sold away from his part of the country, to reconcile them to going thither.
[22] In De Bow’s ‘Resources of the South,’ vol. i., p. 150, a table is furnished by a cotton-planter to show that the expenses of raising cotton are “generally greatly underrated.” It is to be inferred that they certainly are not underrated in the table. On “a well improved and properly organized plantation,” the expense of feeding one hundred negroes, “as deduced from fifteen years’ experience” of the writer, is asserted in this table to be $750 per annum, or seven dollars and a half each; in this sum is included, however, the expenses of the “hospital and the overseer’s table.” This is much less than the expense for the same purposes, if the overseer’s account was true, of the plantation above described. Clothing, shoes, bedding, sacks for gathering cotton, and so forth, are estimated by the same authority to cost an equal sum—$7.50 for each slave. I have just paid on account of a day labourer on a farm in New York, his board bill, he being a bachelor living at the house of another Irish labourer with a family. The charge is twenty-one times as large as that set down for the slave.
[23] “I was informed that some successful planters, who held several estates in this neighbourhood [Natchez] made it a rule to change their overseers every year, on the principle that the two years’ service system is sure to spoil them.”—Russell’s North America: its Agriculture, etc., p. 258.
“Overseers are changed every year; a few remain four or five years, but the average time they remain on the same plantation does not exceed two years.”—Southern Agriculturist, vol. iv., p. 351.
[24] “On Monday last, as James Allen (overseer on Prothro’s plantation at St. Maurice) was punishing a negro boy named Jack, for stealing hogs, the boy ran off before the overseer had chastised him sufficiently for the offence. He was immediately pursued by the overseer, who succeeded in catching him, when the negro drew a knife and inflicted a terrible gash in his abdomen. The wounds of the overseer were dressed by Dr. Stephens, who pronounces it a very critical case, but still entertains hope of his recovery.”—Nachitoches Chronicle.