I found that some of the large plantations had, besides a white superintendent, two black overseers,—one whose sole business was to take care of the ploughs and hoes, and one who looked after the mules and other live stock.
The buildings of a first-class plantation form a little village by themselves. There is first the planter’s house, which is commonly a framed dwelling of good size, with two or four brick chimneys built outside. There is not a closet in the house. The pantry and dairy form a separate building. The kitchen is another; and the meat-house still another. Next in importance to the planter’s house is the overseer’s house. Then come the negro quarters, which, on some plantations I have seen, are very comfortable and neat-looking little framed houses. They are oftener mere huts. A barn is a rare exception. The corn is kept in cribs, and other grain in out-door bins framed with roof-like covers that shut down and lock. Then there are the mule-pens; the gin-house (if it has not been burned); and the mill for crushing sorghum. Orchards are rare, planters thinking of little besides cotton, and living, like their negroes, chiefly on hog and hominy.
Travelling by private conveyance from Eatonton—the northern terminus of the Milledgeville and Eatonton Railroad—over to Madison on the Georgia road, on my way to Augusta, I passed a night at a planter’s house of the middle class. It was a plain, one-and-a-half story, unpainted, weather-browned framed dwelling, with a porch in front, and two front windows. The oaken floors were carpetless, but clean swept. The rooms were not done off at all; there was not a lath, nor any appearance of plastering or whitewash about them. The rafters and shingles of the roof formed the ceiling of the garret-chamber; the sleepers and boards of the chamber-floor, the ceiling of the sitting-room; and the undisguised beams, studs, and clapboards of the frame and its covering, composed the walls. The dining-room was a little detached framed box, without a fireplace, and with a single broken window. There was a cupboard, a wardrobe, and a bed in the sitting-room; a little bedroom leading off from it; and two beds in the garret.
There was a glowing fire in the fireplace, beside which sat a neatly-attired, fine-looking, but remarkably silent grandmother, taking snuff, or smoking.
The house had three other inmates,—the planter and his wife, and their son, a well-educated young man, who sat in the evening reading “Handy Andy” by the light of pitch-pine chips thrown at intervals upon the oak-wood fire. No candle was lighted except for me, at bedtime.
This, be it understood, was not the house of a small farmer, but of the owner of two plantations, of a thousand acres each. He had fifty-nine negroes before the war.
There was a branch running through his estate, on the bottom-land of which he could make a bale of cotton to the acre. On the uplands it took three or four acres to make a bale. This year his son had undertaken to run the plantation we were on, while he was to oversee the other.
The young man was far more hopeful of success than his father.
The old man said: “You can’t get anything out of the niggers, now they’re free.”
“I never knew them to work any better,” said the young man.