Each family, in addition, had its garden and poultry; and they were always paid for Saturday afternoons, but were given the time for their own work.
The expenses on these plantations for the year could be quite accurately calculated. The items would stand nearly or quite as follows:
| 60 mules @ (average) $180 | $10,800 | |
| 175 hands @ $10. pr. month,[[73]] wages | 21,000 | |
| SUPPLIES. | ||
| Pork, 182 bbls. @ $29 | $5,278 | |
| Meal,[[74]] 442 bbls. @ $5 | 2,210 | |
| Molasses, 1,137 gallons @ 70c | 790 | 8,284 |
| Corn for mules, 5,400 bushels @ $1 | 5,400 | |
| Hay for mules, 100 tons @ $30 | 3,000 | |
| Incidentals | 3,000 | |
| $51,484 | ||
Economical management and the personal supervision of an interested party might undoubtedly reduce these expenses at least ten per cent., but under the loose expenditures of overseers the calculation was none too large. The amount would still be swelled by at least twenty thousand dollars for rent, and two thousand as wages of the overseer, so that the expenses of conducting the plantations for a year might be pretty accurately set down in round numbers at seventy thousand dollars.
With a good season and without overflow, the yield ought to be twelve hundred bales of cotton, worth, say, a hundred dollars per bale. Taking all the risks, therefore, and using this heavy capital, the proprietors were likely, under the most favorable circumstances, to have, at the end of the year, fifty thousand dollars and sixty mules, as their net profit. On other plantations, where they paid less exorbitant rents, they anticipated, of course, larger returns.
[69]. The name of one of his plantations, only three miles from Natchez, fronting on the Mississippi. It contains seventeen hundred acres of open land, besides a pecan grove and an enormous tract of cypress.
[70]. An admirable pasture grass, flourishing only in warm climates and free from shade. It was first introduced into Louisiana as a protection for the levees, its thick mat of roots preventing the high water from washing away the base of the levee; but it spread rapidly over the adjacent cotton lands, and thus became one of the greatest pests to the planters, who find it almost impossible to exterminate it.
[71]. Nearly all the women on plantations have a great fancy for thus arraying themselves in their husband’s coats. Not a few also adopt the pantaloons, half concealing them with the scant cotton skirt.
[72]. They even steal one another’s corn-husk collars; and so every plowman carries home his harness at night and locks it up in his cabin.