[Footnote 16:  Described in 1846 in the American Agriculturist, VI, 113, 114.]

[Footnote 17:  MS. diary, April 13 to May 14, 1838, in Hammond papers, Library of Congress.]

[Footnote 18:  Letters of Hammond to William Gilmore Simms, Jan. 27 and Mch. 9, 1841.  Hammond’s MS. drafts are in the Library of Congress.]

[Footnote 19:  Letter to Isaac W. Hayne, Jan. 21, 1841.]

[Footnote 20:  MS. oration in the Library of Congress.]

[Footnote 21:  James H. Hammond, An Address delivered before the South Carolina Institute, at the first annual Fair, on the 20th November, 1849 (Charleston. 1849).]

Hammond found that not only the public but his own sons also, with the exception of Harry, were cool toward his advice and example; and he himself yielded to the temptation of the higher cotton prices in the ’fifties, and while not losing interest in cattle and small grain made cotton and corn his chief reliance.  He appears to have salved his conscience in this relapse by devoting part of his income to the reclamation of a great marsh on his estate.  He operated two plantations, the one at his home, “Silver Bluff,” the other, “Cathwood,” near by.  The field force on the former comprised in 1850 sixteen plow hands, thirty-four full hoe hands, six three-quarter hands, two half hands and a water boy, the whole rated at fifty-five full hands.  At Cathwood the force, similarly grouped, was rated at seventy-one hands; but at either place the force was commonly subject to a deduction of some ten per cent, of its rated strength, on the score of the loss of time by the “breeders and suckers” among the women.  In addition to their field strength and the children, of whom no reckoning was made in the schedule of employments, the two plantations together had five stable men, two carpenters, a miller and job worker, a keeper of the boat landing, three nurses and two overseers’ cooks; and also thirty-five ditchers in the reclamation work.

At Silver Bluff, the 385 acres in cotton were expected to yield 330 bales of 400 pounds each; the 400 acres in corn had an expectation of 9850 bushels; and 10 acres of rice, 200 bushels.  At Cathwood the plantings and expectations were 370 acres in cotton to yield 280 bales, 280 in corn to yield 5000 bushels, 15 in wheat to yield 100 bushels, 11 in rye to yield 50, and 2 in rice to yield 50.  In financial results, after earning in 1848 only $4334.91, which met barely half of his plantation and family expenses for the year, his crop sales from 1849 to 1853 ranged from seven to twenty thousand dollars annually in cotton and from one and a half to two and a half thousand dollars in corn.  His gross earnings in these five years averaged $16,217.76, while his plantation expenses averaged $5393.87, and his family outlay $6392.67, leaving an average “clear gain per annum,” as he called it, of $4431.10.  The accounting, however, included no reckoning of interest on the investment or of anything else but money income and outgo.  In 1859 Hammond put upon the market his 5500 acres of uplands with their buildings, livestock, implements and feed supplies, together with 140 slaves including 70 full hands.  His purpose, it may be surmised, was to confine his further operations to his river bottoms.[22]