expert Daniel was day after day steadily topping the plants.  In late August the plows began breaking the fallow fields for wheat.  Early in September the cutting and housing of tobacco began, and continued at intervals in good weather until the middle of October.  Then the corn was harvested and the sowing of wheat was the chief concern until the end of November when winter plowing was begun for the next year’s tobacco.  Two days in December were devoted to the housing of ice; and Christmas week, as well as Easter Monday and a day or two in summer and fall, brought leisure.  Throughout the year the overseer inspected the negroes’ houses and yards every Sunday morning and regularly reported them in good order.

The greatest of the tobacco planters in this period was Samuel Hairston, whose many plantations lying in the upper Piedmont on both sides of the Virginia-North Carolina boundary were reported in 1854 to have slave populations aggregating some 1600 souls, and whose gardens at his homestead in Henry County, Virginia, were likened to paradise.  Of his methods of management nothing more is known than that his overseers were systematically superintended and that his negroes were commonly both fed and clothed with the products of the plantations themselves.[5]

[Footnote 5:  William Chambers, American Slavery and Colour (London, 1857), pp. 194, 195, quoting a Richmond newspaper of 1854.]

In the eastern cotton belt a notable establishment of earlier decades was that of Governor David R. Williams, who began operations with about a hundred slaves in Chesterfield County, South Carolina, near the beginning of the nineteenth century and increased their number fivefold before his death in 1830.  While each of his four plantations gave adequate yields of the staple as well as furnishing their own full supplies of corn and pork, the central feature and the chief source of prosperity was a great bottom tract safeguarded from the floods of the Pee Dee by a levee along the river front.  The building of this embankment was but one of many enterprises which Williams undertook in the time spared from his varied political and military services.  Others were the improvement of manuring methods, the breeding of mules, the building of public bridges, the erection and management of a textile factory, the launching of a cottonseed oil mill, of which his talents might have made a success even in that early time had not his untimely death intervened.  The prosperity of Williams’ main business in the face of his multifarious diversions proves that his plantation affairs were administered in thorough fashion.  His capable wife must have supplemented the husband and his overseers constantly and powerfully in the conduct of the routine.  The neighboring plantation of a kinsman, Benjamin F. Williams, was likewise notable in after years for its highly improved upland fields as well as for the excellent specialized work of its slave craftsmen.[6]