[Footnote 6:  Harvey T. Cooke, The Life and Legacy of David Rogerson Williams (New York, 1916), chaps.  XIV, XVI, XIX, XX, XXV.  This book, though bearing a New York imprint, is actually published, as I have been at pains to learn, by Mr. J.W.  Norwood of Greenville, South Carolina.]

In the fertile bottoms on the Congaree River not far above Columbia, lay the well famed estate of Colonel Wade Hampton, which in 1846 had some sixteen hundred acres of cotton and half as much of corn.  The traveler, when reaching it after long faring past the slackly kept fields and premises common in the region, felt equal enthusiasm for the drainage and the fencing, the avenues, the mansion and the mill, the stud of blooded horses, the herd of Durham cattle, the flock of long-wooled sheep, and the pens of Berkshire pigs.[7] Senator McDuffie’s plantation in the further uplands of the Abbeville district was likewise prosperous though on a somewhat smaller scale.  Accretions had enlarged it from three hundred acres in 1821 to five thousand in 1847, when it had 147 slaves of all ages.  Many of these were devoted to indoor employments, and seventy were field workers using twenty-four mules.  The 750 acres in cotton commonly yielded crops of a thousand pounds in the seed; the 325 acres in corn gave twenty-five or thirty bushels; the 300 in oats, fifteen bushels; and ten acres in peas, potatoes and squashes yielded their proportionate contribution.[8]

[Footnote 7:  Described by R.L.  Allen in the American Agriculturist, VI, 20, 21.]

[Footnote 8:  DeBow’s Review, VI, 149.]

The conduct and earnings of a cotton plantation fairly typical among those of large scale, may be gathered from the overseer’s letters and factor’s accounts relating to Retreat, which lay in Jefferson County, Georgia.  This was one of several establishments founded by Alexander Telfair of Savannah and inherited by his two daughters, one of whom became the wife of W.B.  Hodgson.  For many years Elisha Cain was its overseer.  The first glimpse which the correspondence affords is in the fall of 1829, some years after Cain had taken charge.  He then wrote to Telfair that many of the negroes young and old had recently been ill with fever, but most of them had recovered without a physician’s aid.  He reported further that a slave named John had run away “for no other cause than that he did not feel disposed to be governed by the same rules and regulations that the other negroes on the land are governed by.”  Shortly afterward John returned and showed willingness to do his duty.  But now Cain encountered a new sort of trouble.  He wrote Telfair in January, 1830:  “Your negroes have a disease now among them that I am fully at a loss to know what I had best to do.  Two of them are down with the venereal disease, Die and Sary.  Doctor Jenkins has been attending Die four weeks, and very little alteration as I can learn.  It is very hard to get the truth; but from what I can learn, Sary got it from Friday.”  A note appended to this letter, presumably by Telfair, reads:  “Friday is the house servant sent to Retreat every summer.  I have all the servants examined before they leave Savannah.”