for market.  The overseer’s wages were sometimes as low as $600, but were generally $1000 a year.  In the expense accounts the annual charges for shoes, blankets and oznaburgs were no more regular than the items of “cotton money for the people.”  These sums, averaging about a hundred dollars a year, were distributed among the slaves in payment for the little crops of nankeen cotton which they cultivated in spare time on plots assigned to the several families.  Other expense items mentioned salt, sugar, bacon, molasses, tobacco, wool and cotton cards, loom sleighs, mules and machinery.  Still others dealt with drugs and doctor’s bills.  In 1837, for example, Dr. Jenkins was paid $90 for attendance on Priscilla.  In some years the physician’s payment was a round hundred dollars, indicating services on contract.  In May, 1851, there are debits of $16.16 for a constable’s reward, a jail fee and a railroad fare, and of $1.30 for the purchase of a pair of handcuffs, two padlocks and a trace chain.  These constitute the financial record of a runaway’s recapture.

From 1834 to 1841 the gross earnings on Retreat ranged between eight and fifteen thousand dollars, of which from seven to twelve thousand each year was available for division between the owners.  The gross then fell rapidly to $4000 in 1844, of which more than half was consumed in expenses.  It then rose as rapidly to its maximum of $21,300 in 1847, when more than half of it again was devoted to current expenses and betterments.  Thereafter the range of the gross was between $8000 and $17,000 except for a single year of crop failure, 1856, when the 109 bales brought $5750.  During the ’fifties the current expenses ranged usually between six and ten thousand dollars, as compared with about one third as much in the ’thirties.  This is explained partly by the resolution of the owners to improve the fields, now grown old, and to increase the equipment.  For the crop of 1856, for example, purchases were made of forty tons of Peruvian guano at $56 per ton, and nineteen tons of Mexican guano at $25 a ton.  In the following years lime, salt and dried blood were included in the fertilizer purchases.  At length Hodgson himself gave over his travels and his ethnological studies to take personal charge on Retreat.  He wrote in June, 1859, to his friend Senator Hammond, of whom we have seen something in the preceding chapter, that he had seriously engaged in “high farming,” and was spreading huge quantities of fertilizers.  He continued:  “My portable steam engine is the delicia domini and of overseer too.  It follows the reapers beautifully in a field of wheat, 130 acres, and then in the rye fields.  In August it will be backed up to the gin house and emancipate from slavery eighteen mules and four little nigger drivers."[9]

[Footnote 9:  MS. among the Hammond papers in the Library of Congress.]