The factor’s books for this plantation continue their records into the war time.  From the crop of 1861 nothing appears to have been sold but a single bale of cotton, and the year’s deficit was $6,721.  The proceeds from the harvests of 1862 were $500 from nineteen bales of cotton, and some $10,000 from fodder, hay, peanuts and corn.  The still more diversified market produce of 1863 comprised also wheat, which was impressed by the Confederate government, syrup, cowpeas, lard, hams and vinegar.  The proceeds were $17,000 and the expenses about $9000, including the overseer’s wages at $1300 and the purchase of 350 bushels of peanuts from the slaves at $1.50 per bushel.  The reckonings in the war period were made of course in the rapidly depreciating Confederate currency.  The stoppage of the record in 1864 was doubtless a consequence of Sherman’s march through Georgia.[10]

[Footnote 10:  The Retreat records are in the possession of the Georgia Historical Society, trustee for the Telfair Academy of Art, Savannah, Ga.  The overseer’s letters here used are printed in Plantation and Frontier, I, 314, 330-336, II, 39, 85.]

In the western cotton belt the plantations were much like those of the eastern, except that the more uniform fertility often permitted the fields to lie in solid expanses instead of being sprawled and broken by waste lands as in the Piedmont.  The scale of operations tended accordingly to be larger.  One of the greatest proprietors in that region, unless his display were far out of proportion to his wealth, was Joseph A.S.  Acklen whose group of plantations was clustered near the junction of the Red and Mississippi Rivers.  In 1859 he began to build a country house on the style of a Gothic castle, with a great central hall and fifty rooms exclusive of baths and closets.[11] The building was expected to cost $150,000, and the furnishings $125,000 more.  Acklen’s rules for the conduct of his plantations will be discussed in another connection;[12] but no description of his estate or his actual operations is available.

[Footnote 11:  Federal Union (Milledgeville, Ga.), Aug. 2, 1859.]

[Footnote 12:  Below, pp. 262 ff.]

Olmsted described in detail a plantation in the neighborhood of Natchez.  Its thirteen or fourteen hundred acres of cotton, corn and incidental crops were tilled by a plow gang of thirty and a hoe gang of thirty-seven, furnished by a total of 135 slaves on the place.  A driver cracked a whip among the hoe hands, occasionally playing it lightly upon the shoulders of one or another whom he thought would be stimulated by the suggestion.  “There was a nursery for sucklings at the quarters, and twenty women at this time left their work four times a day, for half an hour, to nurse the young ones, and whom the overseer counted as half hands—­that is, expected to do half an ordinary day’s work.”  At half past nine every night the hoe and plow foremen, serving alternately, sounded curfew on a horn, and