half an hour afterward visited each cabin to see that the households were at rest and the fires safely banked.  The food allowance was a peck of corn and four pounds of pork weekly.  Each family, furthermore, had its garden, fowl house and pigsty; every Christmas the master distributed among them coffee, molasses, tobacco, calico and “Sunday tricks” to the value of from a thousand to fifteen hundred dollars; and every man might rive boards in the swamp on Sundays to buy more supplies, or hunt and fish in leisure times to vary his family’s fare.  Saturday afternoon was also free from the routine.  Occasionally a slave would run away, but he was retaken sooner or later, sometimes by the aid of dogs.  A persistent runaway was disposed of by sale.[13]

[Footnote 13:  F.L.  Olmsted, A Journey in the Back Country (New York, 1860), pp. 46-54.]

Another estate in the same district, which Olmsted observed more cursorily, comprised four adjoining plantations, each with its own stables and quarter, each employing more than a hundred slaves under a separate overseer, and all directed by a steward whom the traveler described as cultured, poetic and delightful.  An observation that women were at some of the plows prompted Olmsted to remark that throughout the Southwest the slaves were worked harder as a rule than in the easterly and northerly slaveholding states.  On the other hand he noted:  “In the main the negroes appeared to be well cared for and abundantly supplied with the necessaries of vigorous physical existence.  A large part of them lived in commodious and well built cottages, with broad galleries in front, so that each family of five had two rooms on the lower floor and a large loft.  The remainder lived in log huts, small and mean in appearance;[14] but those of their overseers were little better, and preparations were being made to replace all of these by neat boarded cottages.”

[Footnote 14:  Olmsted, Back Country, pp. 72-92.]

In the sugar district Estwick Evans when on his “pedestrious tour” in 1817 found the shores of the Mississippi from a hundred miles above New Orleans to twenty miles below the city in a high state of cultivation.  “The plantations within these limits,” he said, “are superb beyond description....  The dwelling houses of the planters are not inferior to any in the United States, either with respect to size, architecture, or the manner in which they are furnished.  The gardens and yards contiguous to them are formed and decorated with much taste.  The cotton, sugar and ware houses are very large, and the buildings for the slaves are well finished.  The latter buildings are in some cases forty or fifty in number, and each of them will accommodate ten or twelve persons....  The planters here derive immense profits from the cultivation of their estates.[15] The yearly income from them is from twenty thousand to thirty thousand dollars.”

[Footnote 15:  Estwick Evans, A Pedestrious Tour ... through the Western States and Territories (Concord, N.H., 1817), p. 219, reprinted in R.G.  Thwaites ed., Early Western Travels, VIII, 325, 326.]