ditched, well manured, and excellently tended.  The land was valued at $360,000, the buildings at $100,000, the machinery at $60,000, the slaves at $170,000, and the livestock at $11,000; total, $701,000.  The crop of 1852, comprising 1,300,000 pounds of white centrifugal sugar at 6 cents and 60,000 gallons of syrup at 36 cents, yielded a gross return of almost $100,000.  The expenses included 4,629 barrels of coal from up the river, in addition to the outlay for wages and miscellaneous supplies.

[Footnote 16:  Harper’s Magasine, VII, 758, 759 (November, 1853); Valcour Aime, Plantation Diary (New Orleans, 1878), partly reprinted in Plantation and Frontier, I, 214, 230.]

[Footnote 17:  According to the MS. returns of the U.S. census of 1850 Aime’s slaves at that time numbered 231, of whom 58 were below fifteen years old, 164 were between 15 and 65, and 9 (one of them blind, another insane) were from 66 to 80 years old.  Evidently there was a considerable number of slaves of working age not classed by him as field hands.]

In the routine of work, each January was devoted mainly to planting fresh canes in the fields from which the stubble canes or second rattoons had recently been harvested.  February and March gave an interval for cutting cordwood, cleaning ditches, and such other incidentals as the building and repair of the plantation’s railroad.  Warm weather then brought the corn planting and cane and corn cultivation.  In August the laying by of the crops gave time for incidentals again.  Corn and hay were now harvested, the roads and premises put in order, the cordwood hauled from the swamp, the coal unladen from the barges, and all things made ready for the rush of the grinding season which began in late October.  In the first phase of harvesting the main gang cut and stripped the canes, the carters and the railroad crew hauled them to the mill, and double shifts there kept up the grinding and boiling by day and by night.  As long as the weather continued temperate the mill set the pace for the cutters.  But when frost grew imminent every hand who could wield a knife was sent to the fields to cut the still standing stalks and secure them against freezing.  For the first few days of this phase, the stalks as fast as cut were laid, in their leaves, in great mats with the tops turned south to prevent the entrance of north winds, with the leaves of each layer covering the butts of that below, and with a blanket of earth over the last butts in the mat.  Here these canes usually stayed until January when they were stripped and strewn in the furrows of the newly plowed “stubble” field as the seed of a new crop.  After enough seed cane were “mat-layed,” the rest of the cut was merely laid lengthwise in the adjacent furrows to await cartage to the mill.[18] In the last phase of the harvest, which followed this work of the greatest emergency, these “windrowed” canes were stripped and hauled, with the mill setting the pace again, until the grinding was ended, generally in December.