[Footnote 21:  MSS. in private possession, data from which were made available through the kindness of Mr. V.A.  Moody.]

[Footnote 22:  The yearly product of each sugar plantation in Louisiana between 1849 and 1858 is reported in P.A.  Champonier’s Annual Statement of the crop. (New Orleans, 1850-1859).]

[Footnote 23:  William H. Russell, My Diary North and South (Boston, 1863), pp. 268-279]

Virtually all of the tobacco, short staple cotton and sugar plantations were conducted on the gang system.  The task system, on the other hand, was instituted on the rice coast, where the drainage ditches checkering the fields into half or quarter acre plots offered convenient units of performance in the successive processes.  The chief advantage of the task system lay in the ease with which it permitted a planter or an overseer to delegate much of his routine function to a driver.  This official each morning would assign to each field hand his or her individual plot, and spend the rest of the day in seeing to the performance of the work.  At evening or next day the master could inspect the results and thereby keep a check upon both the driver and the squad.  Each slave when his day’s task was completed had at his own disposal such time as might remain.  The driver commonly gave every full hand an equal area to be worked in the same way, and discriminated among them only in so far as varying conditions from plot to plot would permit the assignment of the stronger and swifter workmen to tracts where the work required was greater, and the others to plots where the labor was less.  Fractional hands were given fractional tasks, or were combined into full hands for full tasks.  Thus a woman rated at three quarters might be helped by her own one quarter child, or two half-hand youths might work a full plot jointly.  The system gave some stimulus to speed of work, at least from time to time, by its promise of afternoon leisure in reward.  But for this prospect to be effective the tasks had to be so limited that every laborer might have the hope of an hour or two’s release as the fruit of diligence.  The performance of every hand tended accordingly to be standardized at the customary accomplishment of the weakest and slowest members of the group.  This tendency, however, was almost equally strong in the gang system also.

The task acre was commonly not a square of 210 feet, but a rectangle 300 feet long and 150 feet broad, divided into square halves and rectangular quarters, and further divisible into “compasses” five feet wide and 150 feet long, making one sixtieth of an acre.  The standard tasks for full hands in rice culture were scheduled in 1843 as follows:  plowing with two oxen, with the animals changed at noon, one acre; breaking stiff land with the hoe and turning the stubble under, ten compasses; breaking such land with the stubble burnt off, or breaking lighter land, a quarter acre or slightly more; mashing