The history of the estate of James Heyward, Nathaniel’s brother, was in striking contrast with this.  When on a tour in Ireland he met and married an actress, who at his death in 1796 inherited his plantation and 214 slaves.  Two suitors for the widow’s hand promptly appeared in Alexander Baring, afterwards Lord Ashburton, and Charles Baring, his cousin.  Mrs. Heyward married the latter, who increased the estate to seven or eight hundred acres in rice, yielding crops worth from twelve to thirty thousand dollars.  But instead of superintending its work in person Baring bought a large tract in the North Carolina mountains, built a house there, and carried thither some fifty slaves for his service.  After squandering the income for nearly fifty years, he sold off part of the slaves and mortgaged the land; and when the plantation was finally surrendered in settlement of Baring’s debts, it fell into Nathaniel Heyward’s possession.[28]

[Footnote 28:  Notes by Louis Manigault of a conversation with Nathaniel Heyward in 1846.  M.S. in the collection above mentioned.]

Another case of absentee neglect, made notorious through Fanny Kemble’s Journal, was the group of rice and sea-island cotton plantations founded by Senator Pierce Butler on and about Butler’s Island near the mouth of the Altamaha River.  When his two grandsons inherited the estate, they used it as a source of revenue but not as a home.  One of these was Pierce Butler the younger, who lived in Philadelphia.  When Fanny Kemble, with fame preceding her, came to America in 1832, he became infatuated, followed her troupe from city to city, and married her in 1834.  The marriage was a mistake.  The slaveholder’s wife left the stage for the time being, but retained a militant English abolitionism.  When in December, 1838, she and her husband were about to go South for a winter on the plantations, she registered her horror of slavery in advance, and resolved to keep a journal of her experiences and observations.  The resulting record is gloomy enough.  The swarms of negroes were stupid and slovenly, the cabins and hospitals filthy, the women overdriven, the overseer callous, the master indifferent, and the new mistress herself, repudiating the title, was more irritable and meddlesome than helpful.[29] The short sojourn was long enough.  A few years afterward the ill-mated pair were divorced and Fanny Kemble resumed her own name and career.  Butler did not mend his ways.  In 1859 his half of the slaves, 429 in number, were sold at auction in Savannah to pay his debts.

[Footnote 29:  Frances Anne Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation in 1838-1839(London, 1863).]