having finished their day’s work.”  As to punishment, Olmsted asked how often it was necessary.  The master replied:  “’Sometimes perhaps not once for two or three weeks; then it will seem as if the devil had gotten into them all and there is a good deal of it.’” As to matings:  “While watching the negroes in the field, Mr. X. addressed a girl who was vigorously plying a hoe near us:  ’Is that Lucy?—­Ah, Lucy, what’s this I hear about you?’ The girl simpered, but did not answer or discontinue her work.  ‘What is this I hear about you and Sam, eh?’ The girl grinned and still hoeing away with all her might whispered ‘Yes, sir.’  ’Sam came to see me this morning,’ ‘If master pleases.’  ’Very well; you may come up to the house Saturday night, and your mistress will have something for you.’"[31] We may hope that the pair whose prospective marriage was thus endorsed with the promise of a bridal gift lived happily ever after.

[Footnote 31:  Olmsted, Seaboard Slave States,418-448.]

The most detailed record of rice operations available is that made by Charles Manigault from the time of his purchase in 1833 of “Gowrie,” on the Savannah River, twelve miles above the city of Savannah.[32] The plantation then had 220 acres in rice fields, 80 acres unreclaimed, a good pounding mill, and 50 slaves.  The price of $40,000 was analyzed by Manigault as comprising $7500 for the mill, $70 per acre for the cleared, and $37 for the uncleared, and an average of $300 for the slaves.  His maintenance expense per hand he itemized at a weekly peck of corn, $13 a year; summer and winter clothes, $7; shoes, $1; meat at times, salt, molasses and medical attention, not estimated.  In reward for good service, however, Manigault usually issued broken rice worth $2.50 per bushel, instead of corn worth $1.  Including the overseer’s wages the current expense for the plantation for the first six years averaged about $2000 annually.  Meanwhile the output increased from 200 barrels of rice in 1833 to 578 in 1838.  The crop in the latter year was particularly notable, both in its yield of three barrels per acre, or 161-1/2 barrels per working hand, and its price of four cents per pound or $24 per barrel.  The net proceeds of the one crop covered the purchase in 1839 of two families of slaves, comprising sixteen persons, mostly in or approaching their prime, at a price of $640 each.

[Footnote 32:  The Manigault MSS. are in the possession of Mrs. H.K.  Jenkins, Pinopolis, S.C.  Selections from them are printed in Plantation and Frontier, I, 134-139 et passim.]

Manigault and his family were generally absent every summer and sometimes in winter, at Charleston or in Europe, and once as far away as China.  His methods of administration may be gathered from his letters, contracts and memoranda.  In January, 1848, he wrote from Naples to I.F.  Cooper whom his factor had employed at $250 a year as a new overseer on Gowrie:  “My negroes have the reputation of being orderly