In the matter of sanitation, Acklen directed the overseer to see that the negroes kept clean in person, to inspect their houses at least once a week and especially during the summer, to examine their bedding and see to its being well aired, to require that their clothes be mended, “and everything attended to which conduces to their comfort and happiness.”  In these regards, as in various others, Fowler incorporated Acklen’s rules in his own, almost verbatim.  Hammond scheduled an elaborate cleaning of the houses every spring and fall.  The houses were to be completely emptied and their contents sunned, the walls and floors were to be scrubbed, the mattresses to be emptied and stuffed with fresh hay or shucks, the yards swept and the ground under the houses sprinkled with lime.  Furthermore, every house was to be whitewashed inside and out once a year; and the negroes must appear once a week in clean clothes, “and every negro habitually uncleanly in person must be washed and scrubbed by order of the overseer—­the driver and two other negroes officiating.”

As to schedules of work, the Carolina and Georgia lowlanders dealt in tasks; all the rest in hours.  Telfair wrote briefly:  “The negroes to be tasked when the work allows it.  I require a reasonable day’s work, well done—­the task to be regulated by the state of the ground and the strength of the negro.”  Weston wrote with more elaboration:  “A task is as much work as the meanest full hand can do in nine hours, working industriously....  This task is never to be increased, and no work is to be done over task except under the most urgent necessity; which over-work is to be reported to the proprietor, who will pay for it.  No negro is to be put into a task which [he] cannot finish with tolerable ease.  It is a bad plan to punish for not finishing tasks; it is subversive of discipline to leave tasks unfinished, and contrary to justice to punish for what cannot be done.  In nothing does a good manager so much excel a bad as in being able to discern what a hand is capable of doing, and in never attempting to make him do more.”  In Hammond’s schedule the first horn was blown an hour before daylight as a summons for work-hands to rise and do their cooking and other preparations for the day.  Then at the summons of the plow driver, at first break of day, the plowmen went to the stables whose doors the overseer opened.  At the second horn, “just at good daylight,” the hoe gang set out for the field.  At half past eleven the plowmen carried their mules to a shelter house in the fields, and at noon the hoe hands laid off for dinner, to resume work at one o’clock, except that in hot weather the intermission was extended to a maximum of three and a half hours.  The plowmen led the way home by a quarter of an hour in the evening, and the hoe hands followed at sunset.  “No work,” said Hammond, “must ever be required after dark.”  Acklen contented himself with specifying that “the negroes must all rise at the ringing of the first bell in the morning, and retire when the last bell rings at night, and not leave their houses after that hour unless on business or called.”  Fowler’s rule was of the same tenor:  “All hands should be required to retire to rest and sleep at a suitable hour and permitted to remain there until such time as it will be necessary to get out in time to reach their work by the time they can see well how to work.”