of this plantation, however, lay in its device for profit sharing.  To each slave was assigned a half-acre plot with the promise that if he worked with diligence in the master’s crop the whole gang would in turn be set to work his crop.  This was useful in preventing night and Sunday work by the negroes.  The proceeds of their crops, ranging from ten to fifty dollars, were expended by the master at their direction for Sunday clothing and other supplies.[12] On a sugar plantation visited by Olmsted a sum of as many dollars as there were hogsheads in the year’s crop was distributed among the slaves every Christmas.[13]

[Footnote 11:  Pleasant Suit, Farmer’s Accountant and Instructions for Overseers (Richmond, Va., 1828); Affleck’s Cotton Plantation Record and Account Book, reprinted in DeBow’s Review, XVIII, 339-345, and in Thomas W. Knox, Campfire and Cotton Field (New York, 1865), pp. 358-364. See also for varied and interesting data as to rules, experience and advice; Thomas S. Clay (of Bryan County, Georgia), Detail of a Plan for the Moral Improvement of Negroes on Plantations (1833); and DeBow’s Review, XII, 291, 292; XIX, 358-363; XXI, 147-149, 277-279; XXIV, 321-326; XXV, 463; XXVI, 579, 580; XXIX, 112-115, 357-368.]

[Footnote 12:  Southern Quarterly Review, XXI, 215, 216.]

[Footnote 13:  Olmsted, Seaboard Slave States, p. 660.]

Of overseers in general, the great variety in their functions, their scales of operation and their personal qualities make sweeping assertions hazardous.  Some were at just one remove from the authority of a great planter, as is suggested by the following advertisement:  “Wanted, a manager to superintend several rice plantations on the Santee River.  As the business is extensive, a proportionate salary will be made, and one or two young men of his own selection employed under him.[14] A healthful summer residence on the seashore is provided for himself and family.”  Others were hardly more removed from the status of common field hands.  Lawrence Tompkins, for example, signed with his mark in 1779 a contract to oversee the four slaves of William Allason, near Alexandria, and to work steadily with them.  He was to receive three barrels of corn and three hundred pounds of pork as his food allowance, and a fifth share of the tobacco, hemp and flax crops and a sixth of the corn; but if he neglected his work he might be dismissed without pay of any sort.[15] Some overseers were former planters who had lost their property, some were planters’ sons working for a start in life, some were English and German farmers who had brought their talents to what they hoped might prove the world’s best market, but most of them were of the native yeomanry which abounded in virtually all parts of the South.  Some owned a few slaves whom they put on hire into their employers’ gangs, thereby hastening their own attainment of the means to become planters on their own score.[16]