[Footnote 14:  Southern Patriot (Charleston, S. C), Jan. 9, 1821.]

[Footnote 15:  MS. Letter book, 1770-1787, among the Allason papers in the New York Public Library.]

[Footnote 16:  D.D.  Wallace, Life of Henry Laurens, pp. 21, 135.]

If the master lived on the plantation, as was most commonly the case, the overseer’s responsibilities were usually confined to the daily execution of orders in supervising the slaves in the fields and the quarters.  But when the master was an absentee the opportunity for abuses and misunderstandings increased.  Jurisdiction over slaves and the manner of its exercise were the grounds of most frequent complaint.  On the score of authority, for example, a Virginia overseer in the employ of Robert Carter wrote him in 1787 in despair at the conduct of a woman named Suckey:  “I sent for hir to Come in the morning to help Secoure the foder, but She Sent me word that She would not come to worke that Day, and that you had ordered her to wash hir Cloaiths and goo to Any meeting She pleased any time in the weke without my leafe, and on monday when I Come to Reken with hir about it She Said it was your orders and She would do it in Defiance of me....  I hope if Suckey is aloud that privilige more than the Rest, that she will bee moved to some other place, and one Come in her Room."[17] On the score of abuses, Stancil Barwick, an overseer in southwestern Georgia, wrote in 1855 to John B. Lamar:  “I received your letter on yesterday ev’ng.  Was vary sorry to hear that you had heard that I was treating your negroes so cruely.  Now, sir, I do say to you in truth that the report is false.  Thear is no truth in it.  No man nor set of men has ever seen me mistreat one of the negroes on the place.”  After declaring that miscarriages by two of the women had been due to no requirement of work, he continued:  “The reports that have been sent must have been carried from this place by negroes.  The fact is I have made the negro men work, an made them go strait.  That is what is the matter, an is the reason why my place is talk of the settlement.  I have found among the negro men two or three hard cases an I have had to deal rite ruff, but not cruly at all.  Among them Abram has been as triflin as any man on the place.  Now, sir, what I have wrote you is truth, and it cant be disputed by no man on earth,"[18]

[Footnote 17:  Plantation and Frontier, I, 325.]

[Footnote 18:  Ibid., I, 312, 313.]

To diminish the inducement for overdriving, the method of paying the overseers by crop shares, which commonly prevailed in the colonial period, was generally replaced in the nineteenth century by that of fixed salaries.  As a surer preventive of embezzlement, a trusty slave was in some cases given the store-house keys in preference to the overseer; and sometimes even when the master was an absentee an overseer was wholly dispensed with and a slave foreman was given full charge.  This