practice would have been still more common had not the laws discouraged it.[19] Some planters refused to leave their slaves in the full charge of deputies of any kind, even for short periods.  For example, Francis Corbin in 1819 explained to James Madison that he must postpone an intended visit because of the absence of his son.  “Until he arrives,” Corbin wrote, “I dare not, in common prudence, leave my affairs to the sole management of overseers, who in these days are little respected by our intelligent negroes, many of whom are far superior in mind, morals and manners to those who are placed in authority over them."[20]

[Footnote 19:  Olmsted, Seaboard States, p. 206.]

[Footnote 20:  Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings, XLIII, 261.]

Various phases of the problem of management are illustrated in a letter of A.H.  Pemberton of the South Carolina midlands to James H. Hammond at the end of 1846.  The writer described himself as unwilling to sacrifice his agricultural reading in order to superintend his slaves in person, but as having too small a force to afford the employment of an overseer pure and simple.  For the preceding year he had had one charged with the double function of working in person and supervising the slaves’ work also; but this man’s excess of manual zeal had impaired his managerial usefulness.  What he himself did was well done, said Pemberton, “and he would do all and leave the negroes to do virtually nothing; and as they would of course take advantage of this, what he did was more than counterbalanced by what they did not.”  Furthermore, this employee, “who worked harder than any man I ever saw,” used little judgment or foresight.  “Withal, he has always been accustomed to the careless Southern practice generally of doing things temporarily and in a hurry, just to last for the present, and allowing the negroes to leave plows and tools of all kinds just where they use them, no matter where, so that they have to be hunted all over the place when wanted.  And as to stock, he had no idea of any more attention to them than is common in the ordinarily cruel and neglectful habits of the South.”  Pemberton then turned to lamentation at having let slip a recent opportunity to buy at auction “a remarkably fine looking negro as to size and strength, very black, about thirty-five or forty, and so intelligent and trustworthy that he had charge of a separate plantation and eight or ten hands some ten or twelve miles from home.”  The procuring of such a foreman would precisely have solved Pemberton’s problem; the failure to do so left him in his far from hopeful search for a paragon manager and workman combined.[21]

[Footnote 21:  MS. among the Hammond papers in the Library of Congress.]