Lesser men felt the same stresses in plantation management.  An owner of ninety-six slaves told Olmsted that such was the trouble and annoyance his negroes caused him, in spite of his having an overseer, and such the loneliness of his isolated life, that he was torn between a desire to sell out at once and a temptation to hold on for a while in the expectation of higher prices.  At the home of another Virginian, Olmsted wrote:  “During three hours or more in which I was in company with the proprietor I do not think there were ten consecutive minutes uninterrupted by some of the slaves requiring his personal direction or assistance.  He was even obliged three times to leave the dinner table.  ‘You see,’ said he smiling, as he came in the last time, ‘a farmer’s life in this country is no sinecure,’” A third Virginian, endorsing Olmsted’s observations, wrote that a planter’s cares and troubles were endless; the slaves, men, women and children, infirm and aged, had wants innumerable; some were indolent, some obstinate, some fractious, and each class required different treatment.  With the daily wants of food, clothing and the like, “the poor man’s time and thoughts, indeed every faculty of mind, must be exercised on behalf of those who have no minds of their own."[28]

[Footnote 28:  F.L.  Olmsted, Seaboard Slave States, pp. 44, 58, 718.]

Harriet Martineau wrote on her tour of the South:  “Nothing struck me more than the patience of slave-owners ... with their slaves ...  When I considered how they love to be called ‘fiery Southerners,’ I could not but marvel at their mild forbearance under the hourly provocations to which they are liable in their homes.  Persons from New England, France or England, becoming slaveholders, are found to be the most severe masters and mistresses, however good their tempers may always have appeared previously.  They cannot, like the native proprietor, sit waiting half an hour for the second course, or see everything done in the worst possible manner, their rooms dirty, their property wasted, their plans frustrated, their infants slighted,—­themselves deluded by artifices—­they cannot, like the native proprietor, endure all this unruffled."[29] It is clear from every sort of evidence, if evidence were needed, that life among negro slaves and the successful management of them promoted, and wellnigh necessitated, a blending of foresight and firmness with kindliness and patience.  The lack of the former qualities was likely to bring financial ruin; the lack of the latter would make life not worth living; the possession of all meant a toleration of slackness in every concern not vital to routine.  A plantation was a bed of roses only if the thorns were turned aside.  Charles Eliot Norton, who like Olmsted, Hall, Miss Martineau and most other travelers, was hostile to slavery, wrote after a journey to Charleston in 1855:  “The change to a Northerner in coming South is always a great one when he steps over