the boundary of the free states; and the farther you go towards the South the more absolutely do shiftlessness and careless indifference take the place of energy and active precaution and skilful management....  The outside first aspect of slavery has nothing horrible and repulsive about it.  The slaves do not go about looking unhappy, and are with difficulty, I fancy, persuaded to feel so.  Whips and chains, oaths and brutality, are as common, for all that one sees, in the free as the slave states.  We have come thus far, and might have gone ten times as far, I dare say, without seeing the first sign of negro misery or white tyranny."[30] If, indeed, the neatness of aspect be the test of success, most plantations were failures; if the test of failure be the lack of harmony and good will, it appears from the available evidence that most plantations were successful.

[Footnote 29:  Harriet Martineau, Society in America (London, 1837), II 315, 316.]

[Footnote 30:  Charles Eliot Norton, Letters (Boston, 1913), I, 121.]

The concerns and the character of a high-grade planter may be gathered from the correspondence of John B. Lamar, who with headquarters in the town of Macon administered half a dozen plantations belonging to himself and his kinsmen scattered through central and southwestern Georgia and northern Florida.[31] The scale of his operations at the middle of the nineteenth century may be seen from one of his orders for summer cloth, presumably at the rate of about five yards per slave.  This was to be shipped from Savannah to the several plantations as follows:  to Hurricane, the property of Howell Cobb, Lamar’s brother-in-law, 760 yards; to Letohatchee, a trust estate in Florida belonging to the Lamar family, 500 yards; and to Lamar’s own plantations the following:  Swift Creek, 486; Harris Place, 360; Domine, 340; and Spring Branch, 229.  Of his course of life Lamar wrote:  “I am one half the year rattling over rough roads with Dr. Physic and Henry, stopping at farm houses in the country, scolding overseers in half a dozen counties and two states, Florida and Georgia, and the other half in the largest cities of the Union, or those of Europe, living on dainties and riding on rail-cars and steamboats.  When I first emerge from Swift Creek into the hotels and shops on Broadway of a summer, I am the most economical body that you can imagine.  The fine clothes and expensive habits of the people strike me forcibly....  In a week I become used to everything, and in a month I forget my humble concern on Swift Creek and feel as much a nabob as any of them....  At home where everything is plain and comfortable we look on anything beyond that point as extravagant.  When abroad where things are on a greater scale, our ideas keep pace with them.  I always find such to be my case; and if I live to a hundred I reckon it will always be so.”

[Footnote 31:  Lamar’s MSS. are in the possession of Mrs. A.S.  Erwin, Athens, Ga.  Selections from them are printed in Plantation and Frontier, I, 167-183, 309-312, II, 38, 41.]