Lamar could command strong words, as when a physician demanded five hundred dollars for services at Hurricane in 1844, or when overseers were detected in drunkenness or cruelty; but his most characteristic complaints were of his own short-comings as a manager and of the crotchets of his relatives.  His letters were always cheery, and his repeated disappointments in overseers never damped his optimism concerning each new incumbent.  His old lands contented him until he found new and more fertile ones to buy, whereupon his jubilation was great.  When cotton was low he called himself a toad under the harrow; but rising markets would set him to counting bales before the seed had more than sprouted and to building new plantations in the air.  In actual practice his log-cabin slave quarters gave place to frame houses; his mules were kept in full force; his production of corn and bacon was nearly always ample for the needs of each place; his slaves were permitted to raise nankeen cotton on their private accounts; and his own frequent journeys of inspection and stimulus, as he said, kept up an esprit du corps.  When an overseer reported that his slaves were down with fever by the dozen and his cotton wasting in the fields, Lamar would hasten thither with a physician and a squad of slaves impressed from another plantation, to care for the sick and the crop respectively.  He redistributed slaves among his plantations with a view to a better balancing of land and labor, but was deterred from carrying this policy as far as he thought might be profitable by his unwillingness to separate the families.  His absence gave occasion sometimes for discontent among his slaves; yet when the owners of others who were for sale authorized them to find their own purchasers his well known justice, liberality and good nature made “Mas John” a favorite recourse.

As to crops and management, Lamar indicated his methods in criticizing those of a relative:  “Uncle Jesse still builds air castles and blinds himself to his affairs.  Last year he tinkered away on tobacco and sugar cane, things he knew nothing about....  He interferes with the arrangements of his overseers, and has no judgment of his own....  If he would employ a competent overseer and move off the plantation with his family he could make good crops, as he has a good force of hands and good lands....  I have found that it is unprofitable to undertake anything on a plantation out of the regular routine.  If I had a little place off to itself, and my business would admit of it, I should delight in agricultural experiments.”  In his reliance upon staple routine, as in every other characteristic, Lamar rings true to the planter type.

CHAPTER XV

PLANTATION LABOR