Sunday July 10, 1853 Peyton is no more Aged 42 Though he was a bad man in many respects yet he was a most excellent field hand, always at his post.  On this place for 21 years.  Except the measles and its sequence, the injury rec’d by the mule last Nov’r and its sequence, he has not lost 15 days’ work, I verily believe, in the remaining 19 years.  I wish we could hope for his eternal state.

Should anyone in the twentieth century wish to see the old-fashioned prime negro at his best, let him take a Mississippi steamboat and watch the roustabouts at work—­those chaffing and chattering, singing and swinging, lusty and willing freight handlers, whom a river captain plying out of New Orleans has called the noblest black men that God ever made.[4] Ready at every touching of the shore day and night, resting and sleeping only between landings, they carry their loads almost at running speed, and when returning for fresh burdens they “coonjine” by flinging their feet in semi-circles at every step, or cutting other capers in rhythm to show their fellows and the gallery that the strain of the cotton bales, the grain sacks, the oil barrels and the timbers merely loosen their muscles and lighten their spirits.

[Footnote 4:  Captain L.V.  Cooley, Address Before the Tulane Society of Economics, New Orleans, April 11th, 1911, on River Transportation and Its Relation to New Orleans, Past, Present and Future. [New Orleans, 1911.]]

Such an exhibit would have been the despair of the average ante-bellum planter, for instead of choosing among hundreds of applicants and rejecting or discharging those who fell short of a high standard, he had to make shift with such laborers as the slave traders chanced to bring or as his women chanced to rear.  His common problem was to get such income and comfort as he might from a parcel of the general run; and the creation of roustabout energy among them would require such vigor and such iron resolution on his own part as was forthcoming in extremely few cases.

Theoretically the master might be expected perhaps to expend the minimum possible to keep his slaves in strength, to discard the weaklings and the aged, to drive his gang early and late, to scourge the laggards hourly, to secure the whole with fetters by day and with bolts by night, and to keep them in perpetual terror of his wrath.  But Olmsted, who seems to have gone South with the thought of finding some such theory in application, wrote:  “I saw much more of what I had not anticipated and less of what I had in the slave states than, with a somewhat extended travelling experience, in any other country I ever visited";[5] and Nehemiah Adams, who went from Boston to Georgia prepared to weep with the slaves who wept, found himself laughing with the laughing ones instead.[6]

[Footnote 5:  Olmsted, Seaboard Slave States, p. 179.]

[Footnote 6:  Nehemiah Adams. A Southside View of Slavery, or Three Months in the South in 1854 (Boston, 1854), chap. 2.]