rate.  You will get from Messrs. Habersham and Son the twilled wool and cotton, called by some ‘Hazzard’s cloth,’ for all the women and children, and get two or three dozen handkerchiefs so as to give each woman and girl one....  The shoes you will procure as usual from Mr. Habersham by sending down the measures in time."[15] Finally, the register of A.L.  Alexander’s plantation in the Georgia Piedmont contains record of the distributions from 1851 to 1864 on a steady schedule.  Every spring each man drew two cotton shirts and two pair of homespun woolen trousers, each woman a frock and chemises, and each child clothing or cloth in proportion; and every fall the men drew shirts, trousers and coats, the women shifts, petticoats, frocks and sacks, the children again on a similar scale, and the several families blankets as needed.[16]

[Footnote 11:  Plantation and Frontier, I, 203-208.]

[Footnote 12:  MS. records in the possession of W.H.  Stovall, Stovall, Miss.]

[Footnote 13:  Plantation and Frontier, I, 293, 294.]

[Footnote 14:  Ibid., 192, 193.]

[Footnote 15:  MS. copy in Manigault’s letter book.]

[Footnote 16:  MS. in the possession of Mrs. J.F.  Minis, Savannah, Ga.]

As for housing, the vestiges of the old slave quarters, some of which have stood abandoned for half a century, denote in many cases a sounder construction and greater comfort than most of the negroes in freedom have since been able to command.

With physical comforts provided, the birth-rate would take care of itself.  The pickaninnies were winsome, and their parents, free of expense and anxiety for their sustenance, could hardly have more of them than they wanted.  A Virginian told Olmsted, “he never heard of babies coming so fast as they did on his plantation; it was perfectly surprising";[17] and in Georgia, Howell Cobb’s negroes increased “like rabbits."[18] In Mississippi M.W.  Philips’ woman Amy had borne eleven children when at the age of thirty she was married by her master to a new husband, and had eight more thereafter, including a set of triplets.[19] But the culminating instance is the following as reported by a newspaper at Lynchburg, Virginia:  “VERY REMARKABLE.  There is now living in the vicinity of Campbell a negro woman belonging to a gentleman by the name of Todd; this woman is in her forty-second year and has had forty-one children and at this time is pregnant with her forty-second child, and possibly with her forty-third, as she has frequently had doublets."[20] Had childbearing been regulated in the interest of the masters, Todd’s woman would have had less than forty-one and Amy less than her nineteen, for such excesses impaired the vitality of the children.  Most of Amy’s, for example, died a few hours or days after birth.

[Footnote 17:  Olmsted, Seaboard Slave States, p. 57.]

[Footnote 18:  Plantation and Frontier, I, 179.]