[Footnote 19:  Mississippi Historical Society Publications, X, 439, 443, 447, 480.]

[Footnote 20:  Louisiana Gazette (New Orleans), June 11, 1822, quoting the Lynchburg Press.]

A normal record is that of Fowler’s plantation, the “Prairie.”  Virtually all of the adult slaves were paired as husbands and wives except Caroline who in twenty years bore ten children.  Her husband was presumably the slave of some other master.  Tom and Milly had nine children in eighteen years; Harry and Jainy had seven in twenty-two years; Fanny had five in seventeen years with Ben as the father of all but the first born; Louisa likewise had five in nineteen years with Bob as the father of all but the first; and Hector and Mary had five in seven years.  On the other hand, two old couples and one in their thirties had had no children, while eight young pairs had from one to four each.[21] A lighter schedule was recorded on a Louisiana plantation called Bayou Cotonier, belonging to E. Tanneret, a Creole.  The slaves listed in 1859 as being fifteen years old and upwards comprised thirty-six males and thirty-seven females.  The “livre des naissances” showed fifty-six births between 1833 and 1859 distributed among twenty-three women, two of whom were still in their teens when the record ended.  Rhode bore six children between her seventeenth and thirty-fourth years; Henriette bore six between twenty-one and forty; Esther six between twenty-one and thirty-six; Fanny, four between twenty-five and thirty-two; Annette, four between thirty-three and forty; and the rest bore from one to three children each, including Celestine who had her first baby when fifteen and her second two years after.  None of the matings or paternities appear in the record, though the christenings and the slave godparents are registered.[22]

[Footnote 21:  MS. in the possession of W.H.  Stovall, Stovall, Miss.]

[Footnote 22:  MS. in the Howard Memorial Library, New Orleans.]

The death rate was a subject of more active solicitude.  This may be illustrated from the journal for 1859-1860 of the Magnolia plantation, forty miles below New Orleans.  Along with its record of rations to 138 hands, and of the occasional births, deaths, runaways and recaptures, and of the purchase of a man slave for $2300, it contains the following summary under date of October 4, 1860:  “We have had during the past eighteen months over 150 cases of measles and numerous cases of whooping cough, and then the diphtheria, all of which we have gone through with but little loss save in the whooping cough when we lost some twelve children.”  This entry was in the spirit of rejoicing at escape from disasters.  But on December 18 there were two items of another tone.  One of these was entered by an overseer named Kellett:  “[I] shot the negro boy Frank for attempting to cut at me and three boys with his cane knife with intent to kill.”  The other, in a different handwriting, recorded tersely:  “J.A.  Randall commenst buisnass this mornung.  J. Kellett discharged this morning.”  The owner could not afford to keep an overseer who killed negroes even though it might be in self defence.[23]