[Footnote 23:  MS. preserved on the plantation, owned by ex-Governor H.C.  War-moth.]

Of epidemics, yellow fever was of minor concern as regards the slaves, for negroes were largely immune to it; but cholera sometimes threatened to exterminate the slaves and bankrupt their masters.  After a visitation of this in and about New Orleans in 1832, John McDonogh wrote to a friend:  “All that you have seen of yellow fever was nothing in comparison.  It is supposed that five or six thousand souls, black and white, were carried off in fourteen days."[24] The pecuniary loss in Louisiana from slave deaths in that epidemic was estimated at four million dollars.[25] Two years afterward it raged in the Savannah neighborhood.  On Mr. Wightman’s plantation, ten miles above the city, there were in the first week of September fifty-three cases and eighteen deaths.  The overseer then checked the spread by isolating the afflicted ones in the church, the barn and the mill.  The neighboring planters awaited only the first appearance of the disease on their places to abandon their crops and hurry their slaves to lodges in the wilderness.[26] Plagues of smallpox were sometimes of similar dimensions.

[Footnote 24:  William Allen, Life of John McDonogh (Baltimore, 1886), p. 54.]

[Footnote 25:  Niles’ Register, XLV, 84]

[Footnote 26:  Federal Union (Milledgeville, Ga.), Sept. 14 and 17 and Oct. 22, 1834.]

Even without pestilence, deaths might bring a planter’s ruin.  A series of them drove M.W.  Philips to exclaim in his plantation journal:  “Oh! my losses almost make me crazy.  God alone can help.”  In short, planters must guard their slaves’ health and life as among the most vital of their own interests; for while crops were merely income, slaves were capital.  The tendency appears to have been common, indeed, to employ free immigrant labor when available for such work as would involve strain and exposure.  The documents bearing on this theme are scattering but convincing.  Thus E.J.  Forstall when writing in 1845 of the extension of the sugar fields, said thousands of Irishmen were seen in every direction digging plantation ditches;[27] T.B.  Thorpe when describing plantation life on the Mississippi in 1853 said the Irish proved the best ditchers;[28] and a Georgia planter when describing his drainage of a swamp in 1855 said that Irish were hired for the work in order that the slaves might continue at their usual routine.[29] Olmsted noted on the Virginia seaboard that “Mr. W.... had an Irish gang draining for him by contract.”  Olmsted asked, “why he should employ Irishmen in preference to doing the work with his own hands.  ’It’s dangerous work,’ the planter replied, ’and a negro’s life is too valuable to be risked at it.  If a negro dies, it is a considerable loss you know,’"[30] On a Louisiana plantation W.H.  Russell wrote in 1860:  “The labor of ditching, trenching, cleaning the waste lands and hewing down the forests