the planter’s own white variety without certain detection when it reached the gin.  The scale which the slave crops attained on some plantations is indicated by the proceeds of $1,969.65 in 1859 from the nankeen of the negroes on the estate of Allen McWalker in Taylor County, Georgia.[38] Such returns might be distributed in cash; but planters generally preferred for the sake of sobriety that money should not be freely handled by the slaves.  Earnings as well as gifts were therefore likely to be issued in the form of tickets for merchandise.  David Ross, for example, addressed the following to the firm of Allen and Ellis at Fredericksburg in the Christmas season of 1802:  “Gentlemen:  Please to let the bearer George have ten dollars value in anything he chooses”; and the merchants entered a memorandum that George chose two handkerchiefs, two hats, three and a half yards of linen, a pair of hose, and six shillings in cash.[39]

[Footnote 37:  John Drayton, View of South Carolina (Charleston, 1802), p. 128.]

[Footnote 38:  Macon, Ga., Telegraph, Feb. 3, 1859, quoted in DeBow’s Review, XXIX, 362, note.]

[Footnote 39:  MS. among the Allen and Ellis papers in the Library of Congress.]

In general the most obvious way of preventing trouble was to avoid the occasion for it.  If tasks were complained of as too heavy, the simplest recourse was to reduce the schedule.  If jobs were slackly done, acquiescence was easier than correction.  The easy-going and plausible disposition of the blacks conspired with the heat of the climate to soften the resolution of the whites and make them patient.  Severe and unyielding requirements would keep everyone on edge; concession when accompanied with geniality and not indulged so far as to cause demoralization would make plantation life not only tolerable but charming.

In the actual regime severity was clearly the exception, and kindliness the rule.  The Englishman Welby, for example, wrote in 1820:  “After travelling through three slave states I am obliged to go back to theory to raise any abhorrence of it.  Not once during the journey did I witness an instance of cruel treatment nor could I discover anything to excite commiseration in ’the faces or gait of the people of colour.  They walk, talk and appear at least as independent as their masters; in animal spirits they have greatly the advantage."[40] Basil Hall wrote in 1828:  “I have no wish, God knows! to defend slavery in the abstract; ... but ... nothing during my recent journey gave me more satisfaction than the conclusion to which I was gradually brought that the planters of the Southern states of America, generally speaking, have a sincere desire to manage their estates with the least possible severity.  I do not say that undue severity is nowhere exercised; but the discipline, taken upon the average, as far as I could learn, is not more strict than is necessary for the maintenance of a proper degree of authority, without which the whole framework of society in that quarter would be blown to atoms."[41] And Olmsted wrote:  “The only whipping of slaves that I have seen in Virginia has been of these wild, lazy children as they are being broke in to work."[42]