[Footnote 40:  Adlard Welby, Visit to North America (London, 1821 ) reprinted in Thwaites ed., Early Western Travels, XII, 289]

[Footnote 41:  Basil Hall, Travels in the United States, III, 227, 228.]

[Footnote 42:  Olmsted, Seaboard Slave States, p. 146.]

As to the rate and character of the work, Hall said that in contrast with the hustle prevailing on the Northern farms, “in Carolina all mankind appeared comparatively idle."[43] Olmsted, when citing a Virginian’s remark that his negroes never worked enough to tire themselves, said on his own account:  “This is just what I have thought when I have seen slaves at work—­they seem to go through the motions of labor without putting strength into them.  They keep their powers in reserve for their own use at night, perhaps."[44] And Solon Robinson reported tersely from a rice plantation that the negroes plied their hoes “at so slow a rate, the motion would have given a quick-working Yankee convulsions."[45]

[Footnote 43:  Basil Hall, III, 117.]

[Footnote 44:  Seaboard Slave States, p. 91.]

[Footnote 45:  American Agriculturist, IX, 93.]

There was clearly no general prevalence of severity and strain in the regime.  There was, furthermore, little of that curse of impersonality and indifference which too commonly prevails in the factories of the present-day world where power-driven machinery sets the pace, where the employers have no relations with the employed outside of work hours, where the proprietors indeed are scattered to the four winds, where the directors confine their attention to finance, and where the one duty of the superintendent is to procure a maximum output at a minimum cost.  No, the planters were commonly in residence, their slaves were their chief property to be conserved, and the slaves themselves would not permit indifference even if the masters were so disposed.  The generality of the negroes insisted upon possessing and being possessed in a cordial but respectful intimacy.  While by no means every plantation was an Arcadia there were many on which the industrial and racial relations deserved almost as glowing accounts as that which the Englishman William Faux wrote in 1819 of the “goodly plantation” of the venerable Mr. Mickle in the uplands of South Carolina.[46] “This gentleman,” said he, “appears to me to be a rare example of pure and undefiled religion, kind and gentle in manners....  Seeing a swarm, or rather herd, of young negroes creeping and dancing about the door and yard of his mansion, all appearing healthy, happy and frolicsome and withal fat and decently clothed, both young and old, I felt induced to praise the economy under which they lived.  ‘Aye,’ said he, ’I have many black people, but I have never bought nor sold any in my life.  All that you see came to me with my estate by virtue of my father’s will.  They are all, old and young, true and faithful to my interests.