on an Ohio River steamboat.  The tale thus vouched for contained the assertion that sugar planters found that by the excessive driving of slaves day and night in the grinding season they could so increase their output that “they could afford to sacrifice one set of hands in seven years,” and “that this horrible system was now practised to a considerable extent.”  The second citation was likewise to Weld for a statement by Mr. Samuel Blackwell of Jersey City, whose testimonial lay in the fact of his membership in the Presbyterian church, that while on a tour in Louisiana “the planters generally declared to him that they were obliged so to overwork their slaves during the sugar-making season (from eight to ten weeks) as to use them up in seven or eight years.”  The third was to the Rev. Mr. Reed of London who after a tour in Maryland, Virginia and Kentucky in 1834 published the following:  “I was told, confidentially, from excellent authority, that recently at a meeting of planters in South Carolina the question was seriously discussed whether the slave is more profitable to the owner if well fed, well clothed and worked lightly, or if made the most of at once and exhausted in some eight years.  The decision was in favor of the last alternative"[61] An anonymous writer in 1857 repeated this last item without indication of its date or authority but with a shortening of the period of exhaustion to “some four or five years."[62]

[Footnote 59:  Frances A. Kemble, Journal (New York, 1863), p. 28.]

[Footnote 60:  G.W.  Featherstonhaugh, Excursion Through the Slave States (London, 1844), I, 120.  Though Featherstonhaugh afterward visited New Orleans his book does not recur to this topic.]

[Footnote 61:  William Goodell, The American Slave Code in Theory and Practise (New York, 1853), pp. 79-81, citing Theodore Weld, Slavery as it is, p 39, and Mattheson, Visit to the American Churches, II, 173.]

[Footnote 62:  The Suppressed Book about Slavery!  Prepared for publication in 1857, never published until the present time (New York, 1864), p. 211.]

These assertions, which have been accepted by some historians as valid, prompt a series of reflections.  In the first place, anyone who has had experience with negro labor may reasonably be skeptical when told that healthy, well fed negroes, whether slave or free, can by any routine insistence of the employer be driven beyond the point at which fatigue begins to be injurious.  In the second place, plantation work as a rule had the limitation of daylight hours; in plowing, mules which could not be hurried set the pace; in hoeing, haste would imperil the plants by enhancing the proportion of misdirected strokes; and in the harvest of tobacco, rice and cotton much perseverance but little strain was involved.  The sugar harvest alone called for heavy exertion and for night work in the mill.  But common report in that regard emphasized the sturdy