sleekness as well as the joviality of the negroes in the grinding season;[63] and even if exhaustion had been characteristic instead, the brevity of the period would have prevented any serious debilitating effect before the coming of the more leisurely schedule after harvest.  In fact many neighboring Creole and Acadian farmers, fishermen and the like were customarily enlisted on wages as plantation recruits in the months of stress.[64] The sugar district furthermore was the one plantation area within easy reach of a considerable city whence a seasonal supply of extra hands might be had to save the regular forces from injury.  The fact that a planter, as reported by Sir Charles Lyell, failed to get a hundred recruits one year in the midst of the grinding season[65] does not weaken this consideration.  It may well have been that his neighbors had forestalled him in the wage-labor market, or that the remaining Germans and Irish in the city refused to take the places of their fellows who were on strike.  It is well established that sugar planters had systematic recourse to immigrant labor for ditching and other severe work.[66] It is incredible that they ignored the same recourse if at any time the requirements of their crop threatened injury to their property in slaves.  The recommendation of the old Roman, Varro, that freemen be employed in harvesting to save the slaves[67] would apply with no more effect, in case of need, to the pressing of oil and wine than to the grinding of sugar-cane.  Two months’ wages to a Creole, a “’Cajun” or an Irishman would be cheap as the price of a slave’s continued vigor, even when slave prices were low.  On the whole, however, the stress of the grinding was not usually as great as has been fancied.  Some of the regular hands in fact were occasionally spared from the harvest at its height and set to plow and plant for the next year’s crop.[68]

[Footnote 63:  E. g., Olmsted, Seaboard Slave States, p. 668.]

[Footnote 64:  DeBow’s Review, XI, 606.]

[Footnote 65:  See above, p. 337.]

[Footnote 66:  See above, pp. 301, 302.]

[Footnote 67:  Varro, De Re Rustica, I, XVII, 2.]

[Footnote 68:  E. g., items for November, 1849, in the plantation diary of Dr. John P.R.  Stone, of Iberville Parish, Louisiana.  For the use of this document, the MS. of which is in the possession of Mr. John Stone Ware, White-Castle, La., I am indebted to Mr. V. Alton Moody, of the University of Michigan, now Lieutenant in the American Expeditionary Force in France.]

The further question arises:  how could a master who set himself to work a slave to death in seven years make sure on the one hand that the demise would not be precipitated within a few months instead, and on the other that the consequence would not be merely the slave’s incapacitation instead of his death?  In the one case a serious loss would be incurred at once; in the other the stoppage of the slave’s