met the two at the old bargain.  Stepping towards them, I now learned that she was pleading for other privileges—­her friends and favourites must be allowed to visit her.[23] At length she agreed to go and visit her proposed home and see how things looked.”  That the scruples of proprietors occasionally prevented the placing of slaves is indicated by a letter of a Georgia woman anent her girl Betty and a free negro woman, Matilda:  “I cannot agree for Betty to be hired to Matilda—­her character is too bad.  I know her of old; she is a drunkard, and is said to be bad in every respect.  I would object her being hired to any colored person no matter what their character was; and if she cannot get into a respectable family I had rather she came home, and if she can’t work out put her to spinning and weaving.  Her relations here beg she may not be permitted to go to Matilda.  She would not be worth a cent at the end of the year."[24]

The cooerdination of demand and supply was facilitated in some towns by brokers.  Thus J. de Bellievre of Baton Rouge maintained throughout 1826 a notice in the local Weekly Messenger of “Servants to hire by the day or month,” including both artizans and domestics; and in the Nashville city directory of 1860 Van B. Holman advertised his business as an agent for the hiring of negroes as well as for the sale and rental of real estate.

[Footnote 23:  Ibid.]

[Footnote 24:  Letter of Mrs. S.R.  Cobb, Cowpens, Ga., Jan. 9 1843, to her daughter-in-law at Athens.  MS. in the possession of Mrs. A.S.  Erwin, Athens, Ga.]

Slave wages, generally quoted for the year and most frequently for unskilled able-bodied hands, ranged materially higher, of course, in the cotton belt than in the upper South.  Women usually brought about half the wages of men, though they were sometimes let merely for the keep of themselves and their children.  In middle Georgia the wages of prime men ranged about $100 in the first decade of the nineteenth century, dropped to $60 or $75 during the war of 1812, and then rose to near $150 by 1818.  The panic of the next year sent them down again; and in the ’twenties they commonly ranged between $100 and $125.  Flush times then raised them in such wise that the contractors digging a canal on the Georgia coast found themselves obliged in 1838 to offer $18 per month together with the customary weekly rations of three and a half pounds of bacon and ten quarts of corn and also the services of a staff physician as a sort of substitute for life and health insurance.[25] The beginning of the distressful ’forties eased the market so that the town of Milledgeville could get its street gang on a scale of $125;[26] at the middle of the decade slaveowners were willing to take almost any wages offered; and in its final year the Georgia Railroad paid only $70 to $75 for section hands.  In 1850, however, this rate leaped to $100 and $110, and caused a partial substitution of white laborers for the hired slaves;[27]