The conversion of new negroes into plantation laborers, a process called “breaking in,” required always a mingling of delicacy and firmness.  Some planters distributed their new purchases among the seasoned households, thus delegating the task largely to the veteran slaves.  Others housed and tended them separately under the charge of a select staff of nurses and guardians and with frequent inspection from headquarters.  The mortality rate was generally high under either plan, ranging usually from twenty to thirty per cent, in the seasoning period of three or four years.  The deaths came from diseases brought from Africa, such as the yaws which was similar to syphilis; from debilities and maladies acquired on the voyage; from the change of climate and food; from exposure incurred in running away; from morbid habits such as dirt-eating; and from accident, manslaughter and suicide.[14]

[Footnote 14:  Long, Jamaica, II, 435; Edwards, West Indies, book 4, chap. 5; A Professional Planter, Rules, chap. 2; Thomas Roughley, Jamaica Planter’s Guide (London, 1823), pp. 118-120.]

The seasoned slaves were housed by families in separate huts grouped into “quarters,” and were generally assigned small tracts on the outskirts of the plantation on which to raise their own provision crops.  Allowances of clothing, dried fish, molasses, rum, salt, etc., were issued them from the commissary, together with any other provisions needed to supplement their own produce.  The field force of men and women, boys and girls was generally divided according to strength into three gangs, with special details for the mill, the coppers and the still when needed; and permanent corps were assigned to the handicrafts, to domestic service and to various incidental functions.  The larger the plantation, of course, the greater the opportunity of differentiating tasks and assigning individual slaves to employments fitted to their special aptitudes.

The planters put such emphasis upon the regularity and vigor of the routine that they generally neglected other equally vital things.  They ignored the value of labor-saving devices, most of them even shunning so obviously desirable an implement as the plough and using the hoe alone in breaking the land and cultivating the crops.  But still more serious was the passive acquiescence in the depletion of their slaves by excess of deaths over births.  This decrease amounted to a veritable decimation, requiring the frequent importation of recruits to keep the ranks full.  Long estimated this loss at about two per cent. annually, while Edwards reckoned that in his day there were surviving in Jamaica little more than one-third as many negroes as had been imported in the preceding career of the colony.[15] The staggering mortality rate among the new negroes goes far toward accounting for this; but even the seasoned groups generally failed to keep up their numbers.  The birth rate was