From one to four hundred pounds, according to the state of the plants, is the proper allowance for each hand per day.

In the days of slavery the “stint” was fixed by the overseer, and was required to be picked under severe penalties.  It is needless to say that this stint was sufficiently large to allow of no loitering during the entire day.  If the slave exceeded the quantity required of him, the excess was sometimes placed to his credit and deducted from a subsequent day.  This was by no means the universal custom.  Sometimes he received a small present or was granted some especial favor.  By some masters the stint was increased by the addition of the excess.  The task was always regulated by the condition of the cotton in the field.  Where it would sometimes be three hundred pounds, at others it would not exceed one hundred.

At the time I commenced my cotton-picking, the circumstances were not favorable to a large return.  The picking season begins in August or September, and is supposed to end before Christmas.  In my case it was late in January, and the winter rain had washed much of the cotton from the stalks.  Under the circumstances I could not expect more than fifty or seventy-five pounds per day for each person engaged.

During the first few days I did not weigh the cotton.  I knew the average was not more than fifty pounds to each person, but the estimates which the negroes made fixed it at two hundred pounds.  One night I astonished them by taking the weighing apparatus to the field and carefully weighing each basket.  There was much disappointment among all parties at the result.  The next day’s picking showed a surprising improvement.  After that time, each day’s work was tested and the result announced.  The “tell-tale,” as the scales were sometimes called, was an overseer from whom there was no escape.  I think the negroes worked faithfully as soon as they found there was no opportunity for deception.

I was visited by Mrs. B.’s agent a few days after I became a cotton-planter.  We took an inventory of the portable property that belonged to the establishment, and arranged some plans for our mutual advantage.  This agent was a resident of Natchez.  He was born in the North, but had lived so long in the slave States that his sympathies were wholly Southern.  He assured me the negroes were the greatest liars in the world, and required continual watching.  They would take every opportunity to neglect their work, and were always planning new modes of deception.  They would steal every thing of which they could make any use, and many articles that they could not possibly dispose of.  Pretending illness was among the most frequent devices for avoiding labor, and the overseer was constantly obliged to contend against such deception.  In short, as far as I could ascertain from this gentleman, the negro was the embodiment of all earthly wickedness.  Theft, falsehood, idleness, deceit, and many other sins which afflict mortals, were the especial heritance of the negro.