- sion to being planters, who give their overseer a proportion of the crop for
his wages; thus bribing him by the strongest inducements of self-interest, to overstrain and work down everything committed to his charge.
"No planter, who attends to his own business, can dispense with agents and sub-agents. It is impossible, on a plantation of any size, for the proprietor to attend to all the details, many of which are irksome and laborious, and he requires more intelligence to assist him than slaves usually possess. To him, therefore, a good overseer is a blessing. But an overseer who would answer the views of such a planter is most difficult to find. The men engaged in that occupation who combine the most intelligence, industry, and character, are allured into the service of those who place all power in their hands, and are ultimately spoiled."
An English traveller writes to the London Daily News
from Mississippi (1857):—
"On crossing the Big Block river, I left the sandhills and began to find
myself in the rich loam of the valley of the Mississippi. The plantations
became larger, the clearings more numerous and extensive, and the roads
less hilly, but worse. Along the Yazoo river one meets with some of the
richest soil in the world, and some of the largest crops of cotton in the
Union. My first night in that region was passed at the house of a planter
who worked but few hands, was a fast friend of slavery, and yet drew for
my benefit one of the most mournful pictures of a slave's life I have ever
met with. He said, and I believe truly, that the negroes of small planters
are, on the whole, well treated, or at least as well as the owners can afford
to treat them. Their master not unfrequently works side by side with them
in the fields. * * * But on the large plantations, where the business
is carried on by an overseer, and everything is conducted with military
strictness and discipline, he described matters as being widely different.
The future of the overseer depends altogether on the quantity of cotton he is
able to make up for the market. Whether the owner be resident or non-resident,
if the plantation be large, and a great number of hands be employed
upon it, the overseer gets credit for a large crop, and blame for a
small one. His professional reputation depends in a great measure upon
the number of bales or hogsheads he is able to produce, and neither his
education nor his habits are such as to render it likely that he would allow
any consideration for the negroes to stand in the way of his advancing it.
His interest is to get as much work out of them as they can possibly
perform. His skill consists in knowing exactly how hard they may be
driven without incapacitating them for future exertion. The larger the
plantation the less chance there is, of course, of the owner's softening the
rigour of the overseer, or the sternness of discipline by personal interference.
So, as Mr. H said, a vast mass of the slaves pass their lives, from the
moment they are able to go afield in the picking season till they drop worn
