The food allowance was a peck of corn and
four pounds of pork weekly. Each family, furthermore, had its garden, fowl
house and pigsty; every Christmas the master distributed among them coffee,
molasses, tobacco, calico and "Sunday tricks" to the value of from a
thousand to fifteen hundred dollars; and every man might rive boards in the
swamp on Sundays to buy more supplies, or hunt and fish in leisure times to
vary his family's fare. Saturday afternoon was also free from the routine.
Occasionally a slave would run away, but he was retaken sooner or later,
sometimes by the aid of dogs. A persistent runaway was disposed of by
sale.[13]
[Footnote 13: F.L. Olmsted, _A Journey in the Back Country_ (New York,
1860), pp. 46-54.]
Another estate in the same district, which Olmsted observed more cursorily,
comprised four adjoining plantations, each with its own stables and
quarter, each employing more than a hundred slaves under a separate
overseer, and all directed by a steward whom the traveler described as
cultured, poetic and delightful. An observation that women were at some
of the plows prompted Olmsted to remark that throughout the Southwest the
slaves were worked harder as a rule than in the easterly and northerly
slaveholding states.
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