He bought the three
contiguous plantations of Col. J.S. Preston lying opposite Donaldsonville,
and soon added a fourth one to the group. In 1858 his aggregate crop was
3,701 hogsheads; and in 1861 his fields were described by William H.
Russell as exhibiting six thousand acres of cane in an unbroken tract. By
employing squads of immigrant Irishmen for ditching and other severe
work he kept his literally precious negroes, well housed and fed, in
fit condition for effective routine under his well selected staff of
overseers.[23] Even after the war Burnside kept on acquiring plantations,
and with free negro labor kept on making large sugar crops. At the end of
his long life, spent frugally as a bachelor and somewhat of a recluse,
he was doubtless by far the richest man in all the South. The number of
planters who had been merchants and the frequency of partnerships and
corporations operating sugar estates, as well as the magnitude of scale
characteristic of the industry, suggest that methods of a strictly business
kind were more common in sugar production than in that of cotton or
tobacco. Domesticity and paternalism were nevertheless by no means alien to
the sugar regime.
Pages:
419
420
421
422
423
424
425
426
427
428
429
430
431
432
433
434
435
436
437
438
439
440
441
442
443