The virtue or vice of the system, as with the
gang alternative, depended upon its use by a diligent master or its abuse
by an excessive delegation of responsibility.
[Footnote 25: Olmsted, _Seaboard Slave States_, pp. 435, 436.]
[Footnote 26: J.A. Turner, ed., _Cotton Planter's Manual_, p. 34.]
That the tide when taken at the flood on the rice coast as elsewhere
would lead to fortune is shown by the career of the greatest of all rice
planters, Nathaniel Heyward. At the time of his birth, in 1766, his father
was a planter on an inland swamp near Port Royal. Nathaniel himself after
establishing a small plantation in his early manhood married Harriett
Manigault, an heiress with some fifty thousand dollars. With this, when
both lands and slaves were cheap, Heyward bought a tide-land tract and
erected four plantations thereon, and soon had enough accrued earnings to
buy the several inland plantations of the Gibbes brothers, who had fallen
into debt from luxurious living. With the proceeds of his large crops at
high prices during the great wars in Europe, he bought more slaves year
after year, preferably fresh Africans as long as that cheap supply remained
available, and he bought more land when occasion offered.
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