When on a tour in Ireland he met and married
an actress, who at his death in 1796 inherited his plantation and 214
slaves. Two suitors for the widow's hand promptly appeared in Alexander
Baring, afterwards Lord Ashburton, and Charles Baring, his cousin. Mrs.
Heyward married the latter, who increased the estate to seven or eight
hundred acres in rice, yielding crops worth from twelve to thirty thousand
dollars. But instead of superintending its work in person Baring bought
a large tract in the North Carolina mountains, built a house there, and
carried thither some fifty slaves for his service. After squandering the
income for nearly fifty years, he sold off part of the slaves and mortgaged
the land; and when the plantation was finally surrendered in settlement of
Baring's debts, it fell into Nathaniel Heyward's possession.[28]
[Footnote 28: Notes by Louis Manigault of a conversation with Nathaniel
Heyward in 1846. M.S. in the collection above mentioned.]
Another case of absentee neglect, made notorious through Fanny Kemble's
_Journal_, was the group of rice and sea-island cotton plantations founded
by Senator Pierce Butler on and about Butler's Island near the mouth of the
Altamaha River.
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