The soils used for these crops were so sandy and light, however, that
the tasks, staked off each day by the drivers, ranged larger than those in
rice. In the cotton fields they were about half an acre per hand, whether
for listing, bedding or cultivation. In the collecting and spreading of
swamp mud and other manures for the cotton the work was probably done
mostly by gangs rather than by task, since the units were hard to measure.
In cotton picking, likewise, the conditions of the crop were so variable
and the need of haste so great that time work, perhaps with special rewards
for unusually heavy pickings, was the common resort. Thus the lowland
cotton regime alternated the task and gang systems according to the work
at hand; and even the rice planters of course abandoned all thoughts of
stinted performance when emergency pressed, as in the mending of breaks in
the dikes, or when joint exertion was required, as in log rolling, or when
threshing and pounding with machinery to set the pace.
That the task system was extended sporadically into the South Carolina
Piedmont, is indicated by a letter of a certain Thomas Parker of the
Abbeville district, in 1831,[39] which not only described his methods but
embodied an essential plantation precept.
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