" Charles Manigault likewise required of
his overseer in Georgia a pledge to treat his negroes "all with kindness
and consideration in sickness and health." On J.W. Fowler's plantation in
the Yazoo-Mississippi delta from which we have seen in a preceding chapter
such excellent records of cotton picking, the preamble to the rules framed
in 1857 ran as follows: "The health, happiness, good discipline and
obedience, good, sufficient and comfortable clothing, a sufficiency
of good, wholesome and nutritious food for both man and beast being
indispensably necessary to successful planting, as well as for reasonable
dividends for the amount of capital invested, without saying anything about
the Master's duty to his dependents, to himself, and his God, I do hereby
establish the following rules and regulations for the management of my
Prairie plantation, and require an observance of the same by any and all
overseers I may at any time have in charge thereof."[1]
[Footnote 1: The Corbin, Weston, Manigault and Fowler instructions are
printed in _Plantation and Frontier_, I, 109-129.]
Joseph A.S. Acklen had his own rules printed in 1861 for the information of
applicants and the guidance of those who were employed as his overseers.
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