When abroad where things are
on a greater scale, our ideas keep pace with them. I always find such to be
my case; and if I live to a hundred I reckon it will always be so."
[Footnote 31: Lamar's MSS. are in the possession of Mrs. A.S. Erwin,
Athens, Ga. Selections from them are printed in _Plantation and Frontier_,
I, 167-183, 309-312, II, 38, 41.]
Lamar could command strong words, as when a physician demanded five hundred
dollars for services at Hurricane in 1844, or when overseers were detected
in drunkenness or cruelty; but his most characteristic complaints were of
his own short-comings as a manager and of the crotchets of his relatives.
His letters were always cheery, and his repeated disappointments in
overseers never damped his optimism concerning each new incumbent. His
old lands contented him until he found new and more fertile ones to buy,
whereupon his jubilation was great. When cotton was low he called himself a
toad under the harrow; but rising markets would set him to counting bales
before the seed had more than sprouted and to building new plantations in
the air. In actual practice his log-cabin slave quarters gave place to
frame houses; his mules were kept in full force; his production of corn and
bacon was nearly always ample for the needs of each place; his slaves were
permitted to raise nankeen cotton on their private accounts; and his own
frequent journeys of inspection and stimulus, as he said, kept up an
_esprit du corps_.
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