tides from the
ocean, perfecting a complete system of drainage and irrigation. He built
comfortable quarters for his slaves, and erected a church and
schoolhouse for their use. From the original two hundred and eighty
acres of cultivated rice land, the new proprietor developed the wild
morass into sixteen hundred acres of rice-fields, and six hundred acres
of vegetable, corn, and provender producing land.

For several seasons prior to the war, Jehossee yielded a rice crop which
sold for seventy thousand dollars, and netted annually fifty thousand
dollars income to the owner. At that time Governor Aiken had eight
hundred and seventy-three slaves on the island, and about one hundred
working as mechanics, &c., in Charleston. The eight hundred and
seventy-three Jehossee slaves, men, women, and children, furnished a
working force of three hundred for the rice-fields.

Mr. Aiken would not tolerate the loose matrimonial ways of negro life,
but compelled his slaves to accept the marriage ceremony; and herein lay
one of his chief difficulties, for, to whatever cause we attribute it,
the fact remains the same, namely, that the ordinary negro has no sense
of morality. After all the attempts made on this plantation to improve
the moral nature of these men and women, Governor Aiken, during a
yellow-fever season in Savannah after the war, while visiting the poor
sufferers, intent upon charitable works, found in the lowest quarter of
the city, sunk in the most abject depths of vice, men and women who had
once been good servants on his plantations.

In old times Jehossee was a happy place for master and for slave. The
governor rarely locked the door of his mansion. The family plate, valued
at fifteen thousand dollars, was stored in a chest in a room on the
ground-floor of the house, which had for its occupants, during four
months of the year, two or three negro servants. Though all the negroes
at the quarters, which were only a quarter of a mile from the mansion,
knew the valuable contents of the chest, it was never disturbed. They
stole small things, but seemed incapable of committing a burglary.

When the Union army marched through another part of South Carolina,
where Governor Aiken had buried these old family heirlooms and had added
to the original plate thirty thousand dollars' worth of his own
purchasing, the soldiers dug up this treasure-trove, and forty-five
thousand dollars' worth of fine silver went to enrich the spoils o