, and
for a time I greatly enjoyed them.

A short distance from the great house, were the stately mansions of
the dead, a place of somber aspect. Vast tombs, embowered beneath the
weeping willow and the fir tree, told of the antiquities of the Lloyd
family, as well as of their wealth. Superstition was rife among the
slaves about this family burying ground. Strange sights had been seen
there by some of the older slaves. Shrouded ghosts, riding on great
black horses, had been seen to enter; balls of fire had been seen to fly
there at midnight, and horrid sounds had been repeatedly heard. Slaves
know{53} enough of the rudiments of theology to believe that those go
to hell who die slaveholders; and they often fancy such persons wishing
themselves back again, to wield the lash. Tales of sights and sounds,
strange and terrible, connected with the huge black tombs, were a very
great security to the grounds about them, for few of the slaves felt
like approaching them even in the day time. It was a dark, gloomy and
forbidding place, and it was difficult to feel that the spirits of the
sleeping dust there deposited, reigned with the blest in the realms of
eternal peace.

The business of twenty or thirty farms was transacted at this, called,
by way of eminence, "great house farm." These farms all belonged to
Col. Lloyd, as did, also, the slaves upon them. Each farm was under the
management of an overseer. As I have said of the overseer of the home
plantation, so I may say of the overseers on the smaller ones; they
stand between the slave and all civil constitutions--their word is law,
and is implicitly obeyed.

The colonel, at this time, was reputed to be, and he apparently was,
very rich. His slaves, alone, were an immense fortune. These, small and
great, could not have been fewer than one thousand in number, and though
scarcely a month passed without the sale of one or more lots to the
Georgia traders, there was no apparent diminution in the number of his
human stock: the home plantation merely groaned at a removal of the
young increase, or human crop, then proceeded as lively as ever.
Horse-shoeing, cart-mending, plow-repairing, coopering, grinding, and
weaving, for all the neighboring farms, were performed here, and slaves
were employed in all these branches. "Uncle Tony" was the blacksmith;
"Uncle Harry" was the cartwright; "Uncle Abel" was the shoemaker; and
all these had hands to assist them in their several departments.