muel Hairston,
whose many plantations lying in the upper Piedmont on both sides of the
Virginia-North Carolina boundary were reported in 1854 to have slave
populations aggregating some 1600 souls, and whose gardens at his homestead
in Henry County, Virginia, were likened to paradise. Of his methods
of management nothing more is known than that his overseers were
systematically superintended and that his negroes were commonly both fed
and clothed with the products of the plantations themselves.[5]

[Footnote 5: William Chambers, _American Slavery and Colour_ (London,
1857), pp. 194, 195, quoting a Richmond newspaper of 1854.]

In the eastern cotton belt a notable establishment of earlier decades was
that of Governor David R. Williams, who began operations with about a
hundred slaves in Chesterfield County, South Carolina, near the beginning
of the nineteenth century and increased their number fivefold before his
death in 1830. While each of his four plantations gave adequate yields of
the staple as well as furnishing their own full supplies of corn and pork,
the central feature and the chief source of prosperity was a great bottom
tract safeguarded from the floods of the Pee Dee by a levee along the river
front. The building of this embankment was but one of many enterprises
which Williams undertook in the time spared from his varied political and
military services. Others were the improvement of manuring methods, the
breeding of mules, the building of public bridges, the erection and
management of a textile factory, the launching of a cottonseed oil mill, of
which his talents might have made a success even in that early time had not
his untimely death intervened. The prosperity of Williams' main business in
the face of his multifarious diversions proves that his plantation
affairs were administered in thorough fashion. His capable wife must have
supplemented the husband and his overseers constantly and powerfully in the
conduct of the routine. The neighboring plantation of a kinsman, Benjamin
F. Williams, was likewise notable in after years for its highly improved
upland fields as well as for the excellent specialized work of its slave
craftsmen.[6]

[Footnote 6: Harvey T. Cooke, _The Life and Legacy of David Rogerson
Williams_ (New York, 1916), chaps. XIV, XVI, XIX, XX, XXV. This book,
though bearing a New York imprint, is actually published, as I have been at
pains to learn, by Mr. J.W. Norwood of Greenville, South C