arolina.]

In the fertile bottoms on the Congaree River not far above Columbia, lay
the well famed estate of Colonel Wade Hampton, which in 1846 had some
sixteen hundred acres of cotton and half as much of corn. The traveler,
when reaching it after long faring past the slackly kept fields and
premises common in the region, felt equal enthusiasm for the drainage and
the fencing, the avenues, the mansion and the mill, the stud of blooded
horses, the herd of Durham cattle, the flock of long-wooled sheep, and the
pens of Berkshire pigs.[7] Senator McDuffie's plantation in the further
uplands of the Abbeville district was likewise prosperous though on a
somewhat smaller scale. Accretions had enlarged it from three hundred acres
in 1821 to five thousand in 1847, when it had 147 slaves of all ages. Many
of these were devoted to indoor employments, and seventy were field workers
using twenty-four mules. The 750 acres in cotton commonly yielded crops of
a thousand pounds in the seed; the 325 acres in corn gave twenty-five or
thirty bushels; the 300 in oats, fifteen bushels; and ten acres in peas,
potatoes and squashes yielded their proportionate contribution.[8]

[Footnote 7: Described by R.L. Allen in the _American Agriculturist_, VI,
20, 21.]

[Footnote 8: _DeBow's Review_, VI, 149.]

The conduct and earnings of a cotton plantation fairly typical among those
of large scale, may be gathered from the overseer's letters and factor's
accounts relating to Retreat, which lay in Jefferson County, Georgia. This
was one of several establishments founded by Alexander Telfair of Savannah
and inherited by his two daughters, one of whom became the wife of W.B.
Hodgson. For many years Elisha Cain was its overseer. The first glimpse
which the correspondence affords is in the fall of 1829, some years after
Cain had taken charge. He then wrote to Telfair that many of the negroes
young and old had recently been ill with fever, but most of them had
recovered without a physician's aid. He reported further that a slave named
John had run away "for no other cause than that he did not feel disposed to
be governed by the same rules and regulations that the other negroes on
the land are governed by." Shortly afterward John returned and showed
willingness to do his duty. But now Cain encountered a new sort of trouble.
He wrote Telfair in January, 1830: "Your negroes have a disease now among
them that I am fully at a loss to know what I had best to do