ages at $1300 and the purchase of 350 bushels of peanuts from
the slaves at $1.50 per bushel. The reckonings in the war period were made
of course in the rapidly depreciating Confederate currency. The stoppage of
the record in 1864 was doubtless a consequence of Sherman's march through
Georgia.[10]

[Footnote 10: The Retreat records are in the possession of the Georgia
Historical Society, trustee for the Telfair Academy of Art, Savannah, Ga.
The overseer's letters here used are printed in _Plantation and Frontier_,
I, 314, 330-336, II, 39, 85.]

In the western cotton belt the plantations were much like those of the
eastern, except that the more uniform fertility often permitted the fields
to lie in solid expanses instead of being sprawled and broken by waste
lands as in the Piedmont. The scale of operations tended accordingly to be
larger. One of the greatest proprietors in that region, unless his display
were far out of proportion to his wealth, was Joseph A.S. Acklen whose
group of plantations was clustered near the junction of the Red and
Mississippi Rivers. In 1859 he began to build a country house on the style
of a Gothic castle, with a great central hall and fifty rooms exclusive of
baths and closets.[11] The building was expected to cost $150,000, and
the furnishings $125,000 more. Acklen's rules for the conduct of his
plantations will be discussed in another connection;[12] but no description
of his estate or his actual operations is available.

[Footnote 11: _Federal Union_ (Milledgeville, Ga.), Aug. 2, 1859.]

[Footnote 12: Below, pp. 262 ff.]

Olmsted described in detail a plantation in the neighborhood of Natchez.
Its thirteen or fourteen hundred acres of cotton, corn and incidental
crops were tilled by a plow gang of thirty and a hoe gang of thirty-seven,
furnished by a total of 135 slaves on the place. A driver cracked a whip
among the hoe hands, occasionally playing it lightly upon the shoulders
of one or another whom he thought would be stimulated by the suggestion.
"There was a nursery for sucklings at the quarters, and twenty women at
this time left their work four times a day, for half an hour, to nurse the
young ones, and whom the overseer counted as half hands--that is, expected
to do half an ordinary day's work." At half past nine every night the hoe
and plow foremen, serving alternately, sounded curfew on a horn, and half
an hour afterward visited each cabin to see that the households were at