rest and the fires safely banked. The food allowance was a peck of corn and
four pounds of pork weekly. Each family, furthermore, had its garden, fowl
house and pigsty; every Christmas the master distributed among them coffee,
molasses, tobacco, calico and "Sunday tricks" to the value of from a
thousand to fifteen hundred dollars; and every man might rive boards in the
swamp on Sundays to buy more supplies, or hunt and fish in leisure times to
vary his family's fare. Saturday afternoon was also free from the routine.
Occasionally a slave would run away, but he was retaken sooner or later,
sometimes by the aid of dogs. A persistent runaway was disposed of by
sale.[13]

[Footnote 13: F.L. Olmsted, _A Journey in the Back Country_ (New York,
1860), pp. 46-54.]

Another estate in the same district, which Olmsted observed more cursorily,
comprised four adjoining plantations, each with its own stables and
quarter, each employing more than a hundred slaves under a separate
overseer, and all directed by a steward whom the traveler described as
cultured, poetic and delightful. An observation that women were at some
of the plows prompted Olmsted to remark that throughout the Southwest the
slaves were worked harder as a rule than in the easterly and northerly
slaveholding states. On the other hand he noted: "In the main the negroes
appeared to be well cared for and abundantly supplied with the necessaries
of vigorous physical existence. A large part of them lived in commodious
and well built cottages, with broad galleries in front, so that each family
of five had two rooms on the lower floor and a large loft. The remainder
lived in log huts, small and mean in appearance;[14] but those of their
overseers were little better, and preparations were being made to replace
all of these by neat boarded cottages."

[Footnote 14: Olmsted, _Back Country_, pp. 72-92.]

In the sugar district Estwick Evans when on his "pedestrious tour" in 1817
found the shores of the Mississippi from a hundred miles above New Orleans
to twenty miles below the city in a high state of cultivation.
"The plantations within these limits," he said, "are superb beyond
description.... The dwelling houses of the planters are not inferior to any
in the United States, either with respect to size, architecture, or the
manner in which they are furnished. The gardens and yards contiguous to
them are formed and decorated with much taste. The cotton, sugar and ware
houses a