pics, and together with the
mounting price of labor made prosperity depend in some degree upon
protective tariffs. The dearth of land available kept the sugar output
well below the domestic demand, though the molasses market was sometimes
glutted.

A typical prosperous estate of which a description and a diary are
extant[16] was that owned by Valcour Aime, lying on the right bank of the
Mississippi about sixty miles above New Orleans. Of the 15,000 acres which
it comprised in 1852, 800 were in cane, 300 in corn, 150 in crops belonging
to the slaves, and most of the rest in swampy forest from which two or
three thousand cords of wood were cut each year as fuel for the sugar mill
and the boiling house. The slaves that year numbered 215 of all ages, half
of them field hands,[17] and the mules 64. The negroes were well housed,
clothed and fed; the hospital and the nursery were capacious, and the
stables likewise. The mill was driven by an eighty-horse-power steam
engine, and the vacuum pans and the centrifugals were of the latest types.
The fields were elaborately ditched, well manured, and excellently tended.
The land was valued at $360,000, the buildings at $100,000, the machinery
at $60,000, the slaves at $170,000, and the livestock at $11,000;
total, $701,000. The crop of 1852, comprising 1,300,000 pounds of white
centrifugal sugar at 6 cents and 60,000 gallons of syrup at 36 cents,
yielded a gross return of almost $100,000. The expenses included 4,629
barrels of coal from up the river, in addition to the outlay for wages and
miscellaneous supplies.

[Footnote 16: _Harper's Magasine_, VII, 758, 759 (November, 1853);
Valcour Aime, _Plantation Diary_ (New Orleans, 1878), partly reprinted in
_Plantation and Frontier_, I, 214, 230.]

[Footnote 17: According to the MS. returns of the U.S. census of 1850
Aime's slaves at that time numbered 231, of whom 58 were below fifteen
years old, 164 were between 15 and 65, and 9 (one of them blind, another
insane) were from 66 to 80 years old. Evidently there was a considerable
number of slaves of working age not classed by him as field hands.]

In the routine of work, each January was devoted mainly to planting fresh
canes in the fields from which the stubble canes or second rattoons had
recently been harvested. February and March gave an interval for cutting
cordwood, cleaning ditches, and such other incidentals as the building and
repair of the plantation's railroad. Warm weather