he magnitude of scale
characteristic of the industry, suggest that methods of a strictly business
kind were more common in sugar production than in that of cotton or
tobacco. Domesticity and paternalism were nevertheless by no means alien to
the sugar regime.

[Footnote 21: MSS. in private possession, data from which were made
available through the kindness of Mr. V.A. Moody.]

[Footnote 22: The yearly product of each sugar plantation in Louisiana
between 1849 and 1858 is reported in P.A. Champonier's _Annual Statement_
of the crop. (New Orleans, 1850-1859).]

[Footnote 23: William H. Russell, _My Diary North and South_ (Boston,
1863), pp. 268-279]

Virtually all of the tobacco, short staple cotton and sugar plantations
were conducted on the gang system. The task system, on the other hand, was
instituted on the rice coast, where the drainage ditches checkering
the fields into half or quarter acre plots offered convenient units of
performance in the successive processes. The chief advantage of the task
system lay in the ease with which it permitted a planter or an overseer
to delegate much of his routine function to a driver. This official each
morning would assign to each field hand his or her individual plot, and
spend the rest of the day in seeing to the performance of the work. At
evening or next day the master could inspect the results and thereby keep
a check upon both the driver and the squad. Each slave when his day's task
was completed had at his own disposal such time as might remain. The driver
commonly gave every full hand an equal area to be worked in the same way,
and discriminated among them only in so far as varying conditions from plot
to plot would permit the assignment of the stronger and swifter workmen to
tracts where the work required was greater, and the others to plots where
the labor was less. Fractional hands were given fractional tasks, or were
combined into full hands for full tasks. Thus a woman rated at three
quarters might be helped by her own one quarter child, or two half-hand
youths might work a full plot jointly. The system gave some stimulus to
speed of work, at least from time to time, by its promise of afternoon
leisure in reward. But for this prospect to be effective the tasks had to
be so limited that every laborer might have the hope of an hour or two's
release as the fruit of diligence. The performance of every hand tended
accordingly to be standardized at the customary accomp