y neglect to do it
properly he 'sets them back,' so that carelessness will hinder more than
it hastens the completion of their tasks." But Olmsted's view was for once
rose colored. A planter who lived in the regime wrote: "The whole task
system ... is one that I most unreservedly disapprove of, because it
promotes idleness, and that is the parent of mischief."[26] Again the truth
lies in the middle ground. The virtue or vice of the system, as with the
gang alternative, depended upon its use by a diligent master or its abuse
by an excessive delegation of responsibility.

[Footnote 25: Olmsted, _Seaboard Slave States_, pp. 435, 436.]

[Footnote 26: J.A. Turner, ed., _Cotton Planter's Manual_, p. 34.]

That the tide when taken at the flood on the rice coast as elsewhere
would lead to fortune is shown by the career of the greatest of all rice
planters, Nathaniel Heyward. At the time of his birth, in 1766, his father
was a planter on an inland swamp near Port Royal. Nathaniel himself after
establishing a small plantation in his early manhood married Harriett
Manigault, an heiress with some fifty thousand dollars. With this, when
both lands and slaves were cheap, Heyward bought a tide-land tract and
erected four plantations thereon, and soon had enough accrued earnings to
buy the several inland plantations of the Gibbes brothers, who had fallen
into debt from luxurious living. With the proceeds of his large crops at
high prices during the great wars in Europe, he bought more slaves year
after year, preferably fresh Africans as long as that cheap supply remained
available, and he bought more land when occasion offered. Joseph Manigault
wrote of him in 1806: "Mr. Heyward has lately made another purchase of
land, consisting of 300 acres of tide swamp, joining one of his Combahee
plantations and belonging to the estate of Mrs. Bell. I believe he has made
a good bargain. It is uncleared and will cost him not quite L20 per acre.
I have very little doubt that he will be in a few years, if he lives, the
richest, as he is the best planter in the state. The Cooper River lands
give him many a long ride." Heyward was venturesome in large things,
conservative in small. He long continued to have his crops threshed by
hand, saying that if it were done by machines his darkies would have no
winter work; but when eventually he instituted mechanical threshers, no
one could discern an increase of leisure. In the matter of pounding
mills likewis