l into Nathaniel Heyward's possession.[28]

[Footnote 28: Notes by Louis Manigault of a conversation with Nathaniel
Heyward in 1846. M.S. in the collection above mentioned.]

Another case of absentee neglect, made notorious through Fanny Kemble's
_Journal_, was the group of rice and sea-island cotton plantations founded
by Senator Pierce Butler on and about Butler's Island near the mouth of the
Altamaha River. When his two grandsons inherited the estate, they used it
as a source of revenue but not as a home. One of these was Pierce Butler
the younger, who lived in Philadelphia. When Fanny Kemble, with fame
preceding her, came to America in 1832, he became infatuated, followed
her troupe from city to city, and married her in 1834. The marriage was
a mistake. The slaveholder's wife left the stage for the time being, but
retained a militant English abolitionism. When in December, 1838, she and
her husband were about to go South for a winter on the plantations, she
registered her horror of slavery in advance, and resolved to keep a journal
of her experiences and observations. The resulting record is gloomy enough.
The swarms of negroes were stupid and slovenly, the cabins and hospitals
filthy, the women overdriven, the overseer callous, the master indifferent,
and the new mistress herself, repudiating the title, was more irritable and
meddlesome than helpful.[29] The short sojourn was long enough. A few years
afterward the ill-mated pair were divorced and Fanny Kemble resumed her
own name and career. Butler did not mend his ways. In 1859 his half of the
slaves, 429 in number, were sold at auction in Savannah to pay his debts.

[Footnote 29: Frances Anne Kemble, _Journal of a Residence on a Georgia
Plantation in 1838-1839_(London, 1863).]

A pleasanter picture is afforded by the largest single unit in rice culture
of which an account is available. This was the plantation of William Aiken,
at one time governor of South Carolina, occupying Jehossee Island near the
mouth of the Edisto River. It was described in 1850 by Solon Robinson, an
Iowa farmer then on tour as correspondent for the _American Agriculturist_.
The two or three hundred acres of firm land above tide comprised the
homestead, the negro quarter, the stables, the stock yard, the threshing
mill and part of the provision fields. Of the land which could be flooded
with the tide, about fifteen hundred acres were diked and drained. About
two-thirds of this appears to h