ave been cropped in rice each year, and the
rest in corn, oats and sweet potatoes. The steam-driven threshing apparatus
was described as highly efficient. The sheaves were brought on the heads of
the negroes from the great smooth stack yard, and opened in a shed where
the scattered grain might be saved. A mechanical carrier led thence to the
threshing machines on the second floor, whence the grain descended through
a winnowing fan. The pounding mill, driven by the tide, was a half mile
distant at the wharf, whence a schooner belonging to the plantation carried
the hulled and polished rice in thirty-ton cargoes to Charleston. The
average product per acre was about forty-five bushels in the husk, each
bushel yielding some thirty pounds of cleaned rice, worth about three cents
a pound. The provision fields commonly fed the force of slaves and mules;
and the slave families had their own gardens and poultry to supplement
their fare. The rice crops generally yielded some twenty-five
thousand dollars in gross proceeds, while the expenses, including the
two-thousand-dollar salary of the overseer, commonly amounted to some ten
thousand dollars. During the summer absence of the master, the overseer
was the only white man on the place. The engineers, smiths, carpenters
and sailors were all black. "The number of negroes upon the place," wrote
Robinson, "is just about 700, occupying 84 double frame houses, each
containing two tenements of three rooms to a family besides the
cockloft.... There are two common hospitals and a 'lying-in hospital,' and
a very neat, commodious church, which is well filled every Sabbath.... Now
the owner of all this property lives in a very humble cottage, embowered in
dense shrubbery and making no show.... He and his family are as plain and
unostentatious in their manners as the house they live in.... Nearly all
the land has been reclaimed and the buildings, except the house, erected
new within the twenty years that Governor Aiken has owned the island. I
fully believe that he is more concerned to make his people comfortable
and happy than he is to make money."[30] When the present writer visited
Jehossee in the harvest season sixty years after Robinson, the fields were
dotted with reapers, wage earners now instead of slaves, but still using
sickles on half-acre tasks; and the stack yard was aswarm with sable men
and women carrying sheaves on their heads and chattering as of old in a
dialect which a stranger