g hand, and its price
of four cents per pound or $24 per barrel. The net proceeds of the one crop
covered the purchase in 1839 of two families of slaves, comprising sixteen
persons, mostly in or approaching their prime, at a price of $640 each.

[Footnote 32: The Manigault MSS. are in the possession of Mrs. H.K.
Jenkins, Pinopolis, S.C. Selections from them are printed in _Plantation
and Frontier_, I, 134-139 _et passim_.]

Manigault and his family were generally absent every summer and sometimes
in winter, at Charleston or in Europe, and once as far away as China. His
methods of administration may be gathered from his letters, contracts and
memoranda. In January, 1848, he wrote from Naples to I.F. Cooper whom his
factor had employed at $250 a year as a new overseer on Gowrie: "My negroes
have the reputation of being orderly and well disposed; but like all
negroes they are up to anything if not watched and attended to. I expect
the kindest treatment of them from you, for this has always been a
principal thing with me. I never suffer them to work off the place, or
exchange work with any plantation....It has always been my plan to give out
allowance to my negroes on Sunday in preference to any other day, because
this has much influence in keeping them at home that day, whereas if they
received allowance on Saturday for instance some of them would be off with
it that same evening to the shops to trade, and perhaps would not get back
until Monday morning. I allow no strange negro to take a wife on my place,
and none of mine to keep a boat."[33]

[Footnote 33: MS. copy in Manigault letter book.]

A few years after this, Manigault bought an adjoining plantation, "East
Hermitage," and consolidated it with Gowrie, thereby increasing his rice
fields to 500 acres and his slaves to about 90 of all ages. His draught
animals appear to have comprised merely five or six mules. A new overseer,
employed in 1853 at wages of $500 together with corn and rice for his table
and the services of a cook and a waiting boy, was bound by a contract
stipulating the duties described in the letter to Cooper above quoted,
along with a few additional items. He was, for example, to procure a book
of medical instructions and a supply of the few requisite "plantation
medicines" to be issued to the nurses with directions as needed. In case of
serious injury to a slave, however, the sufferer was to be laid upon a door
and sent by the plantation boat to Dr