lantations with less than
a hundred acres available for the staple could hardly survive in the
competition. If one of these adjoined another estate it was likely to be
merged therewith; but if it lay in isolation the course of years would
probably bring its abandonment. The absence of the proprietors every summer
in avoidance of malaria, and the consequent expense of overseer's wages,
hampered operations on a small scale, as did also the maintenance of
special functionaries among the slaves, such as drivers, boatswains, trunk
minders, bird minders, millers and coopers. In 1860 Louis Manigault listed
the forty-one rice plantations on the Savannah River and scheduled their
acreage in the crop. Only one of them had as little as one hundred acres
in rice, and it seems to have been an appendage of a larger one across the
river. On the other hand, two of them had crops of eleven hundred, and two
more of twelve hundred acres each. The average was about 425 acres per
plantation, expected to yield about 1200 pounds of rice per acre each
year.[37] A census tabulation in 1850, ignoring any smaller units, numbered
the plantations which produced annually upwards of 20,000 pounds of rice at
446 in South Carolina, 80 in Georgia, and 25 in North Carolina.[38]

[Footnote 37: MS. in the possession of Mrs. H.K. Jenkins, Pinopolis, S.C.]

[Footnote 38: _Compendium of the Seventh U.S. Census_, p. 178.]

Indigo and sea-island cotton fields had no ditches dividing them
permanently into task units; but the fact that each of these in its day was
often combined with rice on the same plantations, and that the separate
estates devoted to them respectively lay in the region dominated by the
rice regime, led to the prevalence of the task system in their culture
also. The soils used for these crops were so sandy and light, however, that
the tasks, staked off each day by the drivers, ranged larger than those in
rice. In the cotton fields they were about half an acre per hand, whether
for listing, bedding or cultivation. In the collecting and spreading of
swamp mud and other manures for the cotton the work was probably done
mostly by gangs rather than by task, since the units were hard to measure.
In cotton picking, likewise, the conditions of the crop were so variable
and the need of haste so great that time work, perhaps with special rewards
for unusually heavy pickings, was the common resort. Thus the lowland
cotton regime alternated the task and ga