hes twice a week.

In the matter of sanitation, Acklen directed the overseer to see that the
negroes kept clean in person, to inspect their houses at least once a week
and especially during the summer, to examine their bedding and see to its
being well aired, to require that their clothes be mended, "and everything
attended to which conduces to their comfort and happiness." In these
regards, as in various others, Fowler incorporated Acklen's rules in his
own, almost verbatim. Hammond scheduled an elaborate cleaning of the houses
every spring and fall. The houses were to be completely emptied and their
contents sunned, the walls and floors were to be scrubbed, the mattresses
to be emptied and stuffed with fresh hay or shucks, the yards swept and the
ground under the houses sprinkled with lime. Furthermore, every house was
to be whitewashed inside and out once a year; and the negroes must appear
once a week in clean clothes, "and every negro habitually uncleanly in
person must be washed and scrubbed by order of the overseer--the driver and
two other negroes officiating."

As to schedules of work, the Carolina and Georgia lowlanders dealt in
tasks; all the rest in hours. Telfair wrote briefly: "The negroes to be
tasked when the work allows it. I require a reasonable day's work, well
done--the task to be regulated by the state of the ground and the strength
of the negro." Weston wrote with more elaboration: "A task is as much work
as the meanest full hand can do in nine hours, working industriously....
This task is never to be increased, and no work is to be done over task
except under the most urgent necessity; which over-work is to be reported
to the proprietor, who will pay for it. No negro is to be put into a task
which [he] cannot finish with tolerable ease. It is a bad plan to punish
for not finishing tasks; it is subversive of discipline to leave tasks
unfinished, and contrary to justice to punish for what cannot be done. In
nothing does a good manager so much excel a bad as in being able to discern
what a hand is capable of doing, and in never attempting to make him do
more." In Hammond's schedule the first horn was blown an hour before
daylight as a summons for work-hands to rise and do their cooking and other
preparations for the day. Then at the summons of the plow driver, at first
break of day, the plowmen went to the stables whose doors the overseer
opened. At the second horn, "just at good daylight," the hoe ga