healthful summer
residence on the seashore is provided for himself and family." Others
were hardly more removed from the status of common field hands. Lawrence
Tompkins, for example, signed with his mark in 1779 a contract to oversee
the four slaves of William Allason, near Alexandria, and to work steadily
with them. He was to receive three barrels of corn and three hundred pounds
of pork as his food allowance, and a fifth share of the tobacco, hemp and
flax crops and a sixth of the corn; but if he neglected his work he might
be dismissed without pay of any sort.[15] Some overseers were former
planters who had lost their property, some were planters' sons working for
a start in life, some were English and German farmers who had brought their
talents to what they hoped might prove the world's best market, but most of
them were of the native yeomanry which abounded in virtually all parts
of the South. Some owned a few slaves whom they put on hire into their
employers' gangs, thereby hastening their own attainment of the means to
become planters on their own score.[16]

[Footnote 14: _Southern Patriot_ (Charleston, S. C), Jan. 9, 1821.]

[Footnote 15: MS. Letter book, 1770-1787, among the Allason papers in the
New York Public Library.]

[Footnote 16: D.D. Wallace, _Life of Henry Laurens_, pp. 21, 135.]

If the master lived on the plantation, as was most commonly the case, the
overseer's responsibilities were usually confined to the daily execution of
orders in supervising the slaves in the fields and the quarters. But when
the master was an absentee the opportunity for abuses and misunderstandings
increased. Jurisdiction over slaves and the manner of its exercise were the
grounds of most frequent complaint. On the score of authority, for example,
a Virginia overseer in the employ of Robert Carter wrote him in 1787 in
despair at the conduct of a woman named Suckey: "I sent for hir to Come in
the morning to help Secoure the foder, but She Sent me word that She would
not come to worke that Day, and that you had ordered her to wash hir
Cloaiths and goo to Any meeting She pleased any time in the weke without my
leafe, and on monday when I Come to Reken with hir about it She Said it was
your orders and She would do it in Defiance of me.... I hope if Suckey is
aloud that privilige more than the Rest, that she will bee moved to some
other place, and one Come in her Room."[17] On the score of abuses, Stancil
Barwick, an overseer