in southwestern Georgia, wrote in 1855 to John B.
Lamar: "I received your letter on yesterday ev'ng. Was vary sorry to hear
that you had heard that I was treating your negroes so cruely. Now, sir, I
do say to you in truth that the report is false. Thear is no truth in it.
No man nor set of men has ever seen me mistreat one of the negroes on the
place." After declaring that miscarriages by two of the women had been due
to no requirement of work, he continued: "The reports that have been sent
must have been carried from this place by negroes. The fact is I have made
the negro men work, an made them go strait. That is what is the matter, an
is the reason why my place is talk of the settlement. I have found among
the negro men two or three hard cases an I have had to deal rite ruff, but
not cruly at all. Among them Abram has been as triflin as any man on the
place. Now, sir, what I have wrote you is truth, and it cant be disputed by
no man on earth,"[18]

[Footnote 17: _Plantation and Frontier_, I, 325.]

[Footnote 18: _Ibid_., I, 312, 313.]

To diminish the inducement for overdriving, the method of paying the
overseers by crop shares, which commonly prevailed in the colonial period,
was generally replaced in the nineteenth century by that of fixed salaries.
As a surer preventive of embezzlement, a trusty slave was in some cases
given the store-house keys in preference to the overseer; and sometimes
even when the master was an absentee an overseer was wholly dispensed with
and a slave foreman was given full charge. This practice would have been
still more common had not the laws discouraged it.[19] Some planters
refused to leave their slaves in the full charge of deputies of any kind,
even for short periods. For example, Francis Corbin in 1819 explained
to James Madison that he must postpone an intended visit because of the
absence of his son. "Until he arrives," Corbin wrote, "I dare not, in
common prudence, leave my affairs to the sole management of overseers, who
in these days are little respected by our intelligent negroes, many of whom
are far superior in mind, morals and manners to those who are placed in
authority over them."[20]

[Footnote 19: Olmsted, _Seaboard States_, p. 206.]

[Footnote 20: Massachusetts Historical Society _Proceedings_, XLIII, 261.]

Various phases of the problem of management are illustrated in a letter of
A.H. Pemberton of the South Carolina midlands to James H. Hammond at the
end of 184