6. The writer described himself as unwilling to sacrifice his
agricultural reading in order to superintend his slaves in person, but as
having too small a force to afford the employment of an overseer pure and
simple. For the preceding year he had had one charged with the double
function of working in person and supervising the slaves' work also; but
this man's excess of manual zeal had impaired his managerial usefulness.
What he himself did was well done, said Pemberton, "and he would do _all_
and leave the negroes to do virtually nothing; and as they would of course
take advantage of this, what he did was more than counterbalanced by what
they did not." Furthermore, this employee, "who worked harder than any man
I ever saw," used little judgment or foresight. "Withal, he has always been
accustomed to the careless Southern practice generally of doing things
temporarily and in a hurry, just to last for the present, and allowing the
negroes to leave plows and tools of all kinds just where they use them,
no matter where, so that they have to be hunted all over the place when
wanted. And as to stock, he had no idea of any more attention to them than
is common in the ordinarily cruel and neglectful habits of the South."
Pemberton then turned to lamentation at having let slip a recent
opportunity to buy at auction "a remarkably fine looking negro as to size
and strength, very black, about thirty-five or forty, and so intelligent
and trustworthy that he had charge of a separate plantation and eight or
ten hands some ten or twelve miles from home." The procuring of such a
foreman would precisely have solved Pemberton's problem; the failure to
do so left him in his far from hopeful search for a paragon manager and
workman combined.[21]

[Footnote 21: MS. among the Hammond papers in the Library of Congress.]

On the whole, the planters were disposed to berate the overseers as a class
for dishonesty, inattention and self indulgence. The demand for new
and better ones was constant. For example, the editor of the _American
Agriculturist_, whose office was at New York, announced in 1846: "We are
almost daily beset with applications for properly educated managers
for farms and plantations--we mean for such persons as are up to the
improvements of the age, and have the capacity to carry them into
effect."[22] Youths occasionally offered themselves as apprentices. One of
them, in Louisiana, published the following notice in 1822: "A you