1] The scale of his operations at the middle of the nineteenth
century may be seen from one of his orders for summer cloth, presumably
at the rate of about five yards per slave. This was to be shipped from
Savannah to the several plantations as follows: to Hurricane, the property
of Howell Cobb, Lamar's brother-in-law, 760 yards; to Letohatchee, a trust
estate in Florida belonging to the Lamar family, 500 yards; and to Lamar's
own plantations the following: Swift Creek, 486; Harris Place, 360; Domine,
340; and Spring Branch, 229. Of his course of life Lamar wrote: "I am one
half the year rattling over rough roads with Dr. Physic and Henry, stopping
at farm houses in the country, scolding overseers in half a dozen counties
and two states, Florida and Georgia, and the other half in the largest
cities of the Union, or those of Europe, living on dainties and riding on
rail-cars and steamboats. When I first emerge from Swift Creek into the
hotels and shops on Broadway of a summer, I am the most economical body
that you can imagine. The fine clothes and expensive habits of the people
strike me forcibly.... In a week I become used to everything, and in a
month I forget my humble concern on Swift Creek and feel as much a nabob as
any of them.... At home where everything is plain and comfortable we look
on anything beyond that point as extravagant. When abroad where things are
on a greater scale, our ideas keep pace with them. I always find such to be
my case; and if I live to a hundred I reckon it will always be so."

[Footnote 31: Lamar's MSS. are in the possession of Mrs. A.S. Erwin,
Athens, Ga. Selections from them are printed in _Plantation and Frontier_,
I, 167-183, 309-312, II, 38, 41.]

Lamar could command strong words, as when a physician demanded five hundred
dollars for services at Hurricane in 1844, or when overseers were detected
in drunkenness or cruelty; but his most characteristic complaints were of
his own short-comings as a manager and of the crotchets of his relatives.
His letters were always cheery, and his repeated disappointments in
overseers never damped his optimism concerning each new incumbent. His
old lands contented him until he found new and more fertile ones to buy,
whereupon his jubilation was great. When cotton was low he called himself a
toad under the harrow; but rising markets would set him to counting bales
before the seed had more than sprouted and to building new plantations in
the air. In ac