rs, each woman a frock and chemises, and each child clothing or cloth
in proportion; and every fall the men drew shirts, trousers and coats, the
women shifts, petticoats, frocks and sacks, the children again on a similar
scale, and the several families blankets as needed.[16]

[Footnote 11: _Plantation and Frontier_, I, 203-208.]

[Footnote 12: MS. records in the possession of W.H. Stovall, Stovall,
Miss.]

[Footnote 13: _Plantation and Frontier_, I, 293, 294.]

[Footnote 14: _Ibid_., 192, 193.]

[Footnote 15: MS. copy in Manigault's letter book.]

[Footnote 16: MS. in the possession of Mrs. J.F. Minis, Savannah, Ga.]

As for housing, the vestiges of the old slave quarters, some of which
have stood abandoned for half a century, denote in many cases a sounder
construction and greater comfort than most of the negroes in freedom have
since been able to command.

With physical comforts provided, the birth-rate would take care of itself.
The pickaninnies were winsome, and their parents, free of expense and
anxiety for their sustenance, could hardly have more of them than they
wanted. A Virginian told Olmsted, "he never heard of babies coming so fast
as they did on his plantation; it was perfectly surprising";[17] and in
Georgia, Howell Cobb's negroes increased "like rabbits."[18] In Mississippi
M.W. Philips' woman Amy had borne eleven children when at the age of
thirty she was married by her master to a new husband, and had eight more
thereafter, including a set of triplets.[19] But the culminating instance
is the following as reported by a newspaper at Lynchburg, Virginia: "VERY
REMARKABLE. There is now living in the vicinity of Campbell a negro
woman belonging to a gentleman by the name of Todd; this woman is in her
forty-second year and has had forty-one children and at this time is
pregnant with her forty-second child, and possibly with her forty-third, as
she has frequently had doublets."[20] Had childbearing been regulated
in the interest of the masters, Todd's woman would have had less than
forty-one and Amy less than her nineteen, for such excesses impaired the
vitality of the children. Most of Amy's, for example, died a few hours or
days after birth.

[Footnote 17: Olmsted, _Seaboard Slave States_, p. 57.]

[Footnote 18: _Plantation and Frontier_, I, 179.]

[Footnote 19: Mississippi Historical Society _Publications_, X, 439, 443,
447, 480.]

[Footnote 20: _Louisiana Gazette_ (New Orleans), June 11, 1822