n
the spirit of rejoicing at escape from disasters. But on December 18 there
were two items of another tone. One of these was entered by an overseer
named Kellett: "[I] shot the negro boy Frank for attempting to cut at me
and three boys with his cane knife with intent to kill." The other, in a
different handwriting, recorded tersely: "J.A. Randall commenst buisnass
this mornung. J. Kellett discharged this morning." The owner could not
afford to keep an overseer who killed negroes even though it might be in
self defence.[23]

[Footnote 23: MS. preserved on the plantation, owned by ex-Governor H.C.
War-moth.]

Of epidemics, yellow fever was of minor concern as regards the slaves, for
negroes were largely immune to it; but cholera sometimes threatened to
exterminate the slaves and bankrupt their masters. After a visitation of
this in and about New Orleans in 1832, John McDonogh wrote to a friend:
"All that you have seen of yellow fever was nothing in comparison. It is
supposed that five or six thousand souls, black and white, were carried off
in fourteen days."[24] The pecuniary loss in Louisiana from slave deaths
in that epidemic was estimated at four million dollars.[25] Two years
afterward it raged in the Savannah neighborhood. On Mr. Wightman's
plantation, ten miles above the city, there were in the first week of
September fifty-three cases and eighteen deaths. The overseer then checked
the spread by isolating the afflicted ones in the church, the barn and the
mill. The neighboring planters awaited only the first appearance of the
disease on their places to abandon their crops and hurry their slaves to
lodges in the wilderness.[26] Plagues of smallpox were sometimes of similar
dimensions.

[Footnote 24: William Allen, _Life of John McDonogh_ (Baltimore, 1886), p.
54.]

[Footnote 25: _Niles' Register_, XLV, 84]

[Footnote 26: _Federal Union_ (Milledgeville, Ga.), Sept. 14 and 17 and
Oct. 22, 1834.]

Even without pestilence, deaths might bring a planter's ruin. A series
of them drove M.W. Philips to exclaim in his plantation journal: "Oh! my
losses almost make me crazy. God alone can help." In short, planters must
guard their slaves' health and life as among the most vital of their own
interests; for while crops were merely income, slaves were capital. The
tendency appears to have been common, indeed, to employ free immigrant
labor when available for such work as would involve strain and exposure.
The documents b