ract; ... but ... nothing during my recent
journey gave me more satisfaction than the conclusion to which I was
gradually brought that the planters of the Southern states of America,
generally speaking, have a sincere desire to manage their estates with
the least possible severity. I do not say that undue severity is nowhere
exercised; but the discipline, taken upon the average, as far as I could
learn, is not more strict than is necessary for the maintenance of a proper
degree of authority, without which the whole framework of society in that
quarter would be blown to atoms."[41] And Olmsted wrote: "The only whipping
of slaves that I have seen in Virginia has been of these wild, lazy
children as they are being broke in to work."[42]

[Footnote 40: Adlard Welby, _Visit to North America_ (London, 1821 )
reprinted in Thwaites ed., _Early Western Travels_, XII, 289]

[Footnote 41: Basil Hall, _Travels in the United States_, III, 227, 228.]

[Footnote 42: Olmsted, _Seaboard Slave States_, p. 146.]

As to the rate and character of the work, Hall said that in contrast with
the hustle prevailing on the Northern farms, "in Carolina all mankind
appeared comparatively idle."[43] Olmsted, when citing a Virginian's remark
that his negroes never worked enough to tire themselves, said on his own
account: "This is just what I have thought when I have seen slaves at
work--they seem to go through the motions of labor without putting strength
into them. They keep their powers in reserve for their own use at night,
perhaps."[44] And Solon Robinson reported tersely from a rice plantation
that the negroes plied their hoes "at so slow a rate, the motion would have
given a quick-working Yankee convulsions."[45]

[Footnote 43: Basil Hall, III, 117.]

[Footnote 44: _Seaboard Slave States_, p. 91.]

[Footnote 45: _American Agriculturist_, IX, 93.]

There was clearly no general prevalence of severity and strain in the
regime. There was, furthermore, little of that curse of impersonality
and indifference which too commonly prevails in the factories of the
present-day world where power-driven machinery sets the pace, where the
employers have no relations with the employed outside of work hours, where
the proprietors indeed are scattered to the four winds, where the directors
confine their attention to finance, and where the one duty of the
superintendent is to procure a maximum output at a minimum cost. No, the
planters were commonly in resi