l A. Stewart and
his Adventure in capturing and exposing the great "Western Land Pirate" and
his Gang_ (New York, 1836), pp. 63-68, 104, _et passim_. The truth of these
accounts of slave stealings is vouched for in a letter to the editor of the
New Orleans _Bulletin_, reprinted in the _Federal Union_ (Milledgeville,
Ga.), Nov. 5, 1835.]

[Footnote 57: The manifold felonies of the gang were described by Washburn
in a dying confession after his conviction for a murder at Cincinnati.
Natchez _Courier_, reprinted in the _Louisiana Courier_ (New Orleans), Feb.
28, 1837. Other reports of the theft of slaves appear in the Charleston
_Morning Post and Daily Advertiser_, Nov. 2, 1786; _Southern Banner_
(Athens, Ga.), July 19, 1834, advertisement; _Federal Union_
(Milledgeville, Ga.), July 18, 1835; and the following New Orleans
journals: _Louisiana Gazette_, Apr. 1 and Sept. 10, 1819; _Mercantile
Advertiser_, Sept 29, 1831; _Bee_, Dec. 14, 1841; Mch. 10, 1845, and Aug.
1 and Nov. 11, 1848; _Louisiana Courier_, Mch. 29 and Sept. 18, 1840;
_Picayune_, Aug. 21, 1845.]

[Footnote 58: New Orleans _Commercial Times_, Aug. 26, 1846.]

Certain hostile critics of slavery asserted that in one district or another
masters made reckonings favorable to such driving of slaves at their work
as would bring premature death. Thus Fanny Kemble wrote in 1838, when on
the Georgia coast: "In Louisiana ... the humane calculation was not only
made but openly and unhesitatingly avowed that the planters found it upon
the whole their most profitable plan to work off (kill with labour) their
whole number of slaves about once in seven years, and renew the whole
stock."[59] The English traveler Featherstonhaugh likewise wrote of
Louisiana in 1844, when he had come as close to it as East Tennessee,
that "the duration of life for a sugar mill hand does not exceed seven
years."[60] William Goodell supported a similar assertion of his own in
1853 by a series of citations. The first of these was to Theodore Weld as
authority, that "Professor Wright" had been told at New York by Dr. Deming
of Ashland, Ohio, a story that Mr. Dickinson of Pittsburg had been told by
Southern planters and slave dealers on an Ohio River steamboat. The tale
thus vouched for contained the assertion that sugar planters found that by
the excessive driving of slaves day and night in the grinding season they
could so increase their output that "they could afford to sacrifice one set
of hand