I mentioned to you just now that two of the carpenters had made a boat in
their leisure time. I must explain this to you, and this will involve the
mention of another of Miss Martineau's mistakes with regard to slave
labour, at least in many parts of the Southern States. She mentions that
on one estate of which she knew, the proprietor had made the experiment,
and very successfully, of appointing to each of his slaves a certain task
to be performed in the day, which once accomplished, no matter how early,
the rest of the four and twenty hours were allowed to the labourer to
employ as he pleased. She mentions this as a single experiment, and
rejoices over it as a decided amelioration in the condition of the slave,
and one deserving of general adoption. But in the part of Georgia where
this estate is situated, the custom of task labour is universal, and it
prevails, I believe, throughout Georgia, South Carolina, and parts of
North Carolina; in other parts of the latter State, however--as I was
informed by our overseer, who is a native of that State--the estates are
small, rather deserving the name of farms, and the labourers are much
upon the same footing as the labouring men at the North, working from
sunrise to sunset in the fields with the farmer and his sons, and coming
in with them to their meals, which they take immediately after the rest of
the family. In Louisiana and the new South-western Slave States, I
believe, task labour does not prevail; but it is in those that the
condition of the poor human cattle is most deplorable, as you know it was
there that 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. By the bye,
the Jewish institution of slavery is much insisted upon by the Southern
upholders of the system; perhaps this is their notion of the Jewish
jubilee, when the slaves were by Moses' strict enactment to be all set