Note 22 — Chapter IV · THE EXCEPTIONAL LARGE PLANTERS.

In De Bow’s ‘Resources of the South,’ vol. i., p. 150, a table is furnished by a cotton-planter to show that the expenses of raising cotton are “generally greatly underrated.” It is to be inferred that they certainly are not underrated in the table. On “a well improved and properly organized plantation,” the expense of feeding one hundred negroes, “as deduced from fifteen years’ experience” of the writer, is asserted in this table to be $750 per annum, or seven dollars and a half each; in this sum is included, however, the expenses of the “hospital and the overseer’s table.” This is much less than the expense for the same purposes, if the overseer’s account was true, of the plantation above described. Clothing, shoes, bedding, sacks for gathering cotton, and so forth, are estimated by the same authority to cost an equal sum—$7.50 for each slave. I have just paid on account of a day labourer on a farm in New York, his board bill, he being a bachelor living at the house of another Irish labourer with a family. The charge is twenty-one times as large as that set down for the slave.