like cattle on the farms and plantations.[9] Cotton was the staple, and in thinking of the time the eye must range over a vast expanse of cotton plantations and see all the main work done by Negro gangs of men and women in charge of slave drivers. As Olmsted describes a gang of women in a characteristic passage—“The overseer rode about them on a horse, carrying in his hand a rawhide whip ... but as often as he visited one end of the line the hands at the other end would discontinue their labor until he turned to them again. Clumsy, awkward, gross, elephantine in all their movements; pouting, grinning, and leering at us; sly, sensual, and shameless in all their expression and demeanor; I never before had witnessed, I thought, anything more revolting....” In 1837 the whole of Georgia, and indeed of the South, was worked by black slaves—the poor white labor (chiefly Irish) had diminished almost to disappearance. Slave labor was founded on slave discipline, and the discipline on punishment. There was no particular readiness on the part of the savages to do the work given them or understand what they had to do. Whether they could have been coaxed or persuaded is problematical. Farmers have not the time or the spirit for coaxing. The quickest way was by inspiring terror or inflicting pain. It might have been different if the Negro could have been given any positive incentive to work, but there was none. He had therefore to be[10] flogged to it. The smallest gang had its driver with his whip. The type who to-day has become politely a “speeder up” was then the man with the whip. He could have had more power by using his whip infrequently and on the most stubborn slaves, but that was not the common man’s way. He flogged hard and he flogged often. On a typical Georgian plantation the field driver had power to inflict twelve lashes there and then when trouble occurred. The head driver could give thirty-six and the overseer fifty. Every morning there would be a dozen or so special floggings by the overseer or his assistant at the office. Women if anything fared worse than men. On the slightest provocation their scanty clothes were thrown over their heads and they were subjected to a beating. Naked boys and girls were tied by their wrists to boughs of trees so that their toes barely touched the ground, and lashed. The overseer did it, the owner’s son did it, upon occasion the owner himself did it. [8] [9] [10] There were pleasant exceptional homes in Virginia and the Carolinas and elsewhere where there was no flogging and no cruelty whatsoever, but instead a great mutual
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