America Climbs the Cornstalk 97 



cheap to own. They lived in ramshackle cabins, wore scraps 

 of clothing and raised their own food. A peck of corn meal a 

 week, often ground by their own hands after the day's work 

 was done, was the usual allowance to a slave. It is probable 

 that under the utmost pressure a Negro could rarely be 

 brought to do as much work as an energetic white man. But 

 the hours of slave labor covered the whole period of daylight; 

 corn-husking and rice-beating were often done before daylight 

 and after dark. There were laws forbidding masters to exact 

 more than fourteen or fifteen hours work in winter, and more 

 than fifteen or sixteen in summer. 



A white bond-servant, who had served his term and paid off 

 his bond, could take up land, raise a tobacco crop, use the 

 profits to buy a slave or two, and then capitalize on their 

 labor to increase his acreage and his profits. These freed 

 servants were settling the western counties closer and closer 

 to the strip of forest which separated the plantations from the 

 Blue Ridge. All these were corn-planters. Corn had been the 

 chief food of their bondage. 



Those poor Christian servants in Virginia and Maryland and 

 other northerly plantations that have been forced to live wholely 

 on it, do manifestly prove that it is the most nourishing grain for 

 a man to subsist on, without any other victuals.* 



By the same progress of wealth from corn to slaves to to- 

 bacco to money, the wooden plantation houses along the 

 Rappahannock, the York and the James were being supplanted 

 by brick mansions with curving wings, bedrooms for thirty 

 guests, ballrooms and lordly chimneys. The number of a man's 

 chimneys told his rank; two made a major, four a colonel. 

 There were box gardens and bowling greens, and libraries, 

 like that of Colonel Byrd of Westover which numbered "near 

 4000 Volumes in all Languages and Faculties." And in more 

 than one paneled hall hung the beauties and gallants of the 

 family painted by Lawrence, Lely, Kneller and Benjamin West. 



* Lawson's History of Carolina. 



