76 COTTON PLANTER'S MANUAL. 



diligently, for fifteen years, sought a remedy for. I have at 

 no time been interested to teach planters how to make large 

 crops of cotton and corn on rich land. I do not know an in- 

 dustrious man in Macon county, who cannot grow a large crop 

 of cotton and corn if he has rich land to cultivate. Sambo, 

 with no other instruction but the observation gathered from 

 the hurried directions of his overseer, can, and frequently has, 

 on rich land, made a big crop of cotton. And it is in this phase 

 of the question that this fatal error is seen in its strongest light. 

 Look back, if you please, toward the rising sun, and see the 

 scant pittance with which land, once rich in its maiden fertility, 

 now rewards the industrious labor of the merely plougher and 

 koer. 



My chief object has been, in patiently prosecuting these ex- 

 periments, and in watching and investigating their results, to 

 devise a system of plantation economy which, while it will, in 

 the aggregate, bountifully remunerate the industrious labor 

 and pains-taking of the planter, will, at the same time, make 

 poor land rich, and rich land better. The allurements of an 

 honorable and lucrative profession, and the jibes with the 

 pointing finger of ridicule from kind friends, have proved 

 equally unavailing in diverting my attention for a moment 

 from the one great object ; and I may now exclaim, and do, 

 triumphantly, Eureka ! I have found it ! And if there be a 

 single feature about this system that affords me more pleasure 

 than another, it is, that the perfection of the system, with all 

 its advantages, are as accessible to the planter of humble 

 means, as to the planter of more extended means. There is 

 nothing foreign, intricate, or costly about it. It is the pro 

 duction of the country, the soil, and the climate where we 

 live. 



It is immaterial what number of hands may work on the 

 place, we allot to each twenty acres, and upon this condition 



