A VIRGINIA PLANTATION, _ 319 
business. He said there was a general prejudice i 
tobacco, in all the tide water eh of thé Site ben rt 
was through the culture of tobacco that the once fertile soil 
had been impoverished; but he did not believe that, at the 
present value of negroes, their labor could be applied to the 
culture of grain with any profit, except under peculiarly 
favorable circumstances. Possibly the use of guano might 
make wheat a paying crop, but he still doubted. He had 
not used it, himself. Tobacco required fresh land, and was 
rapidly exhausting, but it returned more money, for the 
labor used upon it, than anything else ; enough more, in his 
opinion to pay for the wearing out of the land. If he was 
well paid for it, he did not know why he should not wear 
out his land. His tobacco-fields were nearly all in a distant 
and lower part of his plantation; land which: had been 
neglected before his time, in a great measure, because it had 
been sometimes flooded, and was, much of the year, too wet 
for cultivation. He was draining and clearing it, and it now 
brought good crops. He had had an Irish gang draining for 
him, by contract. He thought a negro could do twice as 
much work in a day as an Irishman. He had not stood over 
them and seen them at work, but judged entirely from the 
amount they accomplished: he thought a good gang of 
negroes would have got on twice as fast. He was sure they 
must have ‘ trifled’ a great deal, or they would have accom- 
plished more than they had. He complained much of their 
sprees and quarrels. I asked why he should employ Ivish- 
men, in preference to doing the work with his own hands. 
‘It’s dangerous work, (unhealthy !) and a negro’s life is:too 
valuable to be risked at it. If a negro dies it’s a considerable 
loss, you know.’ He afterwards said that his negroes never 
worked so hard as to tire themselves—always were lively, 
and ready to go off on a frolic at night. He did not think 
they ever did half a fair day’s work. They could not be 
made to work hard: they never would lay out their strength 
freely, and it was impossible to make them doit. This is 
just what I have thought when I have seen slaves at work— 
they seem to go iecush the motions of labor without putting 
strength into them. They keep their powers in reserve for 
their own use at night, perhaps. 
“Mr. W. also said that he cultivated only the coarser and 
lower-priced sorts of tobacco, because the finer sorts required 
more pains-taking and discretion than it was possible to make 
a large gang of negroes use. ‘You can make a nigger work,’ 
he said, ‘but you cannot make him think.’” 
