The
New Lord Of The Manor Ditched The Marshes, And
Walled In His New Rice-Fields With Dikes, To Keep
Out The Freshets From The Upland And The Tides
From The Ocean, Perfecting A Complete System Of
Drainage And Irrigation.
He built comfortable
quarters for his slaves, and erected a church and
schoolhouse for their use.
From the original
two hundred and eighty acres of cultivated rice
land, the new proprietor developed the wild
morass into sixteen hundred acres of rice-fields,
and six hundred acres of vegetable, corn, and
provender producing land.
For several seasons prior to the war, Jehossee
yielded a rice crop which sold for seventy
thousand dollars, and netted annually fifty thousand
dollars income to the owner. At that time
Governor Aiken had eight hundred and seventy
three Slaves on the island, and about one hundred
working as mechanics, &c., in Charleston. The
eight hundred and seventy-three Jehossee slaves,
men, women, and children, furnished a working
force of three hundred for the rice-fields.
Mr. Aiken would not tolerate the loose
matrimonial ways of negro life, but compelled his
slaves to accept the marriage ceremony; and
herein lay one of his chief difficulties, for, to
whatever cause we attribute it, the fact remains
the same, namely, that the ordinary negro has
no sense of morality. After all the attempts
made on this plantation to improve the moral
nature of these men and women, Governor Aiken,
during a yellow-fever season in Savannah after
the war, while visiting the poor sufferers, intent
upon charitable works, found in the lowest
quarter of the city, sunk in the most abject depths of
vice, men and women who had once been good
servants on his plantations.
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