The house-servants represented a class quite distinct from and quite above the “field-hands,” of whom they were wont to speak scornfully as “cornfield niggers,” while among the former were degrees as clearly defined as ever existed in an English gentleman’s house, where the housekeeper and the butler held themselves above the rest of the servants, only admitting to occasional fellowship the lady’s maid. Among the first in station were the mammy, the butler, the body-servant, the carriage-driver, the ladies’ maids, the cook, and the gardener, with, after an interval, the “boys” who were attached to one or the other position as assistants and were in training for the places when the elders should fail. Among the “field-hands” was, first, the “head man.”[58] The “head man” was the equal of any other servant—a rank due, perhaps, partly to his authority and partly to the character that brought him this authority. He was the foreman, or assistant superintendent of the plantation. He carried the keys; he called the hands to work; directed them, and was, to some extent, in authority over them. Such a one I knew, mighty in word and act, who towered above the hands he led, a “head man,” indeed. A somewhat inaccurate idea prevails of the Southern plantation life, due, possibly, to the highly colored pictures that have been painted of it in books of a romantic order, in which the romance much outweighed the ha’penny-worth of verisimilitude. The current idea is that a Southern plantation was generally a great estate, teeming with black slaves who groaned under the lash of the drivers and at night were scourged to their dungeons, while their masters revelled in ill-used luxury and steeped themselves in licentiousness, not stopping at times to “traffic in their own flesh and blood.” It may be well to say in the outset that nothing could be further from the truth. There were great estates, but they were not numerous. There were, possibly, a score of persons in Virginia who owned over three hundred slaves, and ten or a dozen who owned over five hundred. Such estates were kept up in a certain style which almost always accompanies large wealth. But the great majority of the plantations in Virginia, and, so far as my reading and observation have gone, elsewhere, however extensive were the lands, were modest and simple, and the relation between masters and servants was one of close personal acquaintance and friendliness, beginning at the cradle and scarcely ending at the grave. At the outbreak of the war, while the number of the white population of the Southern States was about thirteen millions, the number of slave-owners and slave-hirers, including those who owned or hired but one slave, was, perhaps, less than half a million; that is, of the adult whites, men and women, estimating them as one-fifth each of the population, less than one in ten owned or hired slaves.[59]