Hammond worked his slaves hard. Partly because of that, but also for less clear reasons, they had a penchant for dying. Each death inflicted a financial cost in terms of lost labor and diminished capital. In one diary entry, he bemoaned the death of a three-year-old, not out of any sense of emotional loss, but because this was the seventy-eighth death in just under ten years.
The fact that this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this man’s transgressions against NATURE
