In financial results, after earning in 1848 only $4334.91, which met barely half of his plantation and family expenses for the year, his crop sales from 1849 to 1853 ranged from seven to twenty thousand dollars annually in cotton and from one and a half to two and a half thousand dollars in corn.

His gross earnings in these five years averaged $16,217.76, while his plantation expenses averaged $5393.87, and his family outlay $6392.67, leaving an average "clear gain per annum," as he called it, of $4431.10.

The accounting, however, included no reckoning of interest on the investment or of anything else but money income and outgo.

In 1859 Hammond put upon the market his 5500 acres of uplands with their buildings, livestock, implements and feed supplies, together with 140 slaves including 70 full hands.

His purpose, it may be surmised, was to confine his further operations to his river bottoms.[22] [Footnote 22: Hammond MSS., Library of Congress.] Philips, whom a dearth of patients drove early from the practice of medicine, established in the 'thirties a plantation which he named Log Hall, in Hinds County, Mississippi.