A search for anything related to manuals on the Library of Congress Web site yields 50 pages of links, most of them having to do with library cataloging, followed by dancing, followed by courts martial. A couple pages on a plantation manual authored by South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond (1807-1864) caught my eye, though. Hammond finished the manual in 1858, not long before the Civil War. He gives detailed instructions on how long to let female slaves nurse their babies, how much time they could spend each day with their babies, and countless other aspects of daily life as a slave and plantation

owner.