Article #4 of Multi-Article Series >>>>> A Short Course in African American History

Slavery on the Plantations of the American South

 

Slavery existed throughout the American colonies during the 16^th and 17^thcenturies, and through most of the 18^th century in the run-up to the Revolutionary War against the British.  In the North, slave owning tended to be on a small scale, with slaves to work as personal and household servants, on loading docks, in workshops and then in small factories;  only a few worked on the small farms of New England, upper New York, Jew Jersey, and Pennsylvania.  In the aftermath of the American Revolution, the northern states one after another terminated slavery, so that during the more than half-century that ensued before the Civil War, there developed great economic and social distinctions between the North and the South.

 

Slaves in the American South most notably worked on large plantations given at first to tobacco (especially in the Virginia and the Carolinas), rice throughout the humid lower South from Florida to Louisiana), and sugarcane (especially in Florida and Lousiana).  But they also work on small farms, some with just a few slaves, others with about twenty.  Then there were huge plantations of hundreds and even thousands of acres where slaves worked on large-scale agricultural operations that brought owners enormous wealth.  The largest of the plantations had the look of towns and even small cities, featuring a coterie of slave laborers who wove cloth, sewed clothes, made shoes, constructed furniture and buildings, shoed horses, sawed lumber, forged iron implements, and milled flour.

 

Most slaves, though, were field hands who did backbreaking, intellectually empty work day after day, from sun up to sun down, at least six days a week.  With the invention of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin in 1793, the separation of seeds from the main fiber became much easier and cost-effective, motivating planters planters to give at first more and then most acreage to cotton plants.  Slaves laboring in the nasty work of cotton picking were typically expected to fill sacks of 250 pounds of cotton a day or face a whipping.  The most adept pickers of cotton might raise their productivity to 400 pounds---  although many with that capability refrained from doing so in order to promote rising expectations on the part of the plantation owner, overseer, and slave driver.

 

Even at nightfall the work of the slave went on.  Slaves still chopped wood, mended tools, and fed the cows, pigs and chickens.  By the time they could even return to their quarters, many slaves had little time to do much else than to fall into bed and get a good enough night’s sleep to begin another round of work the next day.

 

Children of slaves automatically assumed the status of their parents.  At the age of five or six, slave children might do minor tasks in the “Big House” of the master and family, or they might help in the fields, fetching water, picking up stones and other clutter, or collect and dispose of garbage.  At about ten years old, both female and male slave children began to do regular field work, very often meaning picking cotton.

 

Slave quarters were typically one or two room shacks holding as many as twelve residents.  During the 17^th and 18^th centuries, the dwellings were generally roofed with thatch, then in the 1th century log cabins were common.  The cabins were hot in summer and cold in winter, particularly overnight in the latter case, since the slave generally was issued little more than a thin cotton blanket to use as she or he slept on a mattress made of straw.  Slaves generally made their own simple wooden furniture and adapted gourds for use as bowls and jugs;  sometimes the master would provide forks and spoons, but frequently slaves had to fashion these for themselves, as well.

 

Status distinctions among slaves followed an order that began at the Big House with those slaves who worked as butlers, servers, cooks, sewers of clothes, tailors, nannies, carriage drivers, and gardeners.  Out in the fields, working generally under a white overseer, was an often African American  slave driver.  Slave drivers wielded a high level of authority, but the elevated rank of position came awkwardly, because success depended on exploitation of fellow African Americans;  the slave driver had to be careful about acquiring a reputation for unnecessary cruelty, because he still had to dwell among and command the cooperation of other slaves, who could make life uncomfortable for him if he was judged to wield his power with little regard for their welfare.   

 

Slaves who lived and worked in the Big House ate better than did field slaves.  They often ate some of what the kitchen claves cooked for the family of the master.  Field slaves, though, made do with a diet in which flour, cornmeal, and lard provided much of the caloric value.  Milk was plentiful on the farm, and beans served as a good source of protein.  Slaves were ingenious about finding good things from nature’s bounty to supplement the meals put together from rations put together by the slave owner.  They hunted all manner of wild game and gathered a wide variety of edible plants, fruit, and nuts from the fields and forests in and near the farm.  Inventively using herbs and animal fats, slaves turned the wild game and plants of their immediate environment into masterpieces of the culinary art.