First Generations, page 14
Many slave quarters were bordered by plots of corn and tobacco and by gardens, all cultivated in the residents’ limited free time. Using Sundays and the rare holidays they were granted (including, after 1776, Independence Day), Chesapeake slaves made this small-scale agriculture an integral part of community life. In the Piedmont area, historians have traced the rise of an internal eco-omy, built upon the raising and trading of surplus food and livestock from the quarters, upon hunting and foraging, and upon materials stolen, or liberated, from the master’s stock of supplies. Slaves on a plantation traded with each other, but they also traded with peddlers traveling through the Chesapeake region, with neighboring plantation workers, and with white masters or mistresses who found it easier to purchase pies or chickens from their slaves than to compete with them in these areas. Slave women played active parts in expanding and sustaining this internal economy, raising and selling poultry and eggs, baked goods, garden products, and handmade baskets. Thus, although few slave women in the pre-Revolutionary Chesapeake were employed in housewifery by their mistresses, they developed a repertoire of household production skills within their own community economy. The records of one general store in Orange County, Virginia, show that by the 1780s, slave women were able to purchase kerchiefs and scarves, calico cloth, ribbons, thread, and even tableware with money made from production and trade.
Whatever initial reaction Piedmont masters may have had to the rise of this internal economy, they soon realized its benefits. The crops produced in the quarter allowed a master to reduce rations for his labor force, and in many cases the yield from slave gardens and fields helped reduce the pilferage of storerooms and the theft of livestock. Masters could demand that older slaves, no longer valuable in the fields, provide for themselves by gardening, farming, or keeping chickens. These masters saw the internal economy as a means to shift the burden of subsistence onto the slaves. For slave women and men, however, it was a means to carve out more autonomous space in their constricted world. This secondary, or internal, economy, in which women played active roles, had the potential to strengthen the slave community, as much because slaves established its protocols and regulated its operation as because of the material benefits it provided. Working collectively and cooperatively, slaves were able to carve out other autonomous realms. Slave midwives and slave doctors shaped the medical care of the quarter, and slave communities established their own burial societies and burial rituals. Slave women and their husbands also took the initiative in naming their children, using naming patterns to reinforce the kinship structures their community had developed. Mothers named their sons and daughters for their own brothers and sisters and for their husband’s siblings. By naming sons for their fathers, slave mothers attempted to reinforce the most often violated and thus most fragile link in the slave family chain: the paternal line.
Physical and psychological distance from the master and from his white culture surely aided the development of a slave culture. Indeed, historians have found that urban slaves and household slaves who lacked this cultural space were more acculturated than the slaves of the quarters. Yet if proximity to slave masters had its costs, distance could exact a price of its own. In the Piedmont, for example, absentee owners often relied on overseers who proved to be both crueler and more intrusive into the personal lives of the slaves than masters. These overseers allowed the men and women of the quarters fewer opportunities to develop distinctive communal patterns in leisure time, in sexual practices, or in family organization. When Piedmont slaves murdered a white man, their most common victim was not a master but an overseer.
When and where it was well established, the slave community influenced the decisions of the more powerful white community around it. For example, in 1793 a Petersburg, Virginia, slave sentenced to die for robbery won support from white residents of the town. These colonists opposed the slave’s execution on practical rather than moral grounds: his death would have too unsettling an effect on his large family and thus too unsettling an effect on their lives as well. And in 1774 the master of a twenty-five-year-old mulatto woman named Sall took into account the reality of a dense social network based on kinship when he tried to track her down. She came, he noted in his newspaper advertisement for her return, “of a numerous Family of Mulattoes, formerly belonging to a Gentleman of the Name of Howard in York County … and where probably she may attempt to go again, or perhaps into Cumberland, or Amelia, where … many of her kindred live.”
The planters of the Lower South also relied on an African slave-labor force. Indeed, the slave-based agriculture of this region developed with remarkable speed in the early eighteenth century. In 1708 there were only 4,000 slaves in South Carolina, many of them brought to the colony from the West Indies when their masters migrated to the mainland. Yet by 1720 the number of slaves had tripled, and by 1740 the colony had a black majority of over 40,000 women and men, most of whom worked in the rice paddies that produced one of the American colonies’ most valuable crops. The growth of slavery in Georgia was even more spectacular. Despite clear laws against slaveholding, the Georgia settlers were, as one observer put it, “stark Mad after Negroes.” Illegal sale of slaves took place right under the nose of colonial authorities, eventually forcing the ban to be lifted. Between 1751 and 1770, the slave population of Georgia rose from 349 to 16,000; these slaves were imported directly from Africa or purchased from traders in South Carolina.
In the region’s showplace city, Charleston, a largely creole population of African Americans swelled to over half the population, filling positions as house servants, boatmen, dockworkers, and artisans of all kinds. The highly acculturated Charleston slave women shared little in common with their rural sisters, for the slaves who worked the large rice plantations had almost no contact with white society. The plantation slave society that developed was the product of an isolation more pronounced than in the Chesapeake. And because of the steady importation of Africans throughout the eighteenth century, this community differed significantly from the creole-dominated world of the Chesapeake slaves. West African traditions shaped the rice and indigo culture in fundamental ways. Plantation slaves spoke Gullah, a language which combined English and several West African dialects, and they preserved the African custom of naming children for the day of the week on which they were born. Chesapeake girls and boys came to recognize themselves in the diminutives of English names—Lizzie, Betty, or Billy, but among slave children in the Lower South names like Quaco, Juba, and Cuba linked them to their African past.
Like Chesapeake slave women, Lower South women worked the fields. But as rice growers, the women of Carolina and Georgia labored under a task system rather than in gangs. This system assigned specific tasks to each slave but did not regulate the time in which it was to be completed. Thus, slaves on the rice plantations controlled the pace of their workday. The task system did provide a measure of autonomy, but no slave who worked the rice plantations would call their occupation an enviable one. “The labor required for the cultivation [of rice] is fit only for slaves,” wrote one frank observer, “and I think the hardest work I have seen them engaged in.” The most grueling of all the tasks was the pounding of grain with mortar and pestle—and this was a woman’s job. It was also the deadliest; mortality rates were higher in the Lower South than in the Chesapeake, and the women who beat the rice were more likely to die than the men who spent hours stooping in the stagnant rice-paddy waters.
By the middle of the eighteenth century, each slave was responsible for a quarter of an acre. Other activities on the plantation—pounding the rice, making fences, and later, in tidal rice cultivation, digging critical irrigation systems—were tasked as well. The task system was not designed to accommodate the women and men who worked in the rice fields or paddies, of course. Its logic lay in the fact that effective rice cultivation did not require the constant supervision of workers. Yet the task system allowed slaves to develop a lively domestic or internal economy. South Carolina and Georgia slaves were given land on which to grow a variety of crops, including corn, potatoes, tobacco, peanuts, melons, and pumpkins, all of which they marketed. This agriculture within an agriculture quickly became entrenched, despite efforts by lawmakers to curtail it. By 1751 Lower South authorities were fighting a staying action, insisting that slaves could sell their rice, corn, or garden crops only to their own masters. These restrictions were ignored. Slave women and men continued to sell everything from corn to catfish, baskets, canoes, and poultry products. But here, unlike in the Piedmont, slave agriculture reflected the community’s active African tradition, for Low Country slaves grew tania, bene, peppers, and other African crops. When local slave crops reached Charleston, slave women took charge of their marketing. These female traders were known for their shrewdness in bargaining with customers of both races, to whom they hawked poultry, eggs, and fruit at sometimes shocking prices. Slave women willingly paid their masters a fee for the privilege of selling the pies, cakes, handicrafts, or dry goods they made or brokered, for any profits after the fee was met belonged to them. These women drew on a West African tradition of female traders not unlike the female market-town traders of England.
The task system provided the women and men of the Lower South a measure of autonomy. But here, as in the Chesapeake, the opportunity to create a family and protect its integrity was subject to the slave owner’s circumstances and choices. The difficulties were greatest in the newer settlements of Georgia. Well into the post-Revolutionary decades, importation, not natural increase, accounted for the rising slave population there, and that population was overwhelmingly male and young. The demand made by Georgia rice planters for “prime” workers translated into a demand for slaves under the age of twenty-five. Only 4 percent of the almost 2,500 adult slaves listed in Georgia’s pre–Revolutionary War inventories were “old.” The distribution of these young saltwater slaves accounted for some of the difficulty they faced in creating family or community. Into the second decade of the nineteenth century, only 6 percent of Georgia’s planters owned fifty or more slaves, while 13 percent owned only one. Yet by the time of the Revolution, perhaps three-quarters of the slaves lived on plantations with populations of more than twenty. The real problem was not the concentration of the slave population but its composition, for not only did men outnumber women but the larger the slaveholding, the greater the sexual imbalance. Some plantations were virtually single-sexed, and only about 17 percent of those we have records for could claim a balance of the sexes.
Slave masters showed little interest in creating circumstances favorable to natural increase as long as new slaves could be imported. The African women who found themselves in Georgia were treated as workers not potential mothers, and they were put to work in the rice and indigo fields during childbearing years. Despite these obstacles, slave women and men who worked in proximity did form sexual relationships and bonds of affection, and families followed. Generally, Georgia planters allowed slaves the right to choose their own partners, and they made few efforts to disrupt a monogamous relationship. They did place restrictions upon those choices, however, for most of these planters refused to allow interplantation visiting. Thus, couples had to be formed from within the slave community of an individual plantation. Only a little over a quarter of the slave women whose lives can be traced through inventories in the pre-Revolutionary era were married and lived with their husbands. Over half these couples had one child living with them. The rest, however, had none, possibly because the children had been separated from them.
Conditions in Georgia were extreme, but slave women in the Carolinas also found it difficult to establish the relationships they desired or to create the family circumstances they thought best. What these women did want is evident, in part, from the choices they made whenever choices were possible. Historians have long argued about when slave women became sexually active and whether they delayed childbearing until marriage, but the most detailed study of South Carolina slave women suggests that in the twenty-five years before the Revolution, they bore their first children between the ages of sixteen and twenty-three. The median age was nineteen, well after a typical Carolina slave woman reached puberty. This deferral of motherhood suggests that slave women sought a stable relationship before creating their family. It also suggests that the slave community endorsed restraints on a woman’s sexual behavior. Thus, black and white women shared the close identification of morality with sexual behavior.
In South Carolina, the master’s power to disperse its members was the greatest danger to a woman’s family. Here, as in Virginia, Georgia, and Maryland, male sons were at greatest risk. Indeed, 60 percent of men between twenty and twenty-nine were separated from their mothers. Sixty percent of a slave woman’s daughters, on the other hand, were likely to remain with her. Almost all children under five were also allowed to stay with their mother. The result of these dispersal patterns was that three generations of women were likely to live together, from infant daughter to young mother to the elderly matron of the family. Strain and rivalry were as likely to result as harmony in this multigenerational female world, but this was a connection few men could expect with their father or their brothers.
Although South Carolina’s demand for slave labor produced a black majority, only 17 percent of the mainland colonial slaves worked the fields of the Lower South at mid-century. Sixty-one percent lived, as Mary Johnson had a century before, in the Chesapeake. In 1750 61 percent of all enslaved women and men were residents of Virginia or Maryland. Together, these Southern regions were the magnet that drew slave ships to America’s North Atlantic coast, and within them, distinctive slave cultures developed. But slavery was not simply a Southern institution; the remaining black population could be found in the cities and the farmlands of the Northern colonies.
Slavery in the North was an accepted tradition but not a widespread habit. The Dutch had employed slave labor extensively when New York was New Netherlands, using African labor to compensate for the scarcity of colonists from Holland. The small farmers of New England, on the other hand, had little practical use for slave labor, and where slaves were employed it was often because of their master’s close tie to the transatlantic slave trade. For example, the merchant-landowners of Rhode Island who made their riches in trade liked to flaunt their prosperity by retaining anywhere from five to forty slaves. One merchant magnate boasted a holding of 238 slaves. But the majority of New England slaves, like the slaves of the middle colonies, were found in the cities, where shortages of white labor in artisan shops, on the docks, and in household or personal service were a periodic problem. The greatest influx of African slaves to Pennsylvania, for example, came during the Seven Years War, when the flow of English and other European servants was seriously disrupted. By mid-century, roughly 10 percent of the population of Boston, Philadelphia, and New York was black, although only one out of every five families owned a slave.
A slave woman in these Northern cities spent her days engaged in housework—cooking, cleaning, washing and ironing, tending the fires and the gardens, and looking after her master’s children. She passed her nights sleeping in the garret or the kitchen. She might be hired out to nurse the sick, to put in a neighbor’s garden, to preserve food or wait on tables for a special occasion, but few urban slave women were ever hired out to learn a craft. Colonial artisans considered their shops a male domain. Ironically, the “black mammy” so often associated with plantation life was not an authentic figure of the colonial South, but she could be found in the fashionable homes of Philadelphia and New York. Slaves in the countryside also did housework, but more of their time was spent tending larger gardens, raising poultry, milking cows, and spinning cloth than in cooking, cleaning, or serving as personal maids to farm family members. At harvest time, these women were assigned to fieldwork.
As they worked in the wheat fields of southern Pennsylvania or in the kitchens of Boston, Northern slave women experienced constant, intimate contact with white society. Whether their owners were kind or callous, their values and customs were ever present, and a solitary black servant, working, eating, sleeping in a crowded Pennsylvania farmhouse, or in the close quarters of a merchant’s home, lacked the steady reinforcement of her African heritage. Not surprisingly, Northern slave women were more likely to acculturate than their sisters in the plantation South.
Urban slave women had little hope of creating a family that could remain intact. Slaveholdings were too small for a woman to choose a husband from the household, and few urban colonists were willing to shoulder the costs of raising a slave child in their midst. Rural slaveholders could set a slave’s child to work in the garden or field, but in the cities youngsters were simply a drain on resources and living space. At least one master preferred to sell his pregnant slave rather than suffer having her child underfoot. Other masters solved the problem of an extra mouth to feed by selling infants—or, in one case, giving his slave’s baby away. Slave women who dared to start or add to their families were sometimes separated from the men who fathered their children. In Boston, a pregnant woman and her husband chose to commit suicide rather than endure the dissolution of their family. Urban slave women who were allowed to keep their children often lost them quickly. Communicable diseases and cramped quarters combined in deadly fashion in every household in eighteenth-century colonial cities, but black infant mortality rates were two to three times higher than white.
