what did slaves eat on plantations

Africa supplied slaves for the plantations; the New World produced raw material for industries in Europe. For men and women so bent on control, slaves with cashand vendors ready to take itposed risks far beyond the material, however. 6 cups (1 1/4 liter) chicken stock Organization of American Historians From January to June, they harvested the cane by chopping the plants off close to the ground, stripping the leaves and then cutting them into shorter strips to be bundled off to be sent to the sugar cane mill. When the pot of greens was eaten, there would still be the flavorful broth, called potlicker. Advertisers leaned on characters like Aunt Jemima and Rastus, stereotypical black domestics, drawn from minstrel song. "We have a waiting list that's almost a yard long," she says, adding that they should have enough to go around, at least this year. The sugar was then shipped back to Europe. Make no mistake: this was taxing work in often stifling and deadly environments, but even so, some slaves were able to complete daily tasks early and earn time for themselves. House slave was a term used to refer to those enslaved Africans relegated to performing domestic work on American slave plantations. This letter was clearly written, and later published, to give the public a firsthand view of how southern slaves were treated. Which travel companies promote harmful wildlife activities? Choosing to buy control of ones own body affirmed a slaves status as chattel, even as that commodity transaction broke the chains of servitude completely. An illustration depicts slaves crushing the sap out of sugar cane on a sugar plantation in New Orleans. Number of slaves in the Upper South: 1,208,758 (29% of total population) 4,165 million. It became a small way for slaves to create their own personal space. "Everybody needs to keep in touch with their ancestors, and through food is one of the best ways to get close," she says. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1979. Colonial and antebellum elite Southerners understood fully that enslaved people cooked their food. Sugar has a long history as a plantation crop. African rice often accompanied slave voyages. But from the 1820s onward, we see planters strategizing further, introducing choiceor the illusion of choiceas a way to tamp down long-term discontent. Then, other foods made available to slaves are listed, including: bacon, molasses, potatoes, poultry, and eggs. The remainder of the letter consists of detailed explanations of medical care and resources made available to Gibbs slaves. Think leafy greens and black-eyed. Print. Peddlers and wagoners roved from farm to plantation, selling trinkets, candies, cakes, and often alcohol. It was put into a large wooden tray or trough, and set down upon the ground. This page was last edited on 11 October 2022, at 21:29. [10] Agricultural Survey of the Parish of St. Matthews, Southern Cabinet, 1 (1840), 202; Thomas S. Clay, Detail of a Plan for the Moral Improvement of Negroes on Plantations (1833), 2122. Your Privacy Rights [1] Daily Richmond Examiner, Dec. 2, 1864; Richmond Whig and Public Advertiser , Jan. 3, 1865. However, the historical roots of both dishes have so much to teach us about the slave experience that its worth including them together here. While it might be fun to think about boiled sweet potatoes and cornbread, we must also remember the dark truth of slavery. He spent his first nine years of life an enslaved child on the piedmont Virginia tobacco plantation. I delivered the talk to an audience of 30 at the Maier Museum of Art in Lynchburg, Virginia. Private moments were rare, as was rest. On plantations, African American slaves did the same thing. Once in the Americas, slaves then planted the rice for their own consumption. Heres why each season begins twice. The total number of slave owners was 385,000 (including, in Louisiana, some free African Americans), amounting to approximately 3.8% of the Southern and Border states population. Food items included alcohol, sugar, molasses, flour, coffee, rice, spices, butter, cheese, bacon, candy, cakes, and tea. In Mississippi and South Carolina the figure approached one half. Sugar plantation in the British colony of Antigua, 1823. For a guest, this must have been delightful: biscuits, ham, and some brandy, all made on site, ready to eat at 2:30 a.m. or whenever you pleased. Well cook three representative dishes, each of which can help us understand a slightly different aspect of the food experiences of the Revolutionary Era slave. He was one of 10 slaves owned by James Burroughs in 1861. Bondpeople in urban and rural areas alike had long sold their labor power, bought property, earned credit, and incurred debts through participation in what historians and anthropologists call the slaves internal economy.[2] Spending money they earned after and between labor completed for their masters, enslaved consumers sought to provide material comfort to themselves and their kin, to differentiate themselves from their peers, and perhaps most importantly, to acquire material markers of freedom in a world that hemmed them in at every turn. While newly free African Americans fled the plantations to find work as housekeepers, butlers, cooks, drivers, Pullman porters and waitersthe only jobs they could getAunt Jemima and Rastus smiled while serving white folks, enhancing the myth that black cooks had always been cheerful and satisfied, during slavery and with their current situation. If a traveler showed up, day or night, bells would ring for the enslaved cook to prepare food. Boiling ground grains into a porridge called polenta was a longtime Roman and Italian practice, which they quickly adapted to corn when that originally came over from America. Corn was one of the most versatile crops eaten by American Slaves. This week I was reviewing Muster, Payrolls and List of Effectives for Capt Gross Scruggs company of the Fifth Virginia. When working on her master's thesis, Cromwell buried herself in documentslegislative records, tax rolls, newspaper clippings, and primary sources other scholars had reviewed hundreds, if not thousands of times beforeand was able to discern that female Muslim Nigerian slaves, working as fruit sellers and market vendors on behalf of their owners, helped shape the overall economic structure of the American South with long-distance price fixing and aggressive sales techniques. Bondpeople made their bread out of shorts, while the first grade was always used in the masters house, one woman recalled. So, given the risks enslaved consumers posed, why did slaveholders allow their people to trade? All de possums and rabbits and fish and such wer jus dat much more"(5) Clothing for slave children was in general very basic and generally consisted of a smock like garment worn by both boys and girls. Cookie Settings, Courtesy of Internet Archive Book Images, via Wikimedia Commons, Kids Start Forgetting Early Childhood Around Age 7, Archaeologists Discover Wooden Spikes Described by Julius Caesar, Artificial Sweetener Tied to Risk of Heart Attack and Stroke, Study Finds, Rare Jurassic-Era Insect Discovered at Arkansas Walmart. theamericanhistorian@oah.org, 2023 Organization of American Historians, Masters, Slaves, and Exchange: Power's Purchase in the Old South. [7] Hilliard, Masters, Slaves, and Exchange, 6993. I top them with broccoli and red chili paste, Roasted Corn with Garlic Shallot Buttah, able to survive by hunting, fishing, and gardening. Agricultural journals and plantation records burst with strategies and advice. (19721978), 15, pt. [3]. Joyner Rare E444.B58, Special Collections Department, J.Y. Still others imagined that allowing slaves the ability to spend money as they chose might make up for restrictions in other parts of their lives. This is relevant to our general understanding of Chapel Hill, as well as the foodways of the time, because it gives us a clear insight to what is claimedto be the diet and well-being of an average southern slave was in the mid 19th century.It also may have had a significant impact on keeping slavery practices in the American south. [3] George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, 41 vols. In a burgeoning market society, finding goods for sale was not terribly difficult, as store merchants were more than happy to take slaves cash. Few of us sit down to a plate of food and contemplate the historical significance of it. X11ej9G}R)\.}F5aj??*? Sweet potatoes are hearty vegetables that grow well in less ideal soil, which made them an ideal crop for enslaved people and lower class whites. ", Georgia chef and farmer Matthew Raiford is able to reconstruct his family's past through his farm, which has been in his family since 1874. But the country began recalibrating its memories of black cooking even before the Civil War, erasing the brutality and hardships of slavery from a story of Old Southern graciousness. Okra is found in many African dishes, especially in the stews they serve out of big cauldrons. Place on a roasting pan, and bake until soft, perhaps an hour or two, depending upon the size of your sweet potato. Fewer than one-third of Southern families owned slaves at the peak of slavery prior to the Civil War. The Campus of The University of North Carolina, Located in the Village of Chapel Hill. Can we bring a species back from the brink?, Video Story, Copyright 1996-2015 National Geographic Society, Copyright 2015-2023 National Geographic Partners, LLC. The practice was abolished in most places during the 19th century. 90. Retrieved from, Stephen Behrendt (1999). Bats and agaves make tequila possibleand theyre both at risk, This empress was the most dangerous woman in Rome. Cookie Policy 9eBOn In the mill, the cane was crushed using a three-roller mill. City newspapers noted the Army of the Potomacs unrelenting pressure on nearby Petersburg, but the sieges long familiarity muted the panic that dull roar might have incited only three years before. He came to the North Carolina conference with a yellowed letter, a rare piece of history addressed from his great-grandmother to his grandmother, detailing how and where to plant corn, sweet potatoes, sugar cane, and watermelon. In the rice-growing lowcountry of South Carolina and Georgia, enslaved men and women usually labored according to the task system. Under this scheme, planters or overseers assigned each laborer a daily task, hoeing a portion of field, for example, or pounding so many mortars of rice. B@k E0ZCl#a=y/%7rpVV{@h`zh-IFOVdRi9~ijt4z{;)'B1[tK [2R-mLhLCdF4jXp01]'7 *J0TzH}1dhl0&v7oN\"7nHi g r#H]lxVooIH*m'z!doXZ@WJFpDm;zr~ozJZ@Q,@|]4cv In many areas, however, it was customary for slaves to work Saturday afternoons and Sundays on their own time, devoting daylight hours to cash-earning activities similar to that of their lowcountry brethren. You also see evidence of this multi-cultural transformation in so-called receipt books, handwritten cookbooks from the 18th and 19th centuries. yams. Blacks wasted their money, masters opined, or bought goods impractical for their lowly lives. The slaves made up 80% of the property value of the plantation. 2023 Smithsonian Magazine Fruit as Food and Medicine Orange County Observer July 7, 1883, U.S. House of Representative Speech of North Carolina on Food Adulteration, H. H. Patterson Account Books from the 1880s, A Cure for Consumption by Jillian Fellows, Catherine Roulhacs Recipe for Infant Food, Foodways During Enslavement and War Bob Paynes Object, Letter from Nathan P. Neal to Aaron and Elizabeth Neal, September 2, 1857, Letter of Charles P. Mallett to Charles B. Mallett, 18 April 1865, Letter from Elisha Mitchell to Maria North, February 11, 1818, October 12, 1863 Letter from Judge William H. Battle to his son, Richard Battle, Food wanted for North Carolina Solders in the trenches around Petersburg Riley Bechter, Circular from UNC President to Parents on Student Alcohol Use, September 30 1840, President James K. Polks Visit to Chapel Hill (1847), Hireling Labor and Slave Labor in Farmers Journal, Raleigh, May 1854, Mrs. Anne Ruffin Camerons Red Cabbage Pickle, Decadence and Opulence in Smart Society Dinners, Fight Taken Up for Oleomargarine, The German Club & a Tradition of Cotillion at UNC, The Carolina Medical Journal: Health in the Age of Decadence. Accessed October 09, 2018. http://www.nndb.com/people/016/000117662/. [1] Rawick, American Slave, 13, pt. What did slaves eat on plantations? The slaves then had to adapt their African rice dishes to fit the limited ingredients they had in America. The seeds of the 1969 UNC food service worker strike. Some indentured servants were also leaving to . Researcher Alicia Cromwell says one major challenge is "studying the silences," a phrase coined by Harris, which forces researchers to engage in detective-style deductions to piece together a more complete view of history in the absence of primary documents like diaries and letters written by slaves. Enslaved people ate crops or leftover food on the plantations. But to be an American is to live in a place where contradictions are the very fibers that bind a complicated heritage divided sharply by race. 1/2 tsp (3 ml) salt The process for converting plain corn to the more-digestible hominy, which involves soaking in lye (extracted from ashes), was taught to the earliest settlers by the Native Americans. F. from the Cameron Papers, Letter from John and Ebenezer Pettigrew to Charles Pettigrew, October 3, 1795, Lenoir Family Papers Account of Corn, 1785, Business Invoice from the Cameron Papers, 1774, Fiddle Headed Teaspoon, late 1700s / early 1800s, Distilling Method for Corn Whiskey Lenoir Papers (1790s), Newspaper Advertisement from The Pennsylvania Gazette (Dec 5, 1771), Accounting Record of Spice Purchases for the Household of William Lenoir (May 30, 1772), Sunflower Oil Recipe and Mangel-Wurzel Cultivation, Financial Document The Lenoir Family Papers, Excerpt from A Tour in the United States of America, Blums Farmers and Planters Almanac for the year 1870, Star Brand Fertilizers Advertisement in The Danbury Reporter, Liquid standard presented to UNC in 1883, Planting Fruit Trees to Secure Success by Abigail Bowdish, The Bennehan Familys Sugar and Rum Purchases, Mary Ann Bryan Masons Mrs. Masons New Cookery. Yet, this technique draws directly from Africa. A sure indicator that theyre done is that they start to leak caramelized sugars into the pan. Okra is one of those under-appreciated vegetables that I love. This is an example of the many ways in which word of mouth and early forms of media were used to spread false information to convince Americans to sit back and allow the continuation of slavery. [2] Historians and anthropologists across the Caribbean and the United States have explored the mechanics and meaning of the slaves internal economy. Honor the Boycott Flyer Protesting Dining Halls, A Little Bit of China in Chapel Hill Daily Tar Heel Article, February 9, 1979, Lambda, 1977: Tea Dance and Carolina Gay Association, On-Campus Kitchens of as a Social Center of UNC Housing. Typically slave labor on the plantation was divided into two broad categories: house servants and field hands. Sapelo, a barrier island about the size of Manhattan, has about 50 residents, primarily descendants of African slaves who settled here after slavery was outlawed. Offerings such as pepper pot, okra stew, gumbo, and jambalaya became staples on American dining tables. [1] Charles Ball, Fifty Years in Chains; or, the Life of an American Slave (1859), 129. The word gumbo comes from the Bantu word for okra, ki ngombo. *Editor's Note, August 15, 2018: A previous version of this article wrongly stated that Chef Hercules was our nations first White House chef, when, in fact, he served as George Washington's chef at Mount Vernon and at the President's House in Philadelphia, before construction of the White House was complete. These corn mushes and breads became the Soul Food staples of grits and cornbread. A diet consisting of chicken products, molasses, bacon, and wine is one that would be highly appreciated during the 19thcentury. The plantation system peaked in the first half of the 18th century, but later on, during the middle of 19th century, there was a significant increase in demand for cotton from European countries, which means there was a need for expanding the plantation in the southern parts of United States. Required fields are marked *. How did enslaved people earn money and what did they buy? [4], As the plantation economy expanded, the slave trade grew to meet the growing demand for labor. As Booker T. Washington recounts in his Slave Diet Bulletin, a common breakfast was cornbread and pork. A slave plantation was an agricultural farm that used enslaved people for labour. \ .2LE_mm5!aq e2z(~i+Lj4 +a,bN^e8w)q~A0*,A|EncL&L3upPm4Y]}R"XNeFWeoN;N&hS3LW0Km]-+SNjzq"-b5m:-`v]zf6P5'm0t"~VK,Le-}9r"v These dishes traveled with captured West Africans on slave ships, and into the kitchens of Virginias elite. Throughout history domestic service was probably the major slave occupation. Again, simple preparation is likely to be the most authentic, and interviews with slaves of later periods[iv] indicate that they would simply wrap the sweet potatoes in leaves, place them in the coals and let them roast. In cotton and tobacco regions, enslaved people more often worked from sunup to sundown under the close eye of a driver or overseer. The children were then called, like so many pigs, and like so many pigs they would come and devour the mush; some with oyster-shells, others with pieces of shingle, some with naked hands, and none with spoons.. "Black people have been in the room, but for so long they were so good at being invisible" that they were easy to leave out of the historical record, Harris says. I am wondering, however, about the timing of Mr. In Bailey's family, the tiny red legume, with its thin, firm shell; creamy interior; and sweet, buttery flavor was just another staple she and her family planted, harvested, and cooked.