Part 23 (1/2)
The most thoroughgoing application on record of self-government by slaves is probably that of the brothers Joseph and Jefferson Davis on their plantations, Hurricane and Brierfield, in Warren County, Mississippi. There the slaves were not only encouraged to earn money for themselves in every way they might, but the discipline of the plantations was vested in courts composed wholly of slaves, proceeding formally and imposing penalties to be inflicted by slave constables except when the master intervened with his power of pardon. The regime was maintained for a number of years in full effect until in 1862 when the district was invaded by Federal troops.[9]
[Footnote 9: W.L. Fleming, ”Jefferson Davis, the Negroes and the Negro Problem,” in the _Sewanee Review_ (October, 1908).]
These several instances were of course exceptional, and they merely tend to counterbalance the examples of systematic severity at the other extreme.
In general, though compulsion was always available in last resort, the relation of planter and slave was largely shaped by a sense of propriety, proportion and cooperation.
As to food, clothing and shelter, a few concrete items will reinforce the indications in the preceding chapters that crude comfort was the rule.
Bartram the naturalist observed in 1776 that a Georgia slaveholder with whom he stopped sold no dairy products from his forty cows in milk. The proprietor explained this by saying: ”I have a considerable family of black people who though they are slaves must be fed and cared for Those I have were either chosen for their good qualities or born in the family; and I find from long experience and observation that the better they are fed, clothed and treated, the more service and profit we may expect to derive from their labour. In short, I find my stock produces no more milk, or any article of food or nourishment, than what is expended to the best advantage amongst my family and slaves.” At another place Bartram noted the arrival at a plantation of horse loads of wild pigeons taken by torchlight from their roosts in a neighboring swamp.[10]
[Footnote 10: William Bartram, _Travels_ (London, 1792), pp. 307-310, 467, 468.]
On Charles Cotesworth Pinckney's two plantations on the South Carolina coast, as appears from his diary of 1818, a detail of four slaves was s.h.i.+fted from the field work each week for a useful holiday in angling for the huge drumfish which abounded in those waters; and their catches augmented the fare of the white and black families alike.[11] Game and fish, however, were extras. The staple meat was bacon, which combined the virtues of easy production, ready curing and constant savoriness. On Fowler's ”Prairie” plantation, where the field hands numbered a little less than half a hundred, the pork harvest throughout the eighteen-fifties, except for a single year of hog cholera, yielded from eleven to twenty-three hundred pounds; and when the yield was less than the normal, northwestern bacon or barreled pork made up the deficit.[12]
In the matter of clothing, James Habersham sent an order to London in 1764 on behalf of himself and two neighbors for 120 men's jackets and breeches and 80 women's gowns to be made in a.s.sorted sizes from strong and heavy cloth. The purpose was to clothe their slaves ”a little better than common”
and to save the trouble of making the garments at home.[13] In January, 1835, the overseer of one of the Telfair plantations reported that the woolen weaving had nearly supplied the full needs of the place at the rate of six or six and a half yards for each adult and proportionately for the children.[14] In 1847, in preparation for winter, Charles Manigault wrote from Paris to his overseer: ”I wish you to count noses among the negroes and see how many jackets and trousers you want for the men at Gowrie, ...
and then write to Messrs. Matthiessen and Co. of Charleston to send them to you, together with the same quant.i.ty of twilled red flannel s.h.i.+rts, and a large woolen Scotch cap for each man and youth on the place.... Send back anything which is not first rate. You will get from Messrs. Habersham and Son the twilled wool and cotton, called by some 'Hazzard's cloth,' for all the women and children, and get two or three dozen handkerchiefs so as to give each woman and girl one.... The shoes you will procure as usual from Mr. Habersham by sending down the measures in time.”[15] Finally, the register of A.L. Alexander's plantation in the Georgia Piedmont contains record of the distributions from 1851 to 1864 on a steady schedule. Every spring each man drew two cotton s.h.i.+rts and two pair of homespun woolen trousers, each woman a frock and chemises, and each child clothing or cloth in proportion; and every fall the men drew s.h.i.+rts, trousers and coats, the women s.h.i.+fts, petticoats, frocks and sacks, the children again on a similar scale, and the several families blankets as needed.[16]
[Footnote 11: _Plantation and Frontier_, I, 203-208.]
[Footnote 12: MS. records in the possession of W.H. Stovall, Stovall, Miss.]
[Footnote 13: _Plantation and Frontier_, I, 293, 294.]
[Footnote 14: _Ibid_., 192, 193.]
[Footnote 15: MS. copy in Manigault's letter book.]
[Footnote 16: MS. in the possession of Mrs. J.F. Minis, Savannah, Ga.]
As for housing, the vestiges of the old slave quarters, some of which have stood abandoned for half a century, denote in many cases a sounder construction and greater comfort than most of the negroes in freedom have since been able to command.
With physical comforts provided, the birth-rate would take care of itself.
The pickaninnies were winsome, and their parents, free of expense and anxiety for their sustenance, could hardly have more of them than they wanted. A Virginian told Olmsted, ”he never heard of babies coming so fast as they did on his plantation; it was perfectly surprising”;[17] and in Georgia, Howell Cobb's negroes increased ”like rabbits.”[18] In Mississippi M.W. Philips' woman Amy had borne eleven children when at the age of thirty she was married by her master to a new husband, and had eight more thereafter, including a set of triplets.[19] But the culminating instance is the following as reported by a newspaper at Lynchburg, Virginia: ”VERY REMARKABLE. There is now living in the vicinity of Campbell a negro woman belonging to a gentleman by the name of Todd; this woman is in her forty-second year and has had forty-one children and at this time is pregnant with her forty-second child, and possibly with her forty-third, as she has frequently had doublets.”[20] Had childbearing been regulated in the interest of the masters, Todd's woman would have had less than forty-one and Amy less than her nineteen, for such excesses impaired the vitality of the children. Most of Amy's, for example, died a few hours or days after birth.
[Footnote 17: Olmsted, _Seaboard Slave States_, p. 57.]
[Footnote 18: _Plantation and Frontier_, I, 179.]
[Footnote 19: Mississippi Historical Society _Publications_, X, 439, 443, 447, 480.]
[Footnote 20: _Louisiana Gazette_ (New Orleans), June 11, 1822, quoting the Lynchburg _Press_.]
A normal record is that of Fowler's plantation, the ”Prairie.” Virtually all of the adult slaves were paired as husbands and wives except Caroline who in twenty years bore ten children. Her husband was presumably the slave of some other master. Tom and Milly had nine children in eighteen years; Harry and Jainy had seven in twenty-two years; f.a.n.n.y had five in seventeen years with Ben as the father of all but the first born; Louisa likewise had five in nineteen years with Bob as the father of all but the first; and Hector and Mary had five in seven years. On the other hand, two old couples and one in their thirties had had no children, while eight young pairs had from one to four each.[21] A lighter schedule was recorded on a Louisiana plantation called Bayou Cotonier, belonging to E. Tanneret, a Creole. The slaves listed in 1859 as being fifteen years old and upwards comprised thirty-six males and thirty-seven females. The ”livre des naissances”
showed fifty-six births between 1833 and 1859 distributed among twenty-three women, two of whom were still in their teens when the record ended. Rhode bore six children between her seventeenth and thirty-fourth years; Henriette bore six between twenty-one and forty; Esther six between twenty-one and thirty-six; f.a.n.n.y, four between twenty-five and thirty-two; Annette, four between thirty-three and forty; and the rest bore from one to three children each, including Celestine who had her first baby when fifteen and her second two years after. None of the matings or paternities appear in the record, though the christenings and the slave G.o.dparents are registered.[22]
[Footnote 21: MS. in the possession of W.H. Stovall, Stovall, Miss.]
[Footnote 22: MS. in the Howard Memorial Library, New Orleans.]
The death rate was a subject of more active solicitude. This may be ill.u.s.trated from the journal for 1859-1860 of the Magnolia plantation, forty miles below New Orleans. Along with its record of rations to 138 hands, and of the occasional births, deaths, runaways and recaptures, and of the purchase of a man slave for $2300, it contains the following summary under date of October 4, 1860: ”We have had during the past eighteen months over 150 cases of measles and numerous cases of whooping cough, and then the diphtheria, all of which we have gone through with but little loss save in the whooping cough when we lost some twelve children.” This entry was in the spirit of rejoicing at escape from disasters. But on December 18 there were two items of another tone. One of these was entered by an overseer named Kellett: ”[I] shot the negro boy Frank for attempting to cut at me and three boys with his cane knife with intent to kill.” The other, in a different handwriting, recorded tersely: ”J.A. Randall commenst buisna.s.s this mornung. J. Kellett discharged this morning.” The owner could not afford to keep an overseer who killed negroes even though it might be in self defence.[23]
[Footnote 23: MS. preserved on the plantation, owned by ex-Governor H.C.