The “typical” plantation did not exist, but it is possible to describe, in a general way, what a medium-to-large operation employing twenty or more slaves was like in the two decades preceding the Civil War. Such a plantation was more like a small village than a northern-type agricultural unit, and in another way more like a self-sufficient colonial farm than a nineteenth-century commercial operation, although its major activity involved producing cotton or some other cash crop.
In addition to the master’s house with its complement of barns and stables, there would usually be a kitchen, a smokehouse, a washhouse, a home for the overseer should one be employed, perhaps a school-house, a gristmill, a forge, and of course the slave quarters, off at a distance (but not too far) from the center.
Slaveholding families were also quite different from northern families of similar status, in part because they were engaged in agriculture and in part because of their so-called peculiar institution. Husbands and wives did not function in separate spheres to nearly the same extent, although their individual functions were different and gender-related.
Although planter families purchased their fine clothes, furniture, and china, as well as other manufactured products such as sewing machines, cooking utensils, books, and musical instruments, plantations were busy centers of household manufacture, turning out most of the clothing of slaves except for shoes and the everyday clothing of their own children, along with bedding and other textiles. Spinning, weaving, and sewing were women’s work, both for whites and blacks. Nearly all the food consumed was raised on the land; only tea and coffee and a few other food items were commonly purchased.
The master was in general charge and his word was law—the system was literally paternalistic. But his wife nearly always had immense responsibilities. Running the household meant supervising the servants (and sometimes punishing them, which often meant wielding a lash), nursing the sick, taking care of the vegetable and flower gardens, planning meals, and seeing to the education of her own children and the training of young slaves. It could also involve running the entire plantation on the frequent occasions when her husband was away on business. At the same time, her role entailed being a “southern lady”: refined, graceful, and supposedly untroubled by worldly affairs.
Most slaveholding women had to learn all these things by doing; in general, they married while still in their teens and had been given little or no training in running a household. Unmarried “young ladies” had few responsibilities beyond caring for their own rooms and persons and perhaps such “ladylike” tasks as arranging flowers.
The Kingsley plantation, on Fort George Island in Jacksonville, Florida. Zephaniah Kingsley, the owner, bought Anta, a thirteen-year-old slave, in 1806. Although they were never legally married, Zephaniah described Anta—now Anna—as his wife. He freed her and all five of her children, whom he recognized as his heirs. Anna managed the plantation until 1821, when Spain transferred Florida to the United States. Unwilling to live under the harsh slave laws that prevailed in the South, Kingsley emigrated to Haiti with Anna and their children. The slave quarters are shown here as well.
The majority of the slaves of both sexes were field hands who labored on the land from dawn to dusk. Household servants and artisans, indeed any slave other than small children and the aged and infirm, might be called on for such labor when needed. Slave women were expected to cook for their own families and do other chores after working in the fields.
Children, free and slave, were cared for by slaves, the former by household servants, the latter usually by an elderly woman, perhaps with the help of a girl only a little older than the children. Infants were brought to their mothers in the fields for nursing several times a day, for after a month or two at most, slave mothers were required to go back to work. Slave children were not put to work until they were six or seven years old, and until they were about ten they were given only small tasks such as feeding the chickens or minding a smaller child. Black and white youngsters played together and were often cared for by the same nursemaid.
Slave cabins were simple and crude; most consisted of a single room, dark, with a fireplace for cooking and heat. Usually the flooring was raised above ground level, though some were set on the bare earth. In 1827 Basil Hall, a British naval officer, reported that in a large South Carolina plantation, 140 slaves lived in twenty-eight cottages or huts. These were “uncommonly neat and comfortable, and might have shamed those of many countries I have seen.” Yet Hall dismissed the claims of whites that slaves were happier than the peasantry of England. Slavery was, above all, a “humiliation” imposed upon “the whole mass of the labouring population” of the South. •••-[Read the Document Harper, The Slave Mother at Www. myhistorylab. com
•••-[Read the Document Overseer's Report from Chicora Wood Plantation at Www. myhistorylab. com
World History
