The author of the letter (slave owner Robert W. Gibbs) is described in the newspaper article as one of the most intelligent physicians of the South and a gentleman of the highest personal character and consideration. In the actual letter Gibbs also establishes his own qualifications for speaking about the treatment of southern slaves by stating that he has cared for several thousands of slaves in his lifetime. Early receipt books are dominated by European dishes: puddings, pies, and roasted meats. I also love making Gluten-Free Cornbread and Southern Corn Pudding for family gatherings. Such paradoxes troubled more than a few, but practical concerns and a desire for labors just reward pushed them to work extra hours, save cash, and put plans in motion to make freedom theirs. Slavery. Indeed, the progress of the plantation system was accompanied by the rapid growth of the slave trade. Copyright 1996-2015 National Geographic SocietyCopyright 2015-2023 National Geographic Partners, LLC. When the pot of greens was eaten, there would still be the flavorful broth, called potlicker. [7] Hilliard, Masters, Slaves, and Exchange, 6993. Ploughing cotton (detail). Planters embraced the use of slaves mainly because indentured labor became expensive. Others crafted brooms or baskets. But cooks wielded great power: As part of the front stage of plantation culture, they carried the reputations of their enslaversand of Virginiaon their shoulders. In 1665, there were fewer than 500 Africans in Virginia but by 1750, 85 percent of the 235,000 slaves lived in the Southern colonies, Virginia included. [an error occurred while processing this directive]. But by the late 17th century, plantation homes throughout Virginia had turned to enslaved laborers, captured from central and western Africa, to grow crops, build structures and generally remain at the beck and call of white families. "Yet gumbo has become totemic," says Harris, "linked forever in the American mind, particularly with southern Louisiana.". Manufactured goods, of higher value, were then sold both to Africa and the New World. Choice implied agency and that agency undermined masters rule. Records from six antebellum stores across Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia indicate that enslaved consumers spent hard-earned cash on a wide variety of goods. Its easy to make a plant-based version of Smoky Collard Greens. For an overview, see Sidney Mintz, Caribbean Transformations (1974); Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan, eds., The Slaves Economy: Independent Production by Slaves in the Americas (1991). Should they free themselves individually or wait until they had saved enough to buy kin as well? Where allowed, some slaves grew crops of their own to supplement diets or to barter and truck. Vegetable patches or gardens, if permitted by the owner, supplied fresh produce to add to the rations. Robert Allston. NNDB. X11ej9G}R)\.}F5aj??*? 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 Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Alicia Cromwell is a doctoral student at the University of South Carolina. Information about diet and food production for enslaved Africans on plantations. Seemingly unimportant trades ruined old relations and wove together new webs of economic, social, political, and cultural life in a thousand stressed communities. (n.d.). Despite the newspapers warnings, white Southerners could not have been surprised to see enslaved buyers browsing goods for sale. Enslaved people ate crops or leftover food on the plantations. ", 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. How did enslaved people earn money and what did they buy? By the Civil Wars last weary winter, Confederate Richmond, had become accustomed to the pounding of artillery echoing across nearby fields. As small as they were, these potato holes allowed a tiny sense of privacy and self control in a life that rarely had boundaries. [ii] Wilke, Richard, and Livia Barbosa. The struggle to get by in a regime of growing instability engendered webs of unregulated exchange and distribution. As crops failed and the Union blockade tightened, goods became scarce. These large homes marked a moment of transition, when English cultural norms took hold on the Virginia landscape. Heres the technology that helped scientists find itand what it may have been used for. . Indigofera was a major crop cultivated during the 18th century, in Venezuela, Guatemalaand Haiti until the slave rebellion against France that left them embargoed by Europe and India in the 19th and 20th centuries. My favorite plant-based recipe for Carolina Gold rice is Southern Collard Dolmades. Terms of Use [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. "I had quite a few okra dishes when I went to West Africa. Another ingredient that came from Africa was okra. theamericanhistorian@oah.org, 2023 Organization of American Historians, Masters, Slaves, and Exchange: Power's Purchase in the Old South. 5 0 obj According to the 1840 United States Census, one out of every four families in Virginia owned slaves. "I'm trying to teach my students, black and white, a different kind of history about slavery," says Cromwell, who is still researching the subject at the University of Georgia. Place on a roasting pan, and bake until soft, perhaps an hour or two, depending upon the size of your sweet potato. They also had to feed every free person who passed through the plantation. It also ties us to the past. Eco-friendly burial alternatives, explained. Advertising Notice Corn was one of the most versatile crops eaten by American Slaves. However, the historical roots of both dishes have so much to teach us about the slave experience that its worth including them together here. For Trinidadians, Callaloo is one part of their national dish: Crab and Callaloo- a dish which was created by the African slaves sometime around 1530 when the island was under Spanish occupation. 8LX KATHLEEN HILLIARD is an associate professor of history at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa and the author of Masters, Slaves, and Exchange: Power's Purchase in the Old South (2014). The perfect taste of summer! How a zoo break-in changed the life of an owl called Flaco, Naked mole rats are fertile until they die, study finds. David Shields, a professor at the University of South Carolina in Columbia and an expert in early American literature and food revivals, points to Emeline Jones as an example. One formerly-enslaved woman remembered that she and her family aint had nothin but de coarsest food an clothes. Educator and former slave Booker T. Washington commented on clothing in particular, recalling shirts that were stiff and coarse . At the top of that list is Atlanta chef Linton Hopkins, who has concocted several ways to serve her peas at his acclaimed southern-upscale Restaurant Eugene, including in his version of Hoppin' John. They lived in the kitchen, sleeping upstairs above the hearth during the winters, and outside come summertime. In cotton and tobacco regions, enslaved people more often worked from sunup to sundown under the close eye of a driver or overseer. Slaveholders lamented the theft of plantation stores, noting that slaves traded purloined corn, cotton, and bacon for goods of their choosing or cash outright. Colonists tried to use Native Americans for labor, but they were susceptible to European diseases and died in large numbers. Purchased most often were cloth and sewing suppliescalico, cambric, muslin, shirting, and occasional bits of silkand ready-made clothing and accessories such as shoes, caps, hats, coats, dresses, shawls, shirts, and cravats. My favorite plant-based okra recipe involves a quick saute with garlic, tomato, and herbs. I delivered the talk to an audience of 30 at the Maier Museum of Art in Lynchburg, Virginia. Heat in a Dutch oven or other large pot with a cover: However, grilled and roasted okra make delicious side dishes. What good could it possibly do them? More importantly, he must have thought, What good does a slave with money do me? Plenty, he and others like him imagined. 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. Grits purists will be gratified to hear that, again, we will take a very straightforward approach to this dish, eschewing cheese, ham or other additions or embellishments. 7W?9HY:tn 2@R>vHwVh1 -Z+R{`F# Q*?^oFu~rZ%anV-1u!k7`2N>/B7JTM,83;U@4Ubn;Lo5AI@x4tsed~E(> For men and women so bent on control, slaves with cashand vendors ready to take itposed risks far beyond the material, however. Slaves were usually given a weekly ration of food such as cornmeal, lard, offals, and molasses greens etc supplemented at times with meat and fish. Plus, a sweet potato puree adds creamy richness. This is nowhere more apparent than in slaves purchase of that most precious and intangible commodity, freedom. Your email address will not be published. For the cooks, it must have been a different kind of experience. 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. "Transatlantic Slave Trade". Journal of the American Revolution also produces annual hardcover volumes, a branded book series, and the podcast, Dispatches. The cooking traditions of the slaves were, as with most newcomers to these shores, a creative amalgamation of what they knew from their homelands and what was available to them here. What do slaves want with money? he asked rhetorically. It's possible it was incorrectly annotated. Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Plantation complexes in the Southern United States, https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Plantation, "How Slavery Helped Build a World Economy", http://abolition.e2bn.org/slavery_42.html, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Slave_plantation&oldid=1115516973. 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. The answers to these questions depend on where a person was enslaved and what kind of work she or he performed. Sweet potatoes can easily grow, even in less than ideal soil. Their comfort is promoted, he reasoned, and it removes the temptation to visit dram shops. Most importantly, it affords the master an excellent opportunity of judging the thrift of each negro.[10] Here was a powerful opportunity for masters not only to monitor slave spending but to criticize it, too. Your Privacy Rights 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. The system had a good many benefits, as Georgia slaveholder Thomas Clay explained. What did the slaves eat on the plantations? During the 18th century Cuba depended increasingly on the sugarcane crop and on the expansive, slave-based plantations that produced it. Joyner Library, East Carolina University, Greenville, North Carolina 27858. Most slave purchasing reflected this tension between necessity, luxury, and potential danger. tUqqM^]gG oyQH5/CKu m:' $D0 &1*eKQ 2 *XlserS4'S:qJfpf+^rhMT4`yi L^c7)e_dJIS*=m+yh~>;UEWD=_GL5,A ^=Eeobge%nh&kJ5H #O bEV5 9NUiNz-U+F/D 6g^*^f:,_O_.MBV7y#="iIg/ce2I #dg@ `` 1SD Hf]QvnYV7. oS@ hFoL:ZxZ\]&eP 2 tbsp (30 ml) bacon fat, Add: document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. In a highly racialized and segregated America, still grappling with its guilt over slavery, white people created a myth that these cooks wereand always had beenhappy. Gibbs also mentions that the most industrious slaves were allowed to have their own gardens and chickens to tend to, and were able to sell their crops/goods for their own profit. Gibbs, Robert. Perhaps the easiest way to monitor slave spending was through the operation of a plantation store. Underneath the slave ship's decks, Africans were held chest-to-chest and could not do much moving. Goodloe, for example, advised slaveholders to allow supervised shopping trips. Accessed October 09, 2018. http://www.nndb.com/people/016/000117662/. Food items included alcohol, sugar, molasses, flour, coffee, rice, spices, butter, cheese, bacon, candy, cakes, and tea. The indigo crop was grown for making blue indigo dye in the pre-industrial age. Most favoured by slave owners were commercial crops such as olives, grapes, sugar, cotton, tobacco, coffee, and certain forms of rice that demanded intense labour to plant, considerable tending throughout the growing season, and significant labour for harvesting. 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. <> Most slaves were fed heavily on corn, and there were just a few areas in the new nation where rice was so plentiful that it supplanted corn in their diets. Black-Eyed Peas and Rice. These purchases took careful planning. %PDF-1.4 Typically slave labor on the plantation was divided into two broad categories: house servants and field hands. A food historian, Twitty re-creates the meals slaves would have made on plantations using 18th-century tools and ingredients - some of which we eat today. 2, 297. 8H^IBL,c~`x^',M pR5i?mT{QfwN se!ntRZ.Y2 B9G5<2h7POdS_]g*lXBN[g5=jV#NT 8u;MnOn/n VFAh.l~)Ra@6!vmR@JHI )HiZ 8@hw+ev#ZV'Wby-sOATsf:!S",K t1*m!6>2 Gb-xhD=pdW{ @|O. Part of the National Museums Liverpool group. :"Zc35I*Ga^ Describing holidays past, Esther Davis, a South Carolina planters daughter, recalled that in Camdens business district, those three days were given up to the negroes. Merchants angled for enslaved customers: the few stores that were open, were intended just for this trade and did a thriving business. Indeed, she noted, the foundations of some small fortunes were laid in those same small stores with their stocks of hardware, crockery, beads and brass jewelry, calico and bandana handkerchiefs, candy, etc. [6], Much of what we know about slave spending is anecdotal, but scattered ledgers from rural stores and outposts provide a glimpse of what and how slaves consumed. SLAVERY AND THE MAKING OF AMERICA is a production of Thirteen/WNET New York. sesame. During the 19th century, there were moments of widespread fear that these cooks would poison them, and we know from court records and other documents that on at least a few occasions enslaved cooks did slip poisons like hemlock into their masters food. \ .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 Jones was a slave who started as a house servant and rose to the pinnacle of American culinary life with her extravagant multicourse meals. As Frederick Douglas recounts I have often been so pinched with hunger, that I have fought with the dog. Learn how your comment data is processed. Required fields are marked *. But to openly wear or use purloined goods was to risk detection and punishment. (19721978), 15, pt. Yet even the most thriftless and impoverished must have cherished the thought of that most conspicuous and politically subversive form of consumption. One plot was lying fallow, one plot was growing cane, and the final plot was being harvested. Can we bring a species back from the brink? Susan McIntosh remembered that, in contrast to the coarse and rough shoes provided by her masters, she and her companions bought calico, muslin and good shoes, pants, coats and other nice things for their Sunday clothes.[4] In his 1859 autobiography, escaped slave Charles Ball described this process in more detail, elaborating spending priorities. 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. He urged masters to pay for the goods themselves, always rewarding more liberally those that have performed their duty best. Other slaveholders took a more relaxed approach, allowing slaves to make purchases with their own money, but restricting when and where they could trade. Yet, many of the plant-based foods in our current diet are reflections of our nations history. [8] A. T. Goodloe, Management of Negroes, Southern Cultivator, 18 (1860), 130. [3]. Black-eyed peas were introduced in the Americas around the middle of the 18th century, and were noted in some of Washingtons writings and other contemporary sources. The stories of enslaved cooks teach us that we can love our country and also be critical of it, and find some peace along the way. The groundbreaking promise of cellular housekeeping. Of course, nobody at that time had any sense of vitamins or trace minerals, but some cookbooks of the period do have lengthy discourses on the importance of balance of different sorts in ones diet. Guests wrote gushing missives about the meals in they ate while visiting these homes. For decades she has used an image of okra on her business cards as a symbol of her family's African roots and her own connection to the continent's cuisine. They constructed potato holes, often near the fire, where they would bury their sweet potatoes. For masters and bondpeople alike, the internal economy both challenged the institution of slavery and shored it up. Keeping the traditional "stew" cooking could have been a form of subtle resistance to the owner's control. Enslaved people did not restrict their spending to established merchants. [6] Esther S. Davis, Memories of Mulberry (1913), 15. x}Y%q)kOIf5WN'|2k@[46 > TY4!4BF/>xu~}q%xdG?4O/ W?yqyP ^jrq:|'1Yv>=~uuZo? The juice from the crushing of the cane was then boiled or clarified until it crystallized into sugar. Post-emancipation America still relied heavily on the skills and labor of newly freed African Americans. Take, for example, Georgia planter James Towns, whose end-of-year celebrations always included a pay day for good behavior. Franklin Street and its Changing Foodways, 2018, Average Age of Death and Average Income Across Durham County, 2014, The Reputation of Carolina Inn Restaurants, UNC Department of Nutrition Cookbook 1983, Sunrise Biscuit Kitchen Owner Interview, 2017, The Expansion of Chinese Restaurants in Chapel Hill During the 1980s, Vincenzo Marrone Interview, The IP3 Story, Student Resistance to Labor Rights Movements (2005), Student at Vending Machines, Carolina Union, 1983, Foundational and Colonial Culinary Encounters, Thomas Hariot Book Excerpt (1590)- Maddie Dyer, Letter from Florence OSullivan to Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, Instructions to William Berkeley Concerning the Settlement of Carolina, Hannah Wolleys Original Orange Pudding Recipe, Turkey and Deer Bone Awls from Lower Sauratown, John Whites Secotan Indian Village Watercolor Painting, The Journeys of Needham and Arthur Through the Piedmont, John Smiths observations on Native Virginia Plants and Native American Food Practices, Day Book 1774 No. 2. In 1836 the Southern Cabinet reported that some South Carolina slaveholders stocked plantation stores with goods most likely to be in request among the negroes, selling them at cost to enslaved consumers. Hercules was taught by the well-known New York tavern keeper and culinary giant Samuel Frances, who mentored him in Philadelphia; Hemings traveled with Jefferson to Paris, where he learned French-style cooking.