American Negro Slavery by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

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[Footnote 31: Lamar's MSS. are in the possession of Mrs. A.S. Erwin,
Athens, Ga. Selections from them are printed in _Plantation and Frontier_,
I, 167-183, 309-312, II, 38, 41.]

Lamar could command strong words, as when a physician demanded five hundred
dollars for services at Hurricane in 1844, or when overseers were detected
in drunkenness or cruelty; but his most characteristic complaints were of
his own short-comings as a manager and of the crotchets of his relatives.
His letters were always cheery, and his repeated disappointments in
overseers never damped his optimism concerning each new incumbent. His
old lands contented him until he found new and more fertile ones to buy,
whereupon his jubilation was great. When cotton was low he called himself a
toad under the harrow; but rising markets would set him to counting bales
before the seed had more than sprouted and to building new plantations in
the air. In actual practice his log-cabin slave quarters gave place to
frame houses; his mules were kept in full force; his production of corn and
bacon was nearly always ample for the needs of each place; his slaves were
permitted to raise nankeen cotton on their private accounts; and his own
frequent journeys of inspection and stimulus, as he said, kept up an
_esprit du corps_. When an overseer reported that his slaves were down with
fever by the dozen and his cotton wasting in the fields, Lamar would hasten
thither with a physician and a squad of slaves impressed from another
plantation, to care for the sick and the crop respectively. He
redistributed slaves among his plantations with a view to a better
balancing of land and labor, but was deterred from carrying this policy as
far as he thought might be profitable by his unwillingness to separate the
families. His absence gave occasion sometimes for discontent among his
slaves; yet when the owners of others who were for sale authorized them
to find their own purchasers his well known justice, liberality and good
nature made "Mas John" a favorite recourse.

As to crops and management, Lamar indicated his methods in criticizing
those of a relative: "Uncle Jesse still builds air castles and blinds
himself to his affairs. Last year he tinkered away on tobacco and sugar
cane, things he knew nothing about.... He interferes with the arrangements
of his overseers, and has no judgment of his own.... If he would employ a
competent overseer and move off the plantation with his family he could
make good crops, as he has a good force of hands and good lands.... I have
found that it is unprofitable to undertake anything on a plantation out of
the regular routine. If I had a little place off to itself, and my business
would admit of it, I should delight in agricultural experiments." In his
reliance upon staple routine, as in every other characteristic, Lamar rings
true to the planter type.

CHAPTER XV

PLANTATION LABOR

WHILE produced only in America, the plantation slave was a product of
old-world forces. His nature was an African's profoundly modified but
hardly transformed by the requirements of European civilization. The wrench
from Africa and the subjection to the new discipline while uprooting his
ancient language and customs had little more effect upon his temperament
than upon his complexion. Ceasing to be Foulah, Coromantee, Ebo or Angola,
he became instead the American negro. The Caucasian was also changed by the
contact in a far from negligible degree; but the negro's conversion
was much the more thorough, partly because the process in his case was
coercive, partly because his genius was imitative.

The planters had a saying, always of course with an implicit reservation
as to limits, that a negro was what a white man made him. The molding,
however, was accomplished more by groups than by individuals. The purposes
and policies of the masters were fairly uniform, and in consequence the
negroes, though with many variants, became largely standardized into the
predominant plantation type. The traits which prevailed were an eagerness
for society, music and merriment, a fondness for display whether of person,
dress, vocabulary or emotion, a not flagrant sensuality, a receptiveness
toward any religion whose exercises were exhilarating, a proneness to
superstition, a courteous acceptance of subordination, an avidity for
praise, a readiness for loyalty of a feudal sort, and last but not least, a
healthy human repugnance toward overwork. "It don't do no good to hurry,"
was a negro saying, "'caze you're liable to run by mo'n you overtake."
Likewise painstaking was reckoned painful; and tomorrow was always waiting
for today's work, while today was ready for tomorrow's share of play. On
the other hand it was a satisfaction to work sturdily for a hard boss, and
so be able to say in an interchange of amenities: "Go long, half-priced
nigger! You wouldn't fotch fifty dollars, an' I'm wuth a thousand!"[1]

[Footnote 1: _Daily Tropic_ (New Orleans), May 18, 1846.]

Contrasts were abundant. John B. Lamar, on the one hand, wrote: "My man Ned
the carpenter is idle or nearly so at the plantation. He is fixing gates
and, like the idle groom in Pickwick, trying to fool himself into the
belief that he is doing something.... He is an eye servant. If I was with
him I could have the work done soon and cheap; but I am afraid to trust him
off where there is no one he fears."[2] On the other hand, M.W. Philips
inscribed a page of his plantation diary as follows:[3]

[Footnote 2: _Plantation and Frontier_, II, 38.]

[Footnote 3: Mississippi Historical Society _Publications_, X, 444.]

Sunday
July 10, 1853
Peyton is no more
Aged 42
Though he was a bad man in many respects
yet he was a most excellent field
hand, always at his
post.
On this place for 21 years.
Except the measles and its sequence, the
injury rec'd by the mule last Nov'r and its sequence,
he has not lost 15 days' work, I verily believe, in the
remaining 19 years. I wish we could hope for his
eternal state.

Should anyone in the twentieth century wish to see the old-fashioned prime
negro at his best, let him take a Mississippi steamboat and watch the
roustabouts at work--those chaffing and chattering, singing and swinging,
lusty and willing freight handlers, whom a river captain plying out of New
Orleans has called the noblest black men that God ever made.[4] Ready
at every touching of the shore day and night, resting and sleeping only
between landings, they carry their loads almost at running speed, and when
returning for fresh burdens they "coonjine" by flinging their feet in
semi-circles at every step, or cutting other capers in rhythm to show their
fellows and the gallery that the strain of the cotton bales, the grain
sacks, the oil barrels and the timbers merely loosen their muscles and
lighten their spirits.

[Footnote 4: Captain L.V. Cooley, _Address Before the Tulane Society of
Economics, New Orleans, April 11th, 1911, on River Transportation and Its
Relation to New Orleans, Past, Present and Future_. [New Orleans, 1911.]]

Such an exhibit would have been the despair of the average ante-bellum
planter, for instead of choosing among hundreds of applicants and rejecting
or discharging those who fell short of a high standard, he had to make
shift with such laborers as the slave traders chanced to bring or as his
women chanced to rear. His common problem was to get such income and
comfort as he might from a parcel of the general run; and the creation
of roustabout energy among them would require such vigor and such iron
resolution on his own part as was forthcoming in extremely few cases.

Theoretically the master might be expected perhaps to expend the minimum
possible to keep his slaves in strength, to discard the weaklings and the
aged, to drive his gang early and late, to scourge the laggards hourly, to
secure the whole with fetters by day and with bolts by night, and to keep
them in perpetual terror of his wrath. But Olmsted, who seems to have gone
South with the thought of finding some such theory in application, wrote:
"I saw much more of what I had not anticipated and less of what I had in
the slave states than, with a somewhat extended travelling experience, in
any other country I ever visited";[5] and Nehemiah Adams, who went from
Boston to Georgia prepared to weep with the slaves who wept, found himself
laughing with the laughing ones instead.[6]

[Footnote 5: Olmsted, _Seaboard Slave States_, p. 179.]

[Footnote 6: Nehemiah Adams. _A Southside View of Slavery, or Three Months
in the South in 1854_ (Boston, 1854), chap. 2.]

The theory of rigid coercion and complete exploitation was as strange to
the bulk of the planters as the doctrine and practice of moderation was to
those who viewed the regime from afar and with the mind's eye. A planter
in explaining his mildness might well have said it was due to his being
neither a knave nor a fool He refrained from the use of fetters not so much
because they would have hampered the slaves in their work as because the
general use of them never crossed his mind. And since chains and bolts were
out of the question, the whole system of control must be moderate; slaves
must be impelled as little as possible by fear, and as much as might be by
loyalty, pride and the prospect of reward.

Here and there a planter applied this policy in an exceptional degree. A
certain Z. Kingsley followed it with marked success even when his whole
force was of fresh Africans. In a pamphlet of the late eighteen-twenties
he told of his method as follows: "About twenty-five years ago I settled
a plantation on St. John's River in Florida with about fifty new negroes,
many of whom I brought from the Coast myself. They were mostly fine young
men and women, and nearly in equal numbers. I never interfered in their
connubial concerns nor domestic affairs, but let them regulate these after
their own manner. I taught them nothing but what was useful, and what I
thought would add to their physical and moral happiness. I encouraged as
much as possible dancing, merriment and dress, for which Saturday afternoon
and night and Sunday morning were dedicated. [Part of their leisure] was
usually employed in hoeing their corn and getting a supply of fish for the
week. Both men and women were very industrious. Many of them made twenty
bushels of corn to sell, and they vied with each other in dress and
dancing.... They were perfectly honest and obedient, and appeared perfectly
happy, having no fear but that of offending me; and I hardly ever had
to apply other correction than shaming them. If I exceeded this, the
punishment was quite light, for they hardly ever failed in doing their work
well. My object was to excite their ambition and attachment by kindness,
not to depress their spirits by fear and punishment.... Perfect confidence,
friendship and good understanding reigned between us." During the War of
1812 most of these negroes were killed or carried off in a Seminole raid.
When peace returned and Kingsley attempted to restore his Eden with a
mixture of African and American negroes, a serpent entered in the guise of
a negro preacher who taught the sinfulness of dancing, fishing on Sunday
and eating the catfish which had no scales. In consequence the slaves
"became poor, ragged, hungry and disconsolate. To steal from me was only to
do justice--to take what belonged to them, because I kept them in unjust
bondage." They came to believe "that all pastime or pleasure in this
iniquitous world was sinful; that this was only a place of sorrow and
repentance, and the sooner they were out of it the better; that they would
then go to a good country where they would experience no want of anything,
and have no work nor cruel taskmaster, for that God was merciful and would
pardon any sin they committed; only it was necessary to pray and ask
forgiveness, and have prayer meetings and contribute what they could to the
church, etc.... Finally myself and the overseer became completely divested
of all authority over the negroes.... Severity had no effect; it only made
it worse."[7]

[Footnote 7: [Z. Kingsley] _A Treatise on the Patriarchal System of Society
as It exists ... under the Name of Slavery_. By an inhabitant of Florida.
Fourth edition (1834), pp. 21, 22. (Copy in the Library of Congress.)]

This experience left Kingsley undaunted in his belief that liberalism
and profit-sharing were the soundest basis for the plantation regime.
To support this contention further he cited an experiment by a South
Carolinian who established four or five plantations in a group on Broad
River, with a slave foreman on each and a single overseer with very limited
functions over the whole. The cotton crop was the master's, while the hogs,
corn and other produce belonged to the slaves for their sustenance and the
sale of any surplus. The output proved large, "and the owner had no further
trouble nor expense than furnishing the ordinary clothing and paying the
overseer's wages, so that he could fairly be called free, seeing that he
could realize his annual income wherever he chose to reside, without paying
the customary homage to servitude of personal attendance on the operation
of his slaves." In Kingsley's opinion the system "answered extremely well,
and offers to us a strong case in favor of exciting ambition by cultivating
utility, local attachment and moral improvement among the slaves."[8]

[Footnote 8: [Z. Kingsley] _Treatise_, p. 22.]

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
shifted 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 assorted 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 quantity of twilled red flannel shirts, 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 shirts 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 shirts, trousers and coats, the
women shifts, 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; Fanny 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; Fanny, 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 godparents 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
illustrated 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 buisnass
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.
War-moth.]

Of epidemics, yellow fever was of minor concern as regards the slaves, for
negroes were largely immune to it; but cholera sometimes threatened to
exterminate the slaves and bankrupt their masters. After a visitation of
this in and about New Orleans in 1832, John McDonogh wrote to a friend:
"All that you have seen of yellow fever was nothing in comparison. It is
supposed that five or six thousand souls, black and white, were carried off
in fourteen days."[24] The pecuniary loss in Louisiana from slave deaths
in that epidemic was estimated at four million dollars.[25] Two years
afterward it raged in the Savannah neighborhood. On Mr. Wightman's
plantation, ten miles above the city, there were in the first week of
September fifty-three cases and eighteen deaths. The overseer then checked
the spread by isolating the afflicted ones in the church, the barn and the
mill. The neighboring planters awaited only the first appearance of the
disease on their places to abandon their crops and hurry their slaves to
lodges in the wilderness.[26] Plagues of smallpox were sometimes of similar
dimensions.

[Footnote 24: William Allen, _Life of John McDonogh_ (Baltimore, 1886), p.
54.]

[Footnote 25: _Niles' Register_, XLV, 84]

[Footnote 26: _Federal Union_ (Milledgeville, Ga.), Sept. 14 and 17 and
Oct. 22, 1834.]

Even without pestilence, deaths might bring a planter's ruin. A series
of them drove M.W. Philips to exclaim in his plantation journal: "Oh! my
losses almost make me crazy. God alone can help." In short, planters must
guard their slaves' health and life as among the most vital of their own
interests; for while crops were merely income, slaves were capital. The
tendency appears to have been common, indeed, to employ free immigrant
labor when available for such work as would involve strain and exposure.
The documents bearing on this theme are scattering but convincing. Thus
E.J. Forstall when writing in 1845 of the extension of the sugar fields,
said thousands of Irishmen were seen in every direction digging plantation
ditches;[27] T.B. Thorpe when describing plantation life on the Mississippi
in 1853 said the Irish proved the best ditchers;[28] and a Georgia planter
when describing his drainage of a swamp in 1855 said that Irish were
hired for the work in order that the slaves might continue at their usual
routine.[29] Olmsted noted on the Virginia seaboard that "Mr. W.... had an
Irish gang draining for him by contract." Olmsted asked, "why he should
employ Irishmen in preference to doing the work with his own hands. 'It's
dangerous work,' the planter replied, 'and a negro's life is too valuable
to be risked at it. If a negro dies, it is a considerable loss you
know,'"[30] On a Louisiana plantation W.H. Russell wrote in 1860: "The
labor of ditching, trenching, cleaning the waste lands and hewing down the
forests is generally done by Irish laborers who travel about the country
under contractors or are engaged by resident gangsmen for the task. Mr.
Seal lamented the high prices of this work; but then, as he said, 'It was
much better to have Irish do it, who cost nothing to the planter if they
died, than to use up good field-hands in such severe employment,'" Russell
added on his own score: "There is a wonderful mine of truth in this
observation. Heaven knows how many poor Hibernians have been consumed and
buried in these Louisianian swamps, leaving their earnings to the dramshop
keeper and the contractor, and the results of their toil to the planter."
On another plantation the same traveller was shown the debris left by the
last Irish gang and was regaled by an account of the methods by which their
contractor made them work.[31] Robert Russell made a similar observation on
a plantation near New Orleans, and was told that even at high wages Irish
laborers were advisable for the work because they would do twice as
much ditching as would an equal number of negroes in the same time.[32]
Furthermore, A. de Puy Van Buren, noted as a common sight in the Yazoo
district, "especially in the ditching season, wandering 'exiles of Erin,'
straggling along the road"; and remarked also that the Irish were the chief
element among the straining roustabouts, on the steamboats of that day.[33]
Likewise Olmsted noted on the Alabama River that in lading his boat with
cotton from a towering bluff, a slave squad was appointed for the work at
the top of the chute, while Irish deck hands were kept below to capture the
wildly bounding bales and stow them. As to the reason for this division
of labor and concentration of risk, the traveller had his own surmise
confirmed when the captain answered his question by saying, "The niggers
are worth too much to be risked here; if the Paddies are knocked overboard,
or get their backs broke, nobody loses anything!"[34] To these chance
observations it may be added that many newspaper items and canal and
railroad company reports from the 'thirties to the 'fifties record that the
construction gangs were largely of Irish and Germans. The pay attracted
those whose labor was their life; the risk repelled those whose labor was
their capital. There can be no doubt that the planters cherished the lives
of their slaves.