Wilma A. Dunaway
"DIASPORA, DEATH AND SEXUAL EXPLOITATION: SLAVE FAMILIES AT RISK IN THE MOUNTAIN SOUTH."
Appalachian Journal 26 (Winter 1999)
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Engaging the Debates about U.S. Slavery
When Amelia Jones told her story to a WPA interviewer in the 1930s, she described her former east Kentucky owner this way. "Master White didn't hesitate to sell any of his slaves. He said, 'You all belong to me and if you don't like it, I'll put you in my pocket.' Meaning of course that he would sell that slave and put the money in his pocket." When Jim Threat described his experiences as a northern Alabama slave, he focused on the threat of permanent separation. "We lived in constant fear," Jim said, "that we would be sold away from our families." In her story, Maggie Pinkard gives us some clue how often family members were sold apart. "When the slaves got a feeling there was going to be an auction, they would pray. The night before the sale they would pray in their cabins. You could hear the hum of voices in all the cabins down the row." Other enslaved women focused more sharply on the mother's perspective. Several of them lamented that they had "no name" to give their children because they must use their masters' surnames, not those of their husbands. "I haven't never had a nine months child," another informant told the WPA interviewer. "Bein dat I never had no mother to care for me en give me good attention. . . I ain' never been safe in de family way." This former slave went on to say that she experienced chronic hunger, sexual exploitation from white males, and quick return to the fields after childbirth. As a result, all of her babies, except one, were stillborn.
These voices of Appalachian slaves began to haunt me when I was using their narratives to research my first book (The First American Frontier: Transition to Capitalism in Southern Appalachia, 1700-1860, University of North Carolina Press, 1996). What they had to say about slave family life and living conditions was startling because they were reporting a past that contradicts the accepted wisdom in U.S. slave studies over the past three decades. The experiences of these mountain slaves disagree with the findings of Herbert Gutman (The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925, Pantheon Books, 1976) and of an entire school of researchers who have worked with Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman (Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery. Vol. 2. Technical Papers: Conditions of Slave Life and the Transition to Freedom. New York: W.W. Norton, 1989). While debates still ensue about minor points, a majority of scholars seem to have reached agreement that slave trading was only a minor component of income for Southern masters and that owners simply did not sell their slaves very often (Robert W. Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery, W.W. Norton, 1989, pp. 69, 142-50, 181-82). For thirty years, Fogel and Engerman (Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, Little, Brown & Co., 1974, pp. 49-51) and their associates (Without Consent or Contract, Vol. 2, pp. 139-48) have argued that it was not economically rational for masters to break up slave families. In their view, families were the units through which work was organized and through which the rations of basic survival needs were distributed. By discouraging runaways, families also rooted slaves to masters. After 30 years of research, Fogel is convinced that two-thirds of all U.S. slaves lived in two-parent households. Herbert Gutman's work established in our minds the view that slave families were organized as stable, nuclear households in which two parents were present. Gutman contends that most slave marriages lasted over long periods and that their families remained together and were persistent.
Clearly, Gutman and Fogel are convinced that adult males were present to play active roles in their own families and that slave children developed strong lasting relationships with their fathers. Neither Fogel nor Gutman believes that U.S. slave owners interfered in the construction of families by their slaves. Fogel argues that such interference would have worked against the economic interests of the owners while Gutman focuses on the abilities of slaves to engage in day-to-day resistance to keep their families intact. Fogel and most scholars argue that sexual exploitation of slave women did not happen nearly as often as abolitionists claimed. They point to the low percentage of ethnically-mixed slaves as evidence of the low incidence of sexual abuse. On average, only one of every ten U.S. slaves was a mulatto. Most revisionist scholars now are convinced that large plantations discouraged high fertility among slave women because their labor was needed in the fields. Most scholars contend that slave women did not have their first child until about age 21 and that teenage pregnancies were rare. Indeed we have come to understand in recent years that women outnumbered men at field labor, and that women were actually more productive in several agricultural tasks-- especially picking cotton. Fogel has now revised his earlier thinking about this subject and is convinced that pregnant women had little release time from work. To permit women to return to the fields as quickly as possible, large plantations structured collectivized child care to free slave mothers for productive labor. It is in the area of slave mortality and nutrition that scholars are now making the greatest headway. Just in the last five years, researchers have been able to quantify two contrasting trends of slave mortality. By the age of twenty, slaves and whites were dying at about the same rates. So slave diets appear to have been adequate enough to permit a teenage growth spurt and to permit adult slaves to attain health comparable to that of whites. Most of the slave deaths resulted from extremely high rates of child mortality. About two-fifths of all slave children probably died before the age of ten (Richard Steckel, "A Peculiar Population: The Nutrition, Health, and Mortality of American Slaves from Childhood to Maturity," Journal of Economic History 46, 1986, pp. 721-41).
Why Should We Be Interested in Studying Slavery in the Mountain South?
Perhaps the most important reason that we should study mountain slavery is the current state of the field. In his most recent book, Fogel (Without Consent or Contract) acknowledges that there is a fundamental flaw in U.S. slave studies. Most existing research focuses on plantations that owned 50 or more slaves. Findings are also grounded in analysis of Lower South slaveholders who produced cotton. In 1850, however, nearly half the U.S. slave population lived on plantations with twenty or fewer slaves, and they were cultivating crops other than cotton or working at nonagricultural sites. Fundamentally, then, generalizations about slave family life have been drawn from study of only about than half the U.S. slave population. Appalachia was characterized by small slaveholdings, and it offers us the opportunity to investigate small plantations within the bounds of a subregion of the larger South.
The second reason to study slavery in Appalachia is that there is very little research about the Upper South. A decade ago, Michael Tadman (Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South, University of Wisconsin Press, 1989) documented that interstate slave trading broke up one of every three Upper South slave families. To date, there have only been two published monographs about mountain slavery; and they draw opposite conclusions. In his analysis of slavery in western North Carolina, John Inscoe (Mountain Masters, Slavery, and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina, University of Tennessee, 1989, pp. 90-94) concluded that mountain masters showed "a widespread reluctance" to sell slaves or to split up slave families. Inscoe is also convinced that mountain masters were much more benign than their Lower South peers and that they had a "heightened sense of duty" toward protecting the slave families they owned. In her investigation of a Blue Ridge Virginia county, Brenda Stevenson (Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South, Oxford University Press, 1996) documents that slave families were disproportionately matrifocal because of the slave trading and labor strategies of masters. Fundamentally, these two monographs and a handful of scattered articles, theses and dissertations (see Inscoe, Mountain Masters, pp. 328-36) comprise the body of literature about mountain slavery. There are three weaknesses in these existing analyses. First, they target a single county or a handful of counties from the entire larger region. Second, these writers have used very little quantitative analysis. Third, these studies do not explore the narratives of mountain slaves, even when-- like John Inscoe (Mountain Masters, pp. 59-86)-- they ground their generalizations in the biased manuscript collections of slaveholders.
Slaves made a much greater economic contribution to the Southern mountains than scholars have previously acknowledged. About one-third of all Appalachian farm owners held slaves, compared to about one-half of all Southern farm owners (Dunaway, First American Frontier, p. 109-10). As you see in this map, slaves comprised more than 10% of the adult labor force in all of the Southern Appalachians except parts of West Virginia and east Kentucky. In more than one-third of the Appalachian counties, slaves comprised 20 percent or more of the adult labor force. I have defined the Southern Mountains in geographic and geological terms, as that part of the South that rose from the floor of the ocean to form the Appalachian mountain chain. This region is not only different from the rest of the South in terrain; it is also distinct in climate, soil types, and growing season. Before the Civil War, there were 250 Appalachian counties in these nine Southern states. To research this complex topic, I have triangulated numerous primary and archival documents. I have derived my statistical analysis from a data base of nearly 26,000 households drawn from nineteenth-century county tax lists and census manuscripts. I have utilized several hundred manuscript collections at fourteen regional archives. I have completed content and statistical analysis of narratives from 280 mountain slaves and 454 Civil War veterans. I am presenting findings here from my statistical analysis, but you must wait for the book to explore the detailed tables and methodological issues.
The World Economy and Forced Slave Migrations
Between 1790 and 1860, global prices for Upper South tobacco, grains and livestock stagnated or steadily dropped. In the same time period, the demand and prices for Lower South sugar and cotton rose steadily. By 1835, cotton was dominant throughout the Lower South and the Southwest, and those zones were experiencing labor shortages. In the Upper South, there were more adult laborers than were required to produce the agricultural exports. As a direct result of the world demand for cotton, the Upper South began to export surplus laborers to the Lower South. Between 1790 and 1860, nearly 1 million slaves were forcibly relocated so that, by 1860, the exporting Upper South retained only about three-fifths of the slave population that should have been there (Fogel, Without Consent or Contract, pp. 65-67).
Between 1840 and 1860, there is conclusive demographic evidence in census returns of the movement of slaves out of Appalachia as part of this national pattern of forced labor migrations. Like the other sections of the Upper South, Appalachia had only three-fifths of the slave population that should have been there in 1860. Because of the region's location within the belt of slave-selling states, a mountain slave risked at least a one in three chance of being sold before the age of forty. In fact, Southern Appalachia was exporting slaves at a rate that was nearly twice that of other Upper South zones. In reality, then, Appalachian slaves were more likely to be sold away from their families than their Lower South counterparts.
Why would Appalachian masters export slaves to this degree? By 1800, the Mountain South exported livestock, food provisions, salt, timber, and mineral wealth to the Lower South, to the industrial northeast, and to western Europe. However, Appalachians specialized in the cultivation of crops and raw materials for which world supply and demand were very erratic. Between 1820 and 1860, world prices for Appalachian crops, livestock, and minerals fell or remained static-- while the market prices for slaves steadily escalated (Dunaway, First American Frontier, ch. 10). By making statistical comparisons between the agricultural production of Appalachian and other Southern masters, I know that Appalachians were not maximizing the labor of their slaves to produce crops, a point also documented by John Inscoe (Mountain Masters, pp. 69-75). For example, Appalachian slaveholders cultivated only about one-third of the tobacco averaged on comparable farms in other parts of the Upper South. Why, then, did mountain masters utilize slaves differently? By 1840, Appalachian masters found they could generate greater profits by marketing the labor of their slaves.
Forced Labor Migrations and the Black Appalachian Diaspora
Unlike their Lower South counterparts, Appalachian masters viewed their slaves primarily as investment commodities, and only secondarily as agricultural laborers. To maximize profits, they engaged in two forced labor migration strategies. First, they marketed surplus laborers.
On average, smaller mountain masters sold slaves about once every three years. Large slaveholders engaged in slaves every year. Between 1840 and 1860, mountain owners exported through the interstate slave trade more than 60,000 slaves from the Appalachian counties of Maryland, western Virginia, Kentucky, the Carolinas and Tennessee. To meet the demands of expanding cotton plantations, northern Alabama and northern Georgia residents imported another 24,000 black laborers.
Primarily rural in character, Appalachian slave trading was highly organized by roving traders who made direct transactions with slave owners. Slave traders traversed the same roads as livestock drives through Southern Appalachia (Dunaway, First American Frontier, pp. 199-201), as you can surmise from the map of slave trading routes. Notice that two of the national routes cut directly southward through the Appalachians. According to the slave narratives, it was very common in the fall and spring for itinerant traders to appear in the countryside. Penny Thompson of Coosa County, Alabama remembered that "de speculation waggin (negro traders) come by often. Dey stops 'cross de road f'om de Marster's place an' all de Marsters come dere for to trade." In Jackson County, Alabama, "de speckulaters was white men dat sometimes comes around buyin', sellin' or tradin' slaves jest lak dey do cattle now. . . . Dem speckulaters would put de chilluns in a wagon usually pulled by oxens and de older folks was chained or tied together sos dey could not run off and dey would go from one plantation ter another all ovah de country."
To avoid any threat of runaways, Appalachian masters tried to disguise their plans. When one Floyd County, Georgia master decided to trade, a twelve-year-old boy "was fooled out of [his] mammy's house by dem speculators wid an apple. When [he] went out, two or three white men grabbed [him]." Another Buncombe County, North Carolina master, for example, sent all his slaves to their regular work in the fields. Then "Ole Marse he cum t'ru de field wif a man call de specalater. Day walk round jes' lookin', jes' lookin'. All de [slaves] know whut dis mean. Dey didn't dare look up, jes' wok right on. Den de specalater he see who he want. He talk to Ole Marse, den dey slaps de han'cuffs on him an' tak him away to de cotton country." When the speculator was ready to leave with his purchases, "effen dey [was] enny whut didn' wanta go, he thrash em, den tie em 'hind de waggin an' mek um run till dey fall on de groun', den he thrash em till dey say dey go [wi]thout no trouble."
The traffic in Appalachian slaves was dominated by overland journeys of "coffles" lasting as long as seven to eight weeks (Tadman, Speculators and Slaves, ch. 3). Over a five-year period in the 1830s, Samuel Hall spotted twelve or fifteen such coffles, averaging forty slaves each, passing along the road near his home in Greenbrier County. The son of a western Maryland slaveholder reported in the 1830s that he had "seen hundreds of colored men and women chained together, two by two, and driven to the South" (Theodore D. Weld, American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses, Arno Press, 1968, pp. 69-70, 76). In 1830, a West Virginia newspaper documented the frequency with which slave coffles were spotted in regional towns. "During the past year," lamented the Kanawha Register on 5 February 1830, "the roads passing through Charleston have been crowded with travel of every sort. . . . the demon in human form, the dealer in bones and sinew, driving hundreds. . . clanking the chains of their servitude, through the free air of our valley, and destined to send back to us from the banks of the Mississippi the sugar and the cotton of that soil moistened with sweat and blood." As he rode south through Appalachian counties of Virginia and Tennessee, an 1834 traveller encountered two speculator coffles. Camped at the edge of the New River in southwest Virginia, he overtook the first caravan of three hundred slaves:
who had bivouacked the preceding night in chains in the woods; these they were conducting to Natchez on the Mississippi River to work upon sugar plantations in Louisiana. . . . they had a caravan of nine waggons and single-horse carriages, for the purpose of conducting the white people, and any of the blacks that should fall lame, to which they were now putting the horses to pursue their march. The female slaves were, some of them, sitting on logs of wood, whilst others were standing, and a great many little black children were warming themselves at the fires of the bivouac. In front of them all, and prepared for the march, stood in double files, about two hundred male slaves, manacled and chained to each other. [Once the caravan was packed and ready to move], a man on horseback selected a shallow place in the ford for the male slaves; then followed a waggon and four horses, attended by another man on horseback. The other waggons contained the children and some that were lame, whilst the scows, or flatboats, crossed the women and some of the people belonging to the caravan. . . . The slave-drivers. . . endeavor to mitigate their discontent by feeding them well on the march, and by encouraging them to sing "Old Virginia never tire," to the banjo.
As the traveller proceeded southward by stage coach, he encountered a second coffle encamped north of Knoxville, Tennessee. "Long after sunset," he reported, "we came to a place where numerous fires were gleaming through the forest. . . .There were a great many blazing fires around, at which the female slaves were warming themselves; the children were asleep in some tents; and the males, in chains, were lying on the ground, in groups of about a dozen each. The white men. . . were standing about with whips in their hands" (G.W. Featherstonhough, Excursion through the Slave States, Negro Universities, 1968, vol. 1, pp. 119-23, 169).
The second forced labor migration involved profitable management of labor time by shifting laborers between distant sites. Between 1840 and 1860, nearly 16,000 mountain slaves were forced to migrate by owners who were moving further west or south. Masters also shifted laborers between family-owned farms and between farming and nonagricultural enterprises. Unlike Lower South masters, Appalachian slaveholders often combined commercial farming with other commercial or industrial pursuits. More than one-third of the mountain masters were involved in commerce or industry, so probably one-quarter to one-third of their slaves were employed outside agriculture. Typically, these enterprises were geographically distant from one other. So masters shifted slave laborers from one site to another as production demanded.
The third forced labor migration strategy involved slave hiring. Indeed, Mountain South owners leased out slaves on annual contracts much more frequently than Lower South owners. Probably, one-fifth to one-quarter of the region's slaves were hired out every year, and most of them were employed in nonagricultural enterprises. Greater disruption occurred when family members were separated all year, able to visit only two weeks during Christmas holidays. Booker T. Washington described the emotional strain caused by the annual leasing of male laborers to distant sites. "Christmas was a season of great rejoicing on account of the home-coming of a large number of coloured people who had been at work in different industries in different parts of the state. Some of them had been hired out to work on the farms, some were employed on the railroads, and others were mechanics." Such disrupted families were reunited briefly in December, only to be separated again when new contracts were executed in early January (The Booker T. Washington Papers, University of Illinois Press, 1972, vol. 1, p. 418).
Disruption of Appalachian Slave Families
Altogether, at least 100,000 Appalachian slaves were permanently relocated between 1840 and 1860. What, then, were the impacts of these forced labor migrations on slave families? By the early 1800s, Appalachian slaves constructed their family units much like those of Southern whites. Almost all the Appalachian slave narratives report male-headed households, until masters interfered. Appalachian slaves lived together in units of husband, wife, children and extended kin. However, Appalachian slaveholders were not content to leave black families undisturbed. Nearly three-quarters of the Appalachian slave narratives describe family disruptions caused by forced labor migrations. Slave families could be divided when masters moved out-of-state, and families were routinely broken when masters died and their estates were settled. Along with other assets, slaves were divided among relatives or sold to pay debts. Overwhelmingly, however, three-fifths of the Appalachian slave family separations occurred because masters sold off their slaves through "specalaters."
The most frequent structural interference was the master's removal of children. Nearly two of every five Appalachian slaves were separated from their families as children-- two-thirds of them removed before the age of 15. Experiences like the following cases were common. Tillie Duke never knew "nothin' 'bout [her] parents" in Roanoke, Virginia because she was sold as an infant to a white family who migrated to Kansas. In middle Tennessee, a slaveholder sold to an itinerant trader "Aunt Phoebe's little baby that was just toddling along." One McDowell County, North Carolina master sold twelve of the sixteen children of one of his slave women "fas' as dey got three years old." At the age of seven, Jim Threat's father was exported to Talladega, Alabama where "he never saw his parents again." At the age of nine, Martha Showvely and two cousins were sold to speculators passing through Franklin County, Virginia to collect a coffle of slaves for resale by Richmond auction houses. In addition to permanent separations, one of every ten Appalachian slave children lived with whites-- growing up away from both parents. As a result of all these forms of masters' interference, only a minority of Appalachian slave children experienced unbroken bonds and daily interaction with both parents.
The second most frequent structural interference occurred when masters separated spouses. Three-quarters of the family disruptions were permanent fractures. Even when Appalachian masters thought of themselves as preserving family units, they rarely sold fathers with their spouses and children. For instance, a Franklin County, Tennessee slave remembered that his mother had to remarry several times "because they would carry her husband off to one state or another." When slaves were sold on the Rome, Georgia auction block to settle an estate, numerous families "never seed their fo'ks after they was sold at the 'dividement' of the property." In Albermarle, Virginia, Maria Perkins wrote to alert her "abroad" husband that their family would be broken up if he could not find a way to prevent it. "My master has sold albert to a trader on Monday court day and myself and other child is for sale also," she wrote in desperation. "I want you to tell dr Hamelton and your master if either will buy me they can attend to it. . . . I don't want a trader to get me they asked me if I had got any person to buy me and I told them no. . . a man by the name of brady bought albert and is gone I don't know where. . . I am quite heartsick," she lamented (Willie Lee Rose, ed., A Documentary History of Slavery in North America, Oxford University Press, 1976, p. 151).
Only about one-quarter of the family separations were temporary arrangements in which family members were reunited regularly. Antebellum laws commonly referred to such arrangements as "abroad kin customs" (Gutman, The Black Family, pp. 135-38). The least disruption of families occurred when spouses or children were owned by neighboring masters. In these instances, regular weekly or monthly visits were possible. More then fifteen percent of the family disruptions involved the forced labor migration of members, disproportionately males, to distant sites that kept them away most of the time. When they were hired out on a yearly basis or when they were assigned to work on different farms owned by the same master, family members were reunited only a few times each year. Eli Davison belonged to a West Virginia master who "had three plantations," so he was isolated from the rest of his family when they were sent to work on a different farm. One western South Carolina ex-slave recalled that his parents lived in different counties, and the husband's master "didn't 'low" her father to visit his family "'cept twice a year." At the same time, her father's owner "want[ed] young healthy slaves," so he pressured her father to "g[e]t him another wife." That was "'zactly why" her father had two large families.
As a result of these forced labor migration strategies, Appalachian masters structured the absence of fathers and husbands. Even when women were involved in long-term marriages, Appalachia's enslaved women and children still resided overwhelmingly in households headed by women. Husbands were present in Lower South slave families twice as often as they were in mountain slave households (Ann P. Malone, Sweet Chariot: Slave Family and Household Structure in Nineteenth-Century Louisiana, University of North Carolina Press, 1992, p. 15). Because of several generations of diasporas, mountain slave families were overwhelmingly matrifocal by 1850, with women heading households nearly four times more often in the Mountain South than they did in the Lower South. Fathers were treated like absent shadows who had no rights to demand continued contact with their children. Very few Appalachian slave marriages were publicly acknowledged, and the only record of parentage was maintained as part of masters' written inventories or mental notes. Legally, "de chillen allus b'long to dey mama's marster." If husbands were owned by someone else, their names rarely appeared in such written lists. Instead children were enumerated alongside the names of their mothers, with no specification of fathers' identities. When mothers died, were sold, or hired out, the wishes of abroad fathers were not given priority; rather owners determined the fate of children. It was customary for Appalachian mistresses to take charge of children when their mothers died. Even though Sally Brown's father lived nearby, she was "give away when [she] wuz jest a baby," never to see him again. Mollie Scott was raised by whites after her mother's death. Mollie knew that she "was all the child [her] father had but [her] mother had ten children." Still the young girl lost all contact with her father until he came to find her after Emancipation.
Other Major Threats to Survival of Appalachian Slave Families
Forced labor migrations were not the only threats to family persistence. Appalachian ex-slaves reported six environmental risks to family survival. It was not profitable for Appalachian masters to construct wells, privies, or sturdy cabins in their slave quarters, so they did not improve sanitation or housing. Contaminated water, inadequate disposal of human waste and garbage, dirt floors in cabins, and housing that did not protect them from cold weather endangered the health of Appalachian slaves. Two other factors endangered mountain slave families. Environmental hazards, accidents, and hunger were worst at nonagricultural sites (Robert S. Starobin, Industrial Slavery in the Old South, Oxford University Press, 1970, pp. 11-12). Appalachian slaves were at greater risk because they were employed in nonagricultural occupations three to five times more frequently than their counterparts in the Lower South.
Previous studies estimate that U.S. masters issued adequate clothing to more than four-fifths of all U.S. slaves (Fogel, Ralph A. Galantine and Richard L. Manning, eds. Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery. Vol. 3. Evidence and Methods, W.W. Norton, 1992, p. 356). This optimistic finding is not supported by the narratives of slaves who lived on small Appalachian plantations. Shortfalls in annual allocations of clothing and shoes were common, especially during the cold months and at industrial sites. Nearly two-thirds of the Appalachian slave narratives include negative assessments of the adequacy of masters' allocations of clothing and shoes. Their complaints centered around the hardships caused by the failures of their masters to meet their basic needs, to protect them from work injuries and health risks, and to afford them humane privacy. Slave children wore only thin gown-like garments year-round, and they were not issued shoes until they were in their early teens.
Appalachian slave children were especially endangered by the efforts of masters to lower clothing costs. On most Appalachian plantations, "children didn't have nothing to wear no how but shirts," and "there wasn't no difference in the cloth they used in the winter and the summer." At Easter Brown's plantation, children "wore no clothes in summer" and only cotton clothes "in de winter." Typically, slave children wore lighter weight fabrics than adults, and they had no underwear, hats or coats. Uniformly, Appalachian slave children went barefoot the year round, exposing them to the dangers of cold weather, injuries, worms, parasites, cholera, typhoid, and other infectious bacteria that proliferated in the unsanitary quarters (Kenneth F. Kiple and Virginia H. Kiple, "Slave Child Mortality: Some Nutritional Answers to a Perennial Puzzle," Journal of Social History 10, 1977, pp. 284-309). Typically, Appalachian slaves "never knowed what it was to have a pair of shoes" until they were "grown up" enough to work productively. Baily Cunningham "never had a hat or shoes until [he] was twenty." Isom Starnes "tote[d] water on [his] head and a bucket in each hand." As he climbed the hill, "he stumped [his] toe on the rocks till they would bleed." As a child, Sarah Gudger was "always cold n' hungry, and she had to "walk barefoot in de snow" of the western Carolina mountains. Children scrounged carpets, rags, and natural materials to wrap their feet in cold weather; but their "foots cracked open 'til dey looked lak goose foots." When George Jackson had to work "fore daylight" his feet "would 'most freeze." Easter Brown suffered through northern Georgia winters with her "foots popped open from de cold." One middle Tennessee slave complained that her "feet were so frost-bitten that you could track [her] everywhere [she] went through the snow."
Hunger and malnutrition were another threat to slave family stability. One way to determine the likelihood of slave hunger is to measure the food outputs of Appalachian masters. According to regional narratives, the vast majority of the region's masters produced the entire slave food supply; only the largest plantations and nonagricultural enterprises purchased supplements. Enumerator manuscripts for the 1860 Census of Agriculture provide evidence of widespread hunger and malnutrition. Small slaveholders produced corn, wheat, and pork at levels that would not have insured slaves the same per capita food consumption enjoyed by laborers on nonslaveholding farms. In fact, Appalachian slaveholders produced corn and swine at levels that would have permitted adult slaves only two-thirds of the needed caloric intake, and even less of the needed protein.
The Appalachian slave narratives support this quantitative evidence about low per-capita food production. Terming such owners "half-strainers," Appalachian ex-slaves reported that their masters supplied them inadequate food more than twice as often as did other U.S. ex-slaves. Only about 17 percent of U.S. ex-slaves reported that their food supply was inadequate (Fogel, Galantine and Manning, Without Consent or Contract, pp. 305, 334). However, more than 36 percent of Appalachian narratives reported inadequate food. More than half of all U.S. slaves received their diet through regular rations, without having to produce part of their food. In contrast, Appalachian masters were twice as likely as other U.S. slave owners to require slaves to produce much of their own food supply. In fact, more than nine-tenths of all Appalachian slaves supplemented their masters' allocations through hunting, fishing, and cultivation of small parcels. There is another indication that Appalachian slave diets were inadequate. Mountain slaves reported food stealing three times more often than did other U.S. slaves. However, the most pervasive profit-maximizing strategy of Appalachian masters was the structured malnutrition experienced by slave children. As evidenced by the Appalachian slave narratives, it was the common practice of their masters to require the early weaning of infants to a diet high in carbohydrates, but low in proteins and milk. Three quarters of Appalachian slave children were fed a cornbread-buttermilk mush; the rest received cornbread blended with "pot liquor" from boiled meats. Less than 17 percent received regular fruit or green vegetables, and fewer than 16 percent received any regular ration of meats. Overall, it is likely that Appalachian slaves experienced serious deficiencies of protein, iron, amino acids, and several vitamins and minerals essential to growth and good health (Kiple and Kiple, "Slave Child Mortality," pp. 289-93).
Malnutrition was probably widespread among Appalachian slaves, but chronic hunger was most prevalent on small slaveholdings where masters did not have the economic resources to provide a stable and adequate diet for laborers. The term "half-strainers" was coined by Appalachian slaves to refer to those regional masters who operated on such a narrow profit margin that they engaged in severe malnutrition strategies. "Above all, slaves wanted to avoid sale to masters of scanty means. . . because they understood that their own family and community security depended upon their owner's solvency" (Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, Random House, 1974, p. 10). Appalachian narratives provide anecdotal evidence of malnutrition for every part of the region, making it clear that chronic hunger was widespread among mountain slaves. Perry Larkey was convinced that slaves were "underfed at most places" in east Kentucky, and Estill Countian Peter Bruner "did not often have enough to eat." Wylie Nealy "got hungry lots times" on his small northern Georgia plantation, as did Sarah Gudger who slipped away at night to Buncombe County neighbors to supplement her skimpy diet of "cawn bread an' 'lasses." Robert McFalls thought that western North Carolina masters "fed the animals better" and "didn't half feed" their slaves. Thomas Cole agreed, saying that some Jackson County, Alabama slaves "didn't have as easier time as de mules, fer de mules was fed good and de slaves laks ter have starved ter death." Jim Threat described his master as "a devil on this earth" who "jest didn't have any regard for his slaves. He made 'em work from daylight to dark and didn't give them any more food" than was barely necessary for them to "git along with." Another Etowah County woman was owned by a master who "neber give his slaves 'nough t'eat," so "sometimes dey actually go hungry." One east Tennessee master rationed sweet potatoes so closely that he "would go round about 10 o'clock, searching through their cabins to see if they had stowed any away." Blue Ridge Virginia slave Ben Brown was convinced that nobody got enough food on his farm, for "de meat house was full of smoked po'k, but [slaves] only got a little now an' den." Josie Jordan described the most visible evidence of chronic hunger. On her White County, Tennessee plantation, "some of them slaves was so poorly thin they ribs would kinder rustle against each other like corn stalks a-drying in the hot winds."
The vast majority of Appalachian slave children were fed in centralized containers, away from their families. Using a custom adapted from seventeenth century England, Appalachian masters served food to slave children in "trenchers," wooden trays from which people ate communally (James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten, Doubleday, 1977, pp. 52-53). Callie Elder recalled that once a day "dey sot a big old wooden bowl full of cornbread crumbs out in de yard and poured in buttermilk or pot liquor. . . . Den dey let de chillun gather 'round it and eat 'til de bowl was empty." When they were lucky, the women added rabbit or opossum to the mush. Callie "never seed no fried meat 'til [she] was a big strappin' gal." Tom Neal was fed "milk or pot-liquor out in a big pewter bowl on a stump." Similarly, Alex Montgomery reported that "ebery day two wimmen brung big pots uf pot licker and corn bread down in de quarters an' poured it in big troughs an' we all wuz handed a spoon an' told to eat it. Sometimes Granny roasted [sweet] tater in de fire place an' give us one an' sometimes she parched goobers an' let us eat dem-- we had thick black lasses an' sometimes we got a piece uf bread an' dug a hole inside uf it an' den filled dat hole wid lasses."
On most Appalachian slaveholdings, "children would just have mush, but the grown folks would have meat." One middle Tennessee girl would "see grown folks eating the best things" that were denied to children, and youngsters "dasen't to look at it." During lean times on small plantations, children were fed items like ash cake and persimmon beer, squash or cabbage soup, or hoe cakes and molasses. According to Booker T. Washington who spent his childhood in Blue Ridge Virginia and West Virginia, children got food in a haphazard fashion. "It was a piece of bread here and a scrap of meat there. It was a cup of milk at one time and some potatoes at another." On one Blue Ridge Virginia plantation, children were fed cabbage soup at midday, then they "were allowed to go to the table where the white folks ate and get the crumbs from the table."
Mortality is the best indicator of the degree to which mountain slaves were at greater risk than other U.S. slaves. In the United States, slaves died at a frequency only slightly higher than that experienced by whites (Steckel, "A Peculiar Population," 740-41). In sharp contrast to national trends, mountain blacks had a much lower life chance than local whites. Appalachia exhibited higher slave mortality rates than those regions of the United States characterized by larger plantations. Mountain slaves faced a risk of death considerably higher than the mortality rate characteristic of the entire South. In 1850, an individual Appalachian slave was 1.4 times more likely to die than a slave in other parts of the U.S. Southern Appalachia's white children were dying at levels slightly below the national average. However, the mortality risk of Appalachian slave children was above the national average. Nearly 60 percent of Appalachian slave children died before the age of ten, but less than half of all U.S. slave children died. The high mortality of Appalachian slave children has also been documented by Donald Sweig ("Northern Virginia Slavery: A Statistical and Demographic Investigation." Ph.D. diss.: College of William and Mary, 1982, p. 107) and by Stevenson (Life in Black and White, pp. 248-249).
Sexual and Reproductive Exploitation
In addition to risks associated with malnutrition, ecological hazards, and mortality, mountain slave families were destabilized by five patterns of systematic reproductive exploitation. We can spot the first of these patterns in demographic evidence. Mountain plantations were overpopulated with women and children, to a greater extent even than other slave-selling areas of the South. Second, the primary structural mechanism by which Appalachian slaveholders directly controlled the reproductive process was through their manipulation of slave marriages. Many Appalachian masters took an active role in slave marriages that went far beyond granting permission to voluntary spouses. In nearly three-fifths of the cases described in the narratives, slaves were allowed to select their spouses and then marry, after obtaining their masters' permission. However, Appalachian masters strongly influenced about one-third of the spouse selection decisions and unilaterally matched spouses in about one of every thirteen marriages. Slave marriages were economically important to Appalachian masters; so few of them granted their slaves total independence when it came to such a crucial matter. Coosa, Alabama slave Penny Thompson remembered that: "Mos' times masters and misses would jus' pick out some man fo' a woman an' say: '"Dis yo' man, an' say to the man 'Dis yo' woman.' Didn't make no difference what they want. Then they read some from the Bible to 'em an' say 'Now you is husban' an' wife.'" Kanawha County, West Virginia slave Lizzie Grant recalled: "I was about 17 years old when I was given to my young Maser, me and the man that I called my husband. So our young Maser put us to live together to raise from just like you would stock today. They never thought anything about it either. They never cared or thought about our feeling in the matter." Her master rationalized such intrusion with the philosophy that "it was cheaper to raise slaves than it was to buy them."
In about one of every twenty-one marriages, the overseers matched up slaves arbitrarily. In the case of Thomas Cole of Jackson County, Alabama, "De overseah give[d] [him] a log house and furnished [him] a girl." Similarly, a middle Tennessee son reported that the master purchased two slaves, expecting them to marry. His father "was an old man" when he was imported from Maryland while his mother "was young-- just fifteen or sixteen years old." Martha Showvely experienced an even more trying situation. At age thirteen, her overseer pressured her to marry an older male she did not even know. "I said yes," she recalled, "den after I got home, I got scared. He came to ax massa for me an' massa ax me did I want to marry him. I said, 'Naw suh.' Den I told de man I didn' know what I was sayin'." Within a few months, however, she relented; and she delivered three children by the time she was twenty.
The third pattern of reproductive exploitation lay in pressures toward early childbearing. Appalachian slaves were encouraged to marry in their teens. "If a woman didn't breed well, she was put in a gang and sold," according to one Appalachian slave. Thomas Jefferson "consider[ed] the labor of a breeding woman as no object, and that a child raised every 2. years [wa]s of more profit than the crop of the best laboring man" (Thomas Jefferson's Farm Book with Commentary and Relevant Extracts from Other Writings, American Philosophical Society, 1953, p. 43). Appalachian elite James Madison reported in 1834 that one third of his slaves were children, "every slave girl being expected to be a mother by the time she [wa]s fifteen" (Edith I. Coombs, ed., America Visited: Famous Travellers Report on the United States in the 18th and 19th Centuries, Book League of America, n.d., p. 233). Through the 1870 census manuscripts, we can glean significant information about Appalachian slave fertility. Using the enumerated ages of mothers and children, I calculated backwards the ages at which women delivered their children and how far apart these women spaced their pregnancies. Three-quarters of the enslaved mothers delivered their first child before they were nineteen. On average, Appalachian slave women had delivered their first child by age 17.4. Stevenson (Life in Black and White, p. 247) found the same early childbearing pattern in the slave lists for a Blue Ridge Virginia county.
Slave demographers are convinced that "successful manipulation" by masters of the reproductive process "would have led to an observed mean age of first childbearing of from 16.5 to 17 years" (James Trussell and Richard Steckel, "The Age of Slaves at Menarche and Their First Birth," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 8, 1978, p. 504). Two-fifths of the mothers of Appalachian ex-slaves bore eleven or more children, not counting babies who were stillborn or died. Little wonder, then, that they were averaging fewer than two years between their pregnancies. These reproduction strategies are startling when compared with fertility patterns for other populations. For the U.S. South as a whole, the average age of enslaved women at the birth of their first child was about twenty-one, and these mothers were spacing more than two years between pregnancies. Moreover, enslaved women in other parts of the U.S. averaged only about six live births (Fogel, Without Consent or Contract, pp. 181-82). Clearly, mountain masters were engaging in strategies to manipulate the reproductive process. In comparison to the typical U.S. slave mother, Appalachian slave women were bearing children three to four years earlier, they were allowing a shorter space between pregnancies, and they were producing three to five more live births.
The fourth pattern of systematic reproductive exploitation was sexual abuse by white males. Appalachian masters and their male offspring and agents probably resorted to sexual exploitation of slave women more often than did their counterparts in the rest of the South. Only about 5 percent of all the slave narratives in the WPA collection include reports that the slave's father was white (Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross, p. 133). In contrast, one in ten Appalachian slave families was headed by a woman whose children were the outcome of her abuse by white males. Moreover, sexual exploitation of Appalachian slave women occurred nearly three times more often than the average determined from a sample of all the WPA narratives. Nearly 15 percent of the Appalachian narratives describe acts of white sexual exploitation of enslaved women, and most of those instances involved acts of male force or physical violence.
The fifth pattern of systematic reproductive exploitation lay in the child nursing practices structured by mountain masters. To maximize women's productive labor in the fields or at hired locations, masters required women to return to work within a few weeks of childbirth and to wean their babies by the end of the ninth month. Consequently, mountain slave women were trapped in a vicious cycle of early weaning, high child mortality, and high fertility. Recent medical research documents the powerful biological linkage between breastfeeding and child health. Infants who are nursed longer than one year have the highest survival rates and stronger natural immunization against infections and a number of diseases. Moreover, people of African heritage are disproportionately lactose intolerant to animal milk (Kiple and Kiple, "Slave Child Mortality," pp. 292-94), so mountain babies died in great numbers from the diet substitutes. Infants were exposed to contaminated water and a mush that was low in protein and most of the vitamins and minerals essential to growth. Breastfeeding also acts as a natural deterrent to pregnancy, so masters could insure higher fertility by requiring early weaning. Paradoxically, child mortality acted as a spur to high fertility. When their infants died, the Appalachian ex-slaves reported that their mothers were pregnant again in less than two years.
While masters required early weaning of slave children, they employed black mothers to serve as wet nurses and care-givers for white offspring, who were typically breast-fed for nearly two years. At the same time that mountain slave women were weaning their own children early, one-fifth of them worked as wet nurses in white families. At some point during their enslavement, two-thirds of the females were employed as care-givers to white children, requiring them to leave their own children without adequate food or care. Unlike Lower South plantations, mountain masters did not structure collectivized child care. Booker T. Washington (Up from Slavery: An Autobiography, Association Press, 1901, p. 4) recalled that his mother "had little time to give to the training of her children during the day. She snatched a few moments for our care in the early morning before her work began, and at night after the day's work was done." Maugan Sheppard "never saw [his parents] much 'cept upon on a Sunday, cause they went to work before sun-up." Julius Jones had a similar experience, for he "never did see [his] mother or father except on Sunday. [He] stayed in the house they did, but they left in the morning for the fields before [he] was awake, and when they got back [he] was asleep." Jeff Johnson's parents "worked in de fiel', and when dey come in at dark, [the children] be's sleepy and didn' pay 'em no mind." Tom Singleton blamed his lack of genealogical knowledge upon the pressures of work. He did not "'member much 'bout [his] brothers and sisters" even though his parents "had fourteen children." In addition, he did not "ricollect nothin' t'all 'bout [his] grandma and grandpa." During the work day, Tom's family went separate ways. At night, the children "wuz so whupped out from hard wuk [they] just went off to sleep early and never talked much at no time" to their parents. Left without structured care while his mother worked, Perry Madden "would go to the house in slavery time, and there wouldn't be nobody home." So he "would go to the bed and get under it because [he] was scared. When [he] would wake up it would be way in the night and dark," and someone would have put him into bed.
These patterns of systematic reproductive exploitation were costly. The region's enslaved women suffered higher mortality rates than their male peers. Appalachian slave women labored under the cloud of death rates that were 1.5 times higher than national averages and 1.8 times higher than the risks faced by Appalachian white women. The masters' strategies of malnutrition, high fertility, and inadequate work release during pregnancy and childbirth were probably the major causes, for mountain females died disproportionately during their childbearing years.
Comparative Reprise: How Exceptional Was the Mountain South?
Despite his neglect of plantations that held fewer than fifty laborers, Fogel (Without Consent or Contract, pp. 178-83) is convinced that conditions and families on smaller slaveholdings must have been very different from his lifetime of findings about large Lower South plantations. Indeed, a few scholars have argued that there were several factors that were more likely to destabilize family life on small plantations than on large ones. Stephen Crawford ("Quantified Memory: A Study of the WPA and Fisk University Slave Narrative Collections. Ph.D. diss.: University of Chicago, 1980) found that white sexual exploitation of slave women occurred more often on small plantations. He also has shown that slave women on small plantations had their first child at an earlier age and were pregnant more frequently than women on large plantations. Steckel ("A Peculiar Population," 738-39) has argued that hunger and malnutrition were worse on small plantations.
When we compare Appalachian patterns with these earlier studies and with the findings of Orlando Patterson (Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, Harvard University Press, 1982), we make some startling discoveries. Analyzing 66 slave societies around the world in several historical eras, Patterson has found that slavery is most brutal and most exploitative in those societies characterized by small holdings. Contrary to popular perceptions, Patterson found that family separations, slave trading, sexual exploitation, and physical abuse occurred much more often in societies where the masters averaged fewer than 10 slaves. Such is the pattern that emerges from my own research. Appalachian masters sold and hired out slaves from their families twice as frequently as other Southern masters. In comparison to the Lower South, Appalachian slave children were sold eight times more often, and spouses were separated nearly twice as often. Appalachian slave women endured white sexual exploitation at a level that was three times greater than the rate of abuse faced by all Southern slave women. Because of forced labor migrations, mountain slave families were disrupted much more frequently than slaves on Lower South plantations. Mountain slave families were overwhelmingly matrifocal because masters had structured the absence of fathers and husbands through forced labor migration strategies. If there was anything exceptional about mountain slavery, it was the brutality and economic severity of the owners. Because they experienced a higher incidence of inadequate housing, clothing shortfalls, and malnutrition, mountain slaves-- especially women and children-- died at rates significantly higher than national averages.
Increasingly, we are coming to understand that there never has been a monolithic South. Now we must also realize that there was not one monolithic slavery experience. The stability of slave families varied with historical era, region of the South, size of plantation, and type of crops produced (Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two centuries of Slavery in North America, Harvard University Press, 1998). Because this country had the world's most extensive domestic slave trade for more than half a century, we need to rethink U.S. slavery as a multiplicity of diasporas. In this vein, some Upper South slave families endured several intergenerational migrations. Three generations of a typical Appalachian slave family had members who were cumulatively owned by ten or twelve masters. We can now comprehend the full unspoken text hidden in the narratives of two of the ex-slaves whom I quoted at the beginning. Since sixty percent of the Appalachian slave narratives describe trading incidents, anxiety about the next forced separation pervaded family life. "We lived in constant fear," Jim Threat told us, "that we would be sold away from our families." The auction block and travelling speculators loomed like ever-present shadows over black Appalachians. In addition to disruptions caused by forced labor migrations, mountain slave families were threatened by malnutrition, ecological hazards, and high mortality. Somehow Appalachian slave families persisted in the face of diaspora, death, and reproductive exploitation. As evidenced by their personal histories, mountain slaves comprehended, with deep grief, that the economic agendas of their owners prevented them from being "safe in de family way."
NOTES
Direct quotes were drawn from these slave narratives. The numbers in parentheses indicate part divisions within the volumes.
Ophelia Egypt, H. Masuoka, & C. S. Johnson, Comp. "Unwritten History of Slavery: Autobiographical Account of Negro Ex-slaves." Social Science Document No. 1 (1945), Mimeographed Typescript, Fisk University Archives, pp. 1, 5-6, 11-14, 97, 114, 130, 141, 216, 262.
Charles L. Perdue, T.E. Barden and R.K. Phillips, Eds. Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-slaves. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976, pp. 81, 264-65.
George P. Rawick, Comp. The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972, Vol. 2 (1), p. 20; Vol. 3 (1), p. 34; Vol. 3 (2), p. 13; Vol. 4 (1), p. 228; Vol. 7, pp. 138, 162, 172; Vol. 8 (1), p. 105; Vol. 10 (5), pp. 40, 100, 128, 181, 189, 211; Vol. 10 (6), pp. 218; Vol. 12, pp. 137, 308-309; Vol. 13 (3), p. 264; Vol. 14 (1), pp. 354-55; Vol. 16 (6), pp. 11-12, 23, 38, 45-46, 67; Vol. 19, p. 206
_______________________. The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, Supplement I. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 1977, Vol. 1, pp. 3, 19, 94, 144, 361, 1161; Vol. 3, pp. 94; Vol. 5 (1), p. 218; Vol. 5 (2), p. 304; Vol. 7, pp. 690-91; Vol. 8, pp. 216-17, 913, 1215-16; Vol. 9, p. 1523; Vol. 12, pp. 257, 328, 335; Vol. 13 (3), pp. 192; Vol. 14, pp. 79, 354; Vol. 16, p. 22
_______________________. The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, Supplement II. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 1979, Vol. 3, pp. 669-70, 785-86, 800, 806; Vol. 4, pp. 1098, 1242; Vol. 5, p. 1556; Vol. 9, pp. 3639, 3872, 3880