Slavery and the Black Appalachian Family
by Wilma A. Dunaway

Links to Maps and Illustrations:

Where is Southern Appalachia?   Map of US Slave Trading Routes

A slave coffle on the New River in Southwest Virginia

Sale of a Slave Father   Sale of a Slave Child

In 1921, John Campbell bragged that there were few African-Americans in the Southern Mountains because slaves just weren’t needed to grow the small corn crops. Until 1990, regional scholars routinely accepted that outrageous bias, many claiming that slavery was alien to the mentalite of Appalachians. Such myths do not hold up against public records, slave narratives, or slaveholder manuscripts. Obviously, none of these writers ever looked at the published census data for Appalachian counties, else they would have discovered just how many African-Americans were here. The region may not have been characterized by the large plantations that dominated the cotton-growing Lower South, but that did not mean that there was no slave labor contributing to the economy. Contrary to popular myth, 1 of every 3 Appalachian farm owners held slaves, and nearly three of every ten adults in the region's labor force were enslaved. Black slaves also provided a bulk of the labor for the region’s emerging industries, factories, railroad construction, and tourist resorts. Small Appalachian towns routinely purchased slaves to provide public services, such as garbage pickup, water delivery, and fire fighting.
 

Another popular misconception is the notion that slavery was “benign” in this region, that slaves were better treated here than in the rest of the South. I want to spend most of the rest of my time addressing this widespread popular myth. First, let me stress that it is an oxymoron to use the two words “benign” and “slavery” together. There has never been any “benign slavery,” for all slavery takes away the freedom, the civil liberties, the livelihoods, and the families of the enslaved to benefit those who control them. The use of such rhetoric denies that slavery had negative impacts on black Americans, and it whitewashes the harm done to their ancestors by enslavement.

Let’s begin by hearing a few Appalachian slave voices. When Amelia Jones told her story to a WPA interviewer in the 1930s, she called attention to frequent slave selling. "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.'" When Jim Threat described his experiences as a northern Alabama slave, he focused on the frequency of permanent separation. "We lived in constant fear," Jim said, "that we would be sold away from our families." In her story, Maggie Pinkard points to the trauma of those separations. "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 were required to use the names assigned by owners. "I haven't never had a nine months child," Josephine Bacchus told the WPA interviewer. "I ain' never been safe in de family way." This former slave went on to say that she experienced chronic hunger, white sexual exploitation, and quick return to the fields after childbirth. Little wonder that all but one of her babies were stillborn. Katie Johnson captured the vulnerability of parents when she said: "During slavery, it seemed lak yo' chillun b'long to ev'ybody but you."

Challenging the Dominant Paradigm

These Appalachian slave voices should HAUNT us all, for such lived experiences have been downplayed in US slavery studies over the past three decades. Three claims now predominate in textbooks and in museum exhibits:

• that slaves were adequately fed, clothed, and sheltered;

• that slave death risks were no greater than those experienced by white adults;

• and that owners rarely disrupted slave families.

The work of prize-winning slavery expert Herbert Gutman established the view that black households were organized as stable, long-term marriages between spouses who resided together. Despite hundreds of African-American accounts to the contrary, Nobel Prize winner Robert Fogel still contends that two-thirds of all U.S. slaves lived in two-parent households.
Neither Fogel nor Gutman recognized owner manipulation of families. Fogel argued that such intervention would have worked against the economic interests of owners. Gutman emphasized the abilities of slaves to engage in day-to-day resistance to keep their families together. These writers and their supporters have contended that adult males played active roles in their families and that children developed strong relationships with their fathers. Supposedly, slave women began childbearing LATER than their white mistresses, so there were few black teenage pregnancies. Most scholars argue that sexual exploitation of slave women was rare. Fogel and Engerman pointed to a low percentage of ethnically-mixed slaves as proof of the low incidence of sexual abuse. They claimed that only 1 of every 10 US slaves was part-white. But this statistic does not stand up against the proportion of mulattos documented by census enumerators and by slaveholder manuscripts.
 

Supporters of the dominant paradigm arrived at these optimistic conclusions because they neglected small slaveholdings. And this is a serious methodological flaw. By analyzing plantations that owned more than fifty slaves, writers like Gutman and Fogel represented the family histories of a small minority of the enslaved population. In reality, more than 88 percent of U.S. slaves resided at locations where there were fewer than fifty slaves. Around the world historically, slavery was most brutal and most exploitative in those societies, like Appalachia, that were characterized by small plantations.
In fact, family separations, slave trading, sexual exploitation, physical abuse, hunger, and high mortality occurred much more often in societies where the masters owned small numbers of slaves.

Supporters of the dominant paradigm also got things wrong because they made a second methodological blunder. They ignored the Upper South states of Kentucky, Maryland, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia that exported slaves through interstate selling. In the United States, world demand for cotton triggered the largest domestic slave trade in the history of the world. Between 1790 and 1860, the Lower South slave population nearly quadrupled because the Upper South exported nearly one million black laborers. Because of that vast interregional forced migration, Upper South slaves experienced family disruptions frequently, and most lost kin across 3 or more generations.

• Every decade between 1820 and 1860, one-tenth of all Upper South slaves were relocated to the Lower South.

• Thus, the chances of an Upper South slave falling into the hands of interstate traders were quite high.

• Among Mississippi slaves, for example, nearly half the males and two-fifths of the females had been separated from Upper South spouses.

Appalachia and Inter-regional Transfer of Slaves

As this map shows, Appalachia lay at the geographical heart of the interstate slave trade. Towns like Staunton, Abingdon, Knoxville, and Rome, Georgia were regional hubs of slave trading. Most slave coffles, like this one that encamped on the New River in Southwest Virginia, moved to the Lower South over the roads and rivers that crisscrossed this region. By 1860, the Upper South had exported 40% of its slave population. There is conclusive evidence in census returns of the removal of black Appalachians as part of the US slave trade between regions. Like the other sections of the Upper South, Appalachia had only 3/5 of the slave population that should have been there in 1860. Between 1820 and 1860, world prices for regional crops, livestock, and minerals fell or remained static-- while the market prices for slaves steadily escalated.
In reaction to that demand for black workers, mountain masters engaged in 2 profit-maximizing strategies. First, they exported surplus laborers. On average, small plantations sold slaves about once every 3 years, sending most of them to the Lower South through the interstate slave trade. Before the age of 40, a mountain slave risked a 1 in 3 chance of being exported to the Lower South.

However, Appalachian masters engaged in slave hiring to an even greater extent. In sharp contrast to the Lower South, they leased out 1/5 to 1/4 of their slaves on annual contracts, primarily with distant nonagricultural enterprises, such as mining, salt manufacturing, and railroad construction. Between 1790 and 1860, more than 50,000 slaves were exported from Appalachia every decade. Every year, another 80,000 were hired out.

Labor Migrations and Family Disruptions

As a result of these forced labor migrations, nearly 3/4 of the slave narratives report family disruptions. The most frequent structural interference was the master's removal of children, as in this instance. Nearly 40% of mountain slaves were separated from their families as youngsters-- 2/3 of them removed before the age of 15. A majority of Appalachian slaves were touched by losses of siblings, grandparents, and extended kin. However, the 2nd most frequent disruption occurred when spouses were separated, as in this case.

The vast majority of these family separations were permanent fractures. Slave families could be broken when masters moved out-of-state. Families were routinely divided when masters died and their estates were settled. Overwhelmingly, however, 3/5 of the family disruptions occurred because masters sold their slaves.

In addition to these patterns, most mountain slave families were weakened because some of their members lived elsewhere.
When spouses or children were owned or employed by neighboring masters, regular visits were possible. But members never resided in the same household, and owners could withdraw visitation privileges at any time. Greater disruption occurred when family members were hired out on long-term contracts and allowed to reunite only briefly at Christmas. Abroad marriages and distant work assignments resulted in black families whose adult males were somewhere else most of the time. In other words, mountain masters structured the absence of fathers and husbands. Even when they were involved in long-term marriages, Appalachia's enslaved mothers and children resided overwhelmingly in households headed by women.
 

Other Major Threats to Survival of Slave Families

Forced labor migrations were not the only threats to family survival. Appalachian ex-slaves reported four major ecological risks.

1. Contaminated Water
2. Inadequate disposal of human waste and garbage
3. Overcrowded and poorly constructed cabins
4. And dirt floors.

Because of their lack of sanitation and clean water, Appalachian slave quarters exhibited the same dangerous ecological conditions that characterize urban slums of contemporary poor nations where half the children die before age 10.
Women and girls drew water from the same streams where livestock waded, clothes were washed, bodies were bathed, and waste was dumped. Dirt floors were loaded with parasites, molds, and bacteria while cabins provided little protection from either heat, cold, or wood chimneys that caught fire. Because of the lack of toilets, garbage collected near cabins, and human “night soil” was used to fertilize household gardens that were tended by barefoot mothers and children.
We can only speculate about how slave women handled the hygiene problems associated with monthly menses, childbirth, or breastfeeding under conditions in which water was contaminated and fabric and rags were too precious to be discarded.
Appalachian slaves were also at greater risk because they were employed in nonagricultural occupations 3 to 5 times more frequently than their counterparts in the Lower South. Environmental hazards, accidents, and malnutrition were worst for such nonfarm workers.

Previous studies estimate that U.S. masters issued adequate clothing to more than four-fifths of all their slaves. In sharp contrast, nearly two-thirds of the mountain ex-slaves reported that their owners provided insufficient clothing and shoes.
Slave children wore only thin cotton gowns year-round, and they were not issued shoes until their late teens. For example, Sarah Gudger was weak and underweight because she spent her childhood barefoot and was repeatedly infested with tapeworms. A middle Tennessee slave complained that “her feet were so frost-bitten that you could track her everywhere she went through the snow.”

Malnutrition And Hunger

Hunger and malnutrition were also much worse on small Appalachian plantations than on the large holdings studied by supporters of the dominant paradigm. Mountain masters provided food rations at levels that would have permitted adult slaves only two-thirds of their needed daily calories and even less of the nutrients essential to good health. Appalachian ex-slaves reported that their masters supplied them inadequate food more than twice as often as did other U.S. ex-slaves.
In addition, small mountain plantations were twice as likely as other U.S. owners to require slaves to produce much of their own food supply. There is another indication of widespread hunger. Mountain slaves reported food stealing three times more often than did other U.S. slaves.

However, child malnutrition was an even greater threat. 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 1/5 received fruits, molasses, vegetables, or any regular ration of meat. As a result, slave children faced serious deficiencies of protein, iron, amino acids, and several vitamins and minerals essential to growth and good health.  Little wonder that more than half of all Appalachian slave children died before age 10.

Slave Mortality

Mortality is the best indicator of the degree to which mountain slaves were at greater risk. In the United States, slaves died at a frequency only slightly higher than that experienced by whites. In sharp contrast to national trends, mountain blacks had a much lower life chance. In 1850, a mountain slave was 1.4 times more likely to die than other U.S. slaves, and the mortality risk of mountain slave children exceeded the national average.

Sexual And Reproductive Exploitation

In addition to risks associated with slave trading, malnutrition, and ecological hazards, mountain slave families were threatened by 4 patterns of systematic reproductive exploitation. The primary structural mechanism through which mountain slaveholders directly controlled the reproductive process was through their interference into slave marriages.
In nearly three-fifths of the cases described in the narratives, slaves were required to obtain their masters' permission before selecting their spouses. Mountain masters strongly shaped about one-third of the spouse selection decisions and unilaterally matched spouses in about one of every thirteen marriages. Moreover, they routinely separated males from wives who were barren or who bore few children.

The second pattern of reproductive exploitation lay in pressures toward early childbearing. Slave women on small plantations had their first child at an earlier age and were pregnant more frequently than women on large plantations.
Nearly half the enslaved mothers delivered their first child before they were seventeen. Three-quarters of them endured their first pregnancy before the age of nineteen. Moreover, Appalachian slave women averaged fewer than two years between their pregnancies. These reproductive strategies are startling when compared with fertility averages 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 21, and these mothers were spacing more than two years between pregnancies.

The third pattern of reproductive exploitation was sexual abuse. Mountain masters, their male offspring, and their managers resorted to sexual exploitation of slave women 3 times more often than did their counterparts in the rest of the South.
Nearly 15 percent of the regional narratives describe acts of white sexual exploitation of enslaved women, and most of those instances involved force or violence. Moreover, one in ten mountain slave families was headed by a woman whose children were the outcome of sexual exploitation by white males.

The fourth pattern of reproductive exploitation lay in the child nursing practices structured by mountain masters. Appalachian slave women were trapped by their owners in a vicious cycle of early weaning from breastfeeding, high child mortality, and high fertility. To maximize women's productive labor in the fields or at hired locations, masters required mothers to return to work within a few weeks of childbirth and to begin to wean their babies by the 6th month. Because breastfeeding acts as a natural deterrent to pregnancy, owners could also insure higher fertility through early weaning.  Modern medical research documents the powerful biological linkage between breastfeeding and child survival. Infants who are breastfed longer than one year have the highest survival rates and higher natural immunization. Since people of African heritage are disproportionately lactose intolerant to animal milk, mountain babies died in great numbers from the diet substitutes that were mixed with contaminated water. Paradoxically, child mortality acted as a spur to high fertility. When their infants died, mountain slave women were often pregnant again within less than a year. While masters required early weaning of slave children, their own infants were typically breast-fed for at least two years. To accomplish that, owners employed black mothers to serve as wet nurses and care-givers for white offspring. At the same time that mountain slave women were weaning their own infants early, 1/5 of them worked as wet nurses for white babies. At some point during their enslavement, 2/3 of the females were employed as care-givers to white children, often requiring them to leave their own offspring without adequate nutrition and nurture.

The masters' strategies of malnutrition, high fertility, and inadequate work release during pregnancy led to high mother mortality. During their childbearing years, enslaved females suffered higher mortality rates than their male peers. In fact, black Appalachian women labored under the cloud of death rates that were 1.5 times higher than national slave averages and 1.8 times higher than the mortality rates of the white Appalachian males who so often raped them.

Conclusion

We can now comprehend the full unspoken text hidden in the slave narratives I quoted at the beginning. Anxiety about future diasporas pervaded the family lives of mountain slaves. "We lived in constant fear," Jim Threat told us, "that we would be sold away from our families."

• On average, each of the Appalachian ex-slaves reported that their parents were sold 4 times. Three generations of a typical mountain slave family had members who were cumulatively owned by 10 to 12 masters.

• Slave husbands were present in Lower South families twice as often as they were in Appalachian households. Because of several generations of forced labor migrations, mountain slave families were overwhelmingly matrifocal, with women heading households nearly four times more often in the Mountain South than they did in the Lower South.
   

• In addition to being disrupted by forced labor migrations, mountain slave families were threatened by malnutrition, high child and mother mortality, and reproductive exploitation of women. Now we can better comprehend the significance of Josephine Bacchus’ sad lament: "I ain' never been safe in de family way.

At emancipation, 2/3 of the families of Appalachian ex-slaves were in disarray, and the vast majority of separated kin never reunited. Nearly 3/4 of the spouses who had been separated never saw each other again.

• Elderly ex-slaves mourned the loss of parents, spouses, children, siblings, and grandparents. Even when they had been separated from kin at very early ages, they sensed that a significant element of their souls had been wrenched from them. 

• In the minds of black Appalachians, poverty, illiteracy, and racial inequality were not the worst legacies of enslavement. Bad as those structural factors were, it was the forced removals of family that broke their hearts and generated a community wound that was not healed by liberation. A mountain slave says it best: “We never met again. . . . That parting I can never forget.”