Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow

Nanny’s lament captures the essence of the antebellum South’s hierarchical caste system shaped by racial and gender ideologies, and based on dramatic inequalities of wealth and power. A compact, volatile, and ultimately isolated society, the slaveholder’s estate represented in microcosm a larger drama in which physical force, the hallmark of the region’s political economy, sustained the power of whites over blacks, men over women, rich over poor. Here, then, without pretense or apology were notions of social difference wedded to the pursuit of profit. As blacks, enslaved women were exploited for their skills and physical strength in the production of staple crops; as women, they performed a reproductive function vital to individual slaveholders’ financial interests and to the inherently expansive system of slavery in general. Yet they also worked to resist the demands of masters and mistresses, white men and women who placed their own material and economic well-being over the integrity of black family life.²

The peculiar configuration of enforced labor relations and reproductive imperatives under slavery converged most dramatically where the two forms of political domination overlapped—that is, in the experiences of enslaved women.³ In the context of the social division of labor in early rural America, the plantation work of black men and white women conformed to certain broader labor patterns not unique to the antebellum South. For example, despite the rhetorical glorification of the slaveholder’s wife as the embodiment of various otherworldly virtues, she remained responsible for conventional womanly duties in the mundane realm of household management.⁴ Likewise, enslaved men performed duties similar to those of New England and southern yeomen farmers. They planted, weeded, and harvested crops, and during the winter months they burned brush, cleared pasture, mended fences, and repaired equipment. A few received special training and labored as skilled artisans or mechanics. Clearly, the size, spatial arrangement, and commercial orientation, as well as patterns of brutal physical abuse, set the southern plantation apart from northern and midwestern family farms. Still, the definitions of white women’s work, and of black men’s work, did not differ substantially within any of these settings.

However, the slaveowner took a more crudely opportunistic approach toward the labor of black women, revealing the interplay (and at times conflict) between notions of women qua black workers and women qua female reproducers and domestic laborers; hence a master just as “naturally” put his bondswomen to work chopping cotton as washing, ironing, or cooking. Furthermore, in seeking to maximize the productivity of his entire labor force while reserving certain tasks for women exclusively, the owner demonstrated how patriarchal and capitalist assumptions concerning women’s work could reinforce each other.⁵

At the same time, enslaved women also worked on behalf of their own nuclear and extended families and their own communities—and therein lies a central irony in the history of their labor. In defiance of the slaveholders’ tendencies to ignore gender differences in making assignments in the fields, men and women whenever possible adhered to a strict division of labor within their own households and communities. Consequently, black women’s parental obligations, and affective relations more generally, played a key role in their struggle to combat oppression, for their attention to the duties of motherhood deprived whites of full control over them as field laborers, domestic servants, and “brood-sows.” Indeed, the persistence with which enslaved women sought to define on their own terms “what a woman ought to be and to do” would ultimately have a profound impact on American history long after the formal institution of bondage had ceased to exist.

Yet Chesapeake colonists held deep misgivings about incorporating large numbers of Africans, and people of African descent, into their plantation households. Deeply suspicious of all other ethnic groups (including the Spanish, French, and Portuguese), masters and mistresses resisted cohabiting with people who were not English, English-speaking, or Christian. For a number of reasons enslaved laborers were risky; they were expensive to buy, and the high mortality rates among them, especially during the seventeenth century, meant they made a poor investment for cost-conscious planters. Like their English-servant and Indian-hireling counterparts, they were potentially dangerous as resentful individuals and as members of rebellious groups. Moreover, the multicultural Atlantic basin, which brought together people from Europe, Africa, and the New World, militated against the idea of a “race”-based slave system, one that categorized persons as either “black” or “white.” Equiano Olaudah, an enslaved seaman, noted the variable colors on display throughout the Atlantic, a place where, with exposure to the sun, Spaniards “become as dark colored as our native Indians of Virginia,” and where blended cultures challenged the idea that ethnic identities based on skin color were forever fixed, immutable. Noted Equiano of the exchange of languages, religions, and folkways in general among peoples from Europe, Africa, and the Americas: “Understanding is not confined to feature or color.”⁷

By the mid-eighteenth century several factors contributed to the rise of slavery as a labor system integral to the economy and society of the southern colonies. With the expansion of the international slave trade, a decline in the supply of available English indentured servants, and the improved mortality rates among bound Africans and their children, slavery became a viable source of laborers for landowners cultivating not only tobacco in the Chesapeake but also rice in the Georgia and South Carolina low country. Political theorists such as Thomas Jefferson began to develop racial ideologies that sharply differentiated “blacks” from “whites” in terms of their intellectual potential and fitness for citizenship rights. The invention of the cotton gin in 1791 opened the way for the spread of cotton cultivation, a development that increased the value of enslaved workers and imposed on those workers a harsh new regimen of forced gang labor in the fields.⁸

The first enslaved workers arrived on the North American continent not as Africans but as members of ethnic groups from the African continent. For several generations (and even after the closing of the African slave trade in the United States in 1808) they and their descendants retained their ethnic identities and homeland traditions related to all manner of religious beliefs and rituals, foodways, and folkways. Among some groups, their Islamic faith provided a form of social cohesion that transcended ethnic and linguistic differences. Slaves’ African ethnic customs, combined with their unique subordinate legal status, set them apart from all whites, including the disfranchised and impoverished.⁹

Planters sought to exploit the agricultural knowledge of certain ethnic groups, especially those skilled in the production of rice. But before planting could commence, whites put Africans and their descendants to work at the arduous and dangerous tasks of cutting trees and clearing land, tasks unfamiliar to Early Modern English people. Although slave traders in the Americas valued male over female laborers, they understood that women were integral to the sustenance of enslaved populations in terms of food preparation, medical care, and the preservation of social and religious rituals such as mourning the dead. African women possessed a variety of other skills that enhanced their financial value to whites; many women produced baskets, pottery, and other household items; and some had experience marketing and trading goods. Yet over time slaveholders developed a set of ideas that held that people of African descent were best “suited” for manual labor, and unworthy of even the most basic human rights by virtue of their “race.” At the same time, the growth of the southern mulatto population—primarily the children of enslaved women impregnated by white slaveowners or overseers—revealed whites’ hypocrisy and cynicism in using the concept of race as a way of categorizing people into groups of either “blacks” or “whites.”¹⁰

By 1830, slavery was an entrenched institution in the United States, vital to the political and economic life not only of the staple-crop South, but also the industrializing North, where textile mills processed the cotton picked by enslaved workers from South Carolina to Louisiana. As a labor system, slavery exhibited regional variations; enslaved laborers toiled in the workshops and sawmills of the upper South, on the sprawling absentee-owner rice plantations in the low country, on holdings large and small in the broad swath of the Cotton Belt, and on the docks of seaports and river ports throughout the South. At the same time, an emergent African American culture showed common characteristics throughout the South. A balanced sex ratio, especially on the largest holdings, provided the foundation for the black family under slavery. Ethnic identities gave way to a new, hybrid culture that blended African and European traditions. By the early nineteenth century, most enslaved persons, with the exception of low-country Gullah-Geechee speakers, spoke English. Slaves throughout the United States embraced a form of the Christian religion that included African elements of worship—the ring shout, for example—and downplayed European beliefs related to original sin and the damnation of souls. Reinforced through oral tradition, blacks’ worldview stressed the arbitrary boundaries between the natural and spiritual realms, and highlighted the significance of funerary rites and other customs related to food and medicine as markers of a distinctive African heritage. Slaves remained without recourse to the law, and they endured massive forced migration; between 1820 and 1860, 10 percent of slaves in the upper South were sold to the lower South, and family separations were routine.¹¹

During the last three decades of the antebellum period, slaveowners began to issue self-serving pronouncements defending the institution of bondage as a positive good, a way to care for “childlike” black people and incorporate them into white “households.” Yet enslaved men and women were under no such illusion; slavery was a system of coerced labor, first and foremost. Interviewed by a Federal Writers Project (FWP) worker in 1937, the elderly former slave Hannah Davidson spoke reluctantly of her ordeal in Kentucky: “The things that my sister May and I suffered were so terrible . . . It is best not to have such things in our memory.” During the course of the interview Davidson stressed the unremitting toil that had shaped her life under bondage. “Work, work, work,” she said; it had consumed all her days (from dawn until midnight) and all her years (she was only eight when she began minding her master’s children and helping the older women with their spinning). “I been so exhausted working, I was like an inchworm crawling along a roof. I worked till I thought another lick would kill me.” On Sundays, “the only time they [the slaves] had to themselves,” she recalled, women washed clothes and some of the men tended their small tobacco patches. As a child she loved to play in the haystack, but that was possible only on “Sunday evening, after work.”¹²

Slaveowners experimented with various divisions of labor calculated to exploit black men, women, and children, and push them to the limits of human endurance. All slaves were barred by law from owning property or acquiring literacy skills, and although the system played favorites with a few, black males and females were equal in the sense that neither gender wielded legally enforceable economic power over the other. Some slaves, such as those in the Rice Kingdom of low-country South Carolina and Georgia, accumulated modest amounts of personal property, and kept chickens and tended gardens. And slaves throughout the South trafficked in goods they appropriated from their masters and sold to other blacks or whites for gain. Nevertheless, to a considerable extent, the types of jobs enslaved laborers did, and the amount and regularity of labor they were forced to devote to such jobs, were all dictated by the master.¹³

For a number of reasons, then, the definition of enslaved women’s work is problematic. If work is any activity that leads either directly or indirectly to the production of goods or services, then these wives, mothers, and daughters did nothing but work. (An exception was late night revelry, which allowed women to use their bodies for pleasure rather than labor, and often left them too depleted and tired to work efficiently the next day.) Even their efforts to care for themselves and their families helped to maintain the owner’s workforce and to enhance its overall productivity; virtually all forms of nurture contributed to the health and welfare of the enslaved population, thereby increasing the actual value of the master’s property—that is, slaves as strong workers, marketable commodities, and speculative properties. White men warned prospective mothers that they wanted neither “runts” nor girls born on their plantations, and enslaved women understood that their owner’s economic self-interest affected even the most intimate family ties. Of the pregnant bondswomen on her husband’s large Butler’s Island (Georgia) rice plantation, Fanny Kemble observed, “They have all of them a most distinct and perfect knowledge of their value to their owners as property,” and she recoiled at their obsequious profession obviously intended to delight her: “Missus, tho’ we no able to work, we make little niggers for Massa.”¹⁴

The rhythm of the planting-weeding-harvesting cycle shaped the lives of almost all American enslaved workers, 95 percent of whom lived in rural areas. This cycle dictated a common work routine (gang labor) for slaves who cultivated the king of all agricultural products, cotton, in the broad swath of Black Belt that dominated the whole region. Patterns of labor organization varied in the other staple-crop economies—tobacco in the upper South, rice along the coast of Georgia and South Carolina, and sugar in Louisiana. The task system characteristic of low-country rice cultivation granted slave women and men an exceptional degree of control over their own time after the completion of their daily assignments; however, this system imposed additional, heavy burdens on workers, now forced to grow their own food as well as toil in the rice fields. In 1860, of almost 4 million slaves, about half labored on farms with holdings of twenty slaves or more; one-quarter endured bondage with at least fifty other people on the same plantation. In its most basic form, a life of slavery meant working the soil with other blacks at a pace calculated to reap the largest harvest for a white master.¹⁵

Under these conditions, the physical frailty that accompanied old age was unlikely to spare enslaved women from the demands of labor. The West African tradition of respect for one’s elders found new meaning among African Americans; for most women, old age brought increased influence within the slave community even as their economic value to the master declined. Still, owners, fearful lest women escape from “earning their salt” once they became too infirm to go to the field, set them to work at other tasks—knitting, cooking, spinning, weaving, dairying, washing, ironing, caring for the children. (Elderly men served as gardeners, wagoners, carters, and stock tenders.) Nevertheless, the imperatives of the southern economic system sometimes compelled slaveowners to extract from feeble women what field labor they could. In other cases they reduced elderly persons’ material provisions—housing and allowances of food and clothing—in proportion to their decreased productivity.

In his efforts to wrench as much field labor as possible from slaves of child-bearing age without injuring their reproductive capacity, the master made “a noble admission of female equality,” observed Kemble, an abolitionist sympathizer, with bitter irony. Slaveholders had little use for sentimental platitudes about the delicacy of the female constitution when it came to grading their “hands” according to physical strength and endurance. Judged on the basis of a standard set by a healthy adult man, most women probably ranked as three-quarter hands; yet there were enough women like Susan Mabry of Virginia, who could pick 400 or 500 pounds of cotton a day (150 to 200 pounds was considered respectable for an average worker) to remove from a master’s mind all doubts about the abilities of a strong, healthy woman field-worker. At the same time, he was putting into practice time-honored Anglo-Saxon notions about the types of work appropriate for impoverished women, thereby producing many a “very dreary scene” like the one described by northern journalist Frederick Law Olmsted: During winter preparation of rice fields on a Sea Island plantation, he saw a group of black women, “armed with axes, shovels and hoes . . . all slopping about in the black, unctuous mire at the bottom of the ditches.” In essence, the quest for an “efficient” agricultural workforce led slaveowners to downplay gender differences in assigning adults to field labor.¹⁶

Dressed in coarse osnaburg gowns; their skirts “reefed up with a cord drawn tightly around the body, a little above the hips” (the traditional “second belt”); long sleeves pushed above the elbows and kerchiefs on their heads, female field-hands were a common sight throughout the antebellum South. Together with their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons, black women spent up to fourteen hours a day toiling out of doors, often under a blazing sun. In the Cotton Belt they plowed fields; dropped seed; and hoed, picked, ginned, sorted, and moted cotton. On farms in Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee, women hoed tobacco; laid worm fences; and threshed, raked, and bound wheat. For those on the Sea Islands and in coastal areas, rice culture included raking and burning the stubble from the previous year’s crop; ditching; sowing seed; plowing, listing, and hoeing fields; and harvesting, stacking, and threshing the rice. In the bayou region of Louisiana, women planted sugar-cane cuttings, plowed, and helped to harvest and gin the cane. During the winter, they performed a myriad of tasks necessary on nineteenth-century farms: repairing roads, pitching hay, burning brush, and setting up post and rail fences. Like Sara Colquitt of Alabama, most adult females “worked in de fields every day from ’fore daylight to almost plumb dark.” During the busy harvest season, everyone was forced to labor up to sixteen hours at a time—after sunset by the light of candles or burning pine knots. Miscellaneous chores regularly occupied men and women around outbuildings and indoors on rainy days. Male and female enslaved laborers watered the horses, fed the chickens, and slopped the hogs. Together they ginned cotton, ground hominy, shelled corn and peas, and milled flour.¹⁷

In fact, throughout the South, enslaved women formed the bulk of the agricultural labor force (and an estimated 60 to 80 percent of all rice hands). Work assignments for men and women differed according to the size of a plantation, its crops, and its degree of labor specialization. On the largest holdings, masters trained men as artisans and then diverted the energies of husbands, fathers, and sons from the fields to the workshop. On smaller plantations, including one Virginia wheat farm, the men scythed and cradled the grain, women raked and bound it into sheaves, which children then gathered and stacked. Thomas Couper, a wealthy Sea Island planter, divided his slaves according to gender and employed men exclusively in ditching and women in moting and sorting cotton. Within the two gender groups, he further classified hands according to individual strength so that during the sugar-cane harvest, three “gangs” of women stripped blades (medium-level task), cut them (hardest), and bound and carried them (easiest). However, since cotton served as the basis of the southern agricultural system, general patterns of female work usually overshadowed local and regional differences in labor-force management. Stated simply, most women spent a good deal of their lives plowing, hoeing, and picking cotton. In the fields the notion of a distinctive “women’s work” vanished as slaveholders realized that “women can do plowing very well & full well with the hoes and [are] equal to men at picking.”¹⁸

However, it would be inaccurate to label female field-hands as unskilled hands in contrast to their menfolk working as carpenters, coopers, blacksmiths, brick masons, and boat pilots. To harness a double team of mules or oxen and steer, to guide a heavy wooden plow, to sow a rice field, or to pick hundreds of pounds a cotton each day was no mean feat for strong men, and yet slave women mastered these rigorous activities. White men and women from the North and South marveled at the skill and strength of female plow hands. Emily Burke of eastern Georgia saw men and women “promiscuously run their ploughs side by side and day after day . . . and as far as I was able to learn, the part the women sustained in this masculine employment, was quite as efficient as that of the more athletic sex.” In his travels through Mississippi, Frederick Law Olmsted watched as women “twitched their plows around on the head-land, jerking their reins, and yelling to their mules, with apparent ease, energy, and rapidity.” He failed to see “any indication that their sex unfitted them for the occupation.”¹⁹

On another estate in the Mississippi Valley, Olmsted observed forty of the “largest and strongest” women he had ever seen; they “carried themselves loftily, each having a hoe over the shoulder, and walking with a free, powerful swing, like chasseurs on the march.” In preparing fields for planting and in keeping grass from strangling the crop, women as well as men blistered their hands with the clumsy hoe characteristic of southern agriculture. “Hammered out of pig iron, broad like a shovel,” these “slave-time hoes” were made to withstand worker-inflicted damage. Recalled one former slave of the tool that also served as pick, spade, and gravedigger: “Dey make ’em heavy so dey fall hard, but de bigges’ trouble was liftin’ dem up.” Hoeing was backbreaking labor, but the versatility of the tool and its importance to cotton cultivation meant that the majority of female hands used it a good part of the year.²⁰

The cotton-picking season usually began in late July or early August and continued without interruption until the end of December. Thus for up to five months annually, every available man, woman, and child was engaged in a type of work that was strenuous and “tedious from its sameness.” Workers carried a bag fastened by a strap around their neck and deposited the cotton in it as they made their way down the row, at the end of which they emptied the bag’s contents into a basket. Picking cotton required endurance and agility as much as physical strength, and women frequently won regional and interfarm competitions conducted during the year. Pregnant and nursing women usually ranked as half-hands and were required to pick an amount less than the “average” 150 or so pounds per day.²¹

Slaveholders often reserved the tasks that demanded sheer muscle power for men exclusively. These included clearing the land of trees, rolling logs, and chopping and hauling wood. On rice plantations, enslaved men engineered intricate systems of canals and ditches that allowed for the flooding of fields with fresh water from nearby rivers. Yet plantation exigencies sometimes mandated women’s labor in these areas too. Generally, the smaller the farm, the more arduous and varied was women’s fieldwork. Lizzie Atkins, who lived on a twenty-five-acre Texas plantation with only three other slaves, remembered working “until slam dark”; she helped to clear land, cut wood, and tend the livestock in addition to her other duties of hoeing corn, spinning thread, sewing clothes, cooking, washing dishes, and grinding corn. One Texas farmer, who had his female slaves haul logs and plow with oxen, even made them wear breeches, thus minimizing outward differences between the genders. Enslaved women in the low-country rice fields dug ditches and otherwise contributed to the region’s distinctive irrigation system. Still, FWP interviews with former slaves indicate that blacks considered certain jobs uncharacteristic of bondswomen. Recalled Louise Terrell of her days on a farm near Jackson, Mississippi: “The women had to split rails all day long, just like the men.” Nancy Boudry of Georgia said she used to “split wood jus’ like a man.” Elderly women reminisced about their mothers and grandmothers with a mixture of pride and wonder. Mary Frances Webb declared of her slave grandmother: “In the winter she sawed and cut cord wood just like a man. She said it didn’t hurt her as she was strong as an ox.” Janie Scott’s description of her mother implied the extent of the older woman’s emotional as well as physical strength: She was “strong and could roll and cut logs like a man, and was much of a woman.”²²

At first it seems ironic that masters would utilize women fully as field laborers, but reserve most of the skilled occupations that required manual dexterity for men. Here the high cost of specialized and extensive training proved crucial in determining the division of labor. Although women were capable of learning these skills, their work lives were frequently interrupted by childbearing and nursing; a female blacksmith might not be able to provide the regular service required on a plantation. Too, masters frequently “hired out” mechanics and artisans to work for other employers during the winter, and women’s domestic responsibilities were deemed too important to permit protracted absences from their quarters. However, many young girls learned to spin thread and weave cloth because these tasks could occupy them immediately before and after childbirth.²³

The drive for profits induced slaveowners to squeeze every bit of strength from black women as a group. According to some estimates, in the 1850s at least 90 percent of all enslaved females over sixteen years of age labored more than 261 days per year, eleven to thirteen hours each day. Few overseers or masters had any patience with women whose movements in the field were persistently “clumsy, awkward, gross, [and] elephantine” for whatever reasons—malnutrition, exhaustion, recalcitrance. As Hannah Davidson said: “If you had something to do, you did it or got whipped.” The enforced pace of work more nearly resembled that of a factory than a farm; Kemble referred to female field-hands as “human hoeing machines.” The bitter memories of former slaves merely suggest the extent to which the physical strength of women was exploited. Eliza Scantling of South Carolina, only sixteen years old at the end of the Civil War, plowed with a mule during the coldest months of the year: “Sometimes me hands get so cold I jes’ cry.” Matilda Perry of Virginia “use to wuk fum sun to sun in dat ole terbaccy field. Wuk till my back felt lak it ready to pop in two.”²⁴

Although pregnant and nursing women suffered from temporary lapses in productivity, most slaveholders apparently agreed with the (in Olmsted’s words) “well-known, intelligent and benevolent” Mississippi planter who declared that “Labor is conducive to health; a healthy woman will rear most children.” (They obviously did not have the benefit of modern medical knowledge that links the overwork of pregnant mothers not only with a consequent decline in their reproductive capacity but also with Sudden Infant Death Syndrome affecting primarily children under six months of age.) Still, slaveowners faced a real dilemma when it came to making use of the physical strength of women as field-workers and at the same time protecting their investment in women as childbearers. These two objectives—one focused on immediate profit returns and the other on long-term economic considerations—at times clashed, as women who spent long hours picking cotton or harvesting rice or sugar cane, toiling in the fields with heavy iron hoes, and walking several miles a day sustained damage to their reproductive systems immediately before and after giving birth. In the sugar fields of Louisiana and the rice fields of the low country, heat, overwork, poor diet, and chronic illness conspired to limit fecundity levels among women. In these crop cultures, the twin demands of production of the crop and reproduction of the labor force proved mutually exclusive in ways that planters understood but refused to acknowledge in terms of modified work regimens for their female slaves. At the regional level, a decline in slave fertility and an increase in miscarriage rates during the cotton boom years of 1830 to 1860 suggest the heightened demands made upon women, both in terms of increased workloads in the fields and family breakups associated with the massive, forced migration of slaves from the upper to the lower South.²⁵

The auction block revealed in graphic terms the value of enslaved women in both long-range and immediate financial terms. Traffickers in human bodies examined men and women for their “soundness”—that is, their health and ability to work hard. White men poked and prodded the “property” on sale, considering every part of a man, woman, or child—teeth, mouth, eyes, and limbs. Yet a woman’s childbearing capacity set her apart from boys and men, as revealed by the preoccupation of auctioneers and buyers with women’s breasts and genitalia. One seller exhorted potential buyers of the slave Betsy, “There’s a breast for you, good for a round dozen before she’s done child-bearing.” In fact, women’s unique ordeal under slavery derived from their capacity to bear children.²⁶

Masters frequently suspected bondswomen, whether pregnant or not, of shamming illness and fatigue—“play[ing] the lady at your expense,” as one Virginia planter put it. These fears help to account for the reckless brutality with which owners forced women to work in the fields during and after their “confinement”—a period of time that might last as long as four or six weeks, or might be considerably shortened by masters who had women deliver their children between the cotton rows. Indeed, in the severity of punishment they meted out to slaves, owners made little distinction between men and women. Since women attained parity with black men in terms of their productive abilities in the cotton fields, they often received a proportionate share of the whippings. In response to an interviewer’s inquiry, a former Virginia slave declared, “Beat women! Why sure he [master] beat women. Beat women jes lak men. Beat women naked an’ wash ’em down in brine.”²⁷

Agricultural journalists, travelers in the South, and planters themselves loudly condemned overseers—usually illiterate men of the landless class—for their violent ways. Yet despite the inevitable depletion of their workforce from illness and high mortality rates, slaveholders continued to search for overseers who could make the biggest crop. Consequently, overseers drove enslaved women and beat them mercilessly, with some victims achieving respite only in return for sexual submission. To a white man, a black woman was not only a worker who needed prodding, but also a female capable of fulfilling his sexual or aggressive desires. For this reason, a fine line existed between rape and work-related punishment, and an overseer’s lust might yield to sadistic rage. The mother of Minnie Fulkes was suspended from a barn rafter and beaten with a horsewhip “nekkid ’til the blood run down her back to her heels” for fending off the advances of an overseer on a Virginia plantation. In his autobiographical Narrative, Frederick Douglass described a similarly gruesome scene, forever emblazoned on his memory: a master who whipped Douglass’s aunt “upon her naked back until she was literally covered with blood. . . . He would whip her to make her scream, and whip her to make her hush; and not until overcome with fatigue would he cease to swing the blood-clotted cowskin.”²⁸

The whipping of pregnant and nursing mothers—“so that blood and milk flew mingled from their breasts”—revealed the myriad impulses that conjoined to make women especially susceptible to physical abuse. The pregnant woman represented the sexual activity of the enslaved community in general, and (in most but not all cases) that of her husband and herself in particular; she thus symbolized a life in the quarters carried on apart from white interference. One particular method of whipping pregnant slaves was used throughout the South: “They were made to lie face down in a specially dug depression in the ground,” a practice that provided simultaneously for the protection of the fetus and the abuse of its mother. Enslaved women’s roles as workers and as childbearers came together in these trenches, these graves for the living, in southern plantation fields. The uniformity of procedure suggests that the terrorizing of pregnant women was not uncommon, despite the fact that the fertility of these women was crucial to the well-being of every plantation.²⁹

Impatient with slow workers and determined to discipline women whom they suspected of feigning illness, masters and overseers at times indulged in rampages of violence that led to the victim’s death. Former Mississippi slave Clara Young told of her seventeen-year-old cousin, pregnant for the first time and unable to keep up with the rest of the workers in the field. The driver whipped her until she bled; she died the next morning. He had told the other slaves, “If dey said anything ’bout it to de marster, he’d beat them to death, too, so ever’body kep’ quiet an’ de marster neber knowed.” Thus cruelty derived not only from the pathological impulses of a few individuals, but also from a basic premise of the slave system itself: the use of violence to achieve a productive labor force and to terrorize those laborers into a state of compliance.³⁰

Upon first consideration, the frequency with which small boys and girls, pregnant women, mothers of as many as ten children, and grandmothers were beaten bloody seems to indicate that inexplicable sadism pervaded the Old South. In fact, whites often displaced their anger at particularly unruly blacks onto the most vulnerable members of the slave community. Douglass argued that “the doctrine that submission to violence is the best cure for violence did not hold good as between slaves and overseers. He was whipped oftener who was whipped easiest.” Like the mistress who was “afraid of the grown Negroes” and beat the children “all the time” instead, many whites feared the strong men and women who could defend themselves—or retaliate. Historical sources contain innumerable examples of slaves who overpowered a tormenter and beat him senseless or killed him with his own whip. Referring to a powerful black man who “wouldin’ ’low nobody ter whip ’in,” one plantation owner told his overseer, “let ’im ’lone[;] he’s too strong ter be whup’d.” The overseer’s hatred of this enslaved worker was bound to find some other form of release; by abusing a weaker person, he could unleash his aggression and indirectly punish the menacing relative or friend of his victim.³¹

In some cases, a woman would rebel in a manner commensurate with the work demands imposed upon her. In the words of former slaves, “She’d git stubborn like a mule and quit.” Or she took her hoe and knocked the overseer “plum down” and “chopped him right across his head.” When masters and drivers “got rough on her, she got rough on them, and ran away in the woods.” She cursed the man who insisted he “owned” her so that he beat her “till she fell” and left her broken body to serve as a warning to others: “Dat’s what you git effen you sass me.” Nevertheless, a systematic survey of the FWP Slave Narrative Collection reveals that women were more likely than men to engage in “verbal confrontations and striking the master but not running away,” probably because of their family responsibilities. A case study of a Georgia plantation indicates that when women did run away, they usually accompanied or followed spouses already in hiding.³²

Family members who perceived their mothers or sisters as particularly susceptible to abuse in the fields conspired to lessen their workload. Frank Bell and his four brothers, enslaved on a Virginia wheat farm, followed their parents down the long rows of grain during the harvest season. “In dat way one could help de other when dey got behind. All of us would pitch in and help Momma who warn’t very strong.” This overseer discouraged families from working together because he believed “dey ain’t gonna work as fast as when dey all mixed up,” but the black driver, Bell’s uncle, “always looked out for his kinfolk, especially my mother.” James Taliaferro’s father counted the corn rows marked out for Aunt Rebecca, “a short-talking woman that ole Marsa didn’t like,” and alerted her to the fact that her assignment was almost double that given to the other women. Rebecca indignantly confronted the master, who relented by reducing her task, but not before he threatened to sell James’s father for his meddling. On another plantation, the hands surreptitiously added handfuls of cotton to the basket of a young woman who “was small and just couldn’t get her proper amount.” In the low-country Rice Kingdom, where a daily task consisted of hoeing a quarter acre, elderly, ill, and pregnant female rice hands at times relied on family members to help them complete their work, since masters rarely modified tasks to accommodate the health or age of a worker.³³

No enslaved woman exercised authority over enslaved men as part of their work routine, but it is uncertain whether this practice reflected the sensibilities of the slaveowners or of the workers themselves. Women were assigned to teach children simple tasks in the house and field and to supervise other women in various facets of household industry. A master might excuse a woman from the fields and order her to manage a funeral observance, but he would not install her as a driver over people in the field. Many strong-willed women demonstrated that they commanded respect among males as well as females, but more often than not masters perceived this as a negative quality to be suppressed. One Louisiana slaveholder complained bitterly about a particularly “rascally set of old negroes”—“the better you treat them the worse they are.” He had no difficulty pinpointing the cause of the trouble, for “Big Lucy, the leader, corrupts every young negro in her power.” Throughout the South women were held responsible for instigating all sorts of undesirable behavior among their husbands and brothers and sisters. On Charles Colcock Jones’s Georgia plantation, the slave Cash gave up going to prayer meeting and started swearing as soon as he married Phoebe, well-known for her truculence. Apparently few masters attempted to co-opt high-spirited women by offering them positions of formal power over black men.³⁴

Work in the soil thus represented the chief lot of all slaves, female and male. In the Big House, a division of labor based on both gender and age became more apparent. Although women predominated as household workers, few were assigned full-time to this kind of labor, and even those who were remained unspecialized. The size of the plantation determined the degree women could labor exclusively as cleaners, laundresses, cooks, maids, and the caretakers of white children. As few as 5 percent of all antebellum adult slaves served in the elite corps of house servants trained for specific duties. Of course during the harvest season, all slaves, including those in the house, went to the fields to make obeisance to King Cotton. Thus the lines between domestic service and fieldwork blurred during the day and during the lives of enslaved women. Many continued to live in the quarters but rose early in the morning to perform various chores for the mistress—“up wid de fust light to draw water and help as house girl”—before heading for the field. James Claiborne’s mother “wuked in de fiel’ some, an’ aroun’ de house sometimes.” Young girls tended babies and waited on tables until they were sent outside—“mos’ soon’s” they could work—and returned to the house years later, too frail to hoe weeds but still able to cook and sew. The circle of women’s domestic work went unbroken from day to day and from generation to generation.³⁵

Just as southern white men scorned manual labor as the proper sphere of slaves, so their wives strove, often unsuccessfully, to lead a life of leisure within their own homes. Those duties necessary to maintain the health, comfort, and daily welfare of white families were considered less women’s work than black women’s and black children’s work. Slave mistresses supervised the whole operation, but on the largest plantations the sheer magnitude of the responsibility meant that black women had to supply the elbow grease. (Like white men, mistresses often described the work of enslaved women as work they themselves had accomplished. Wrote the mistress Dolly Lunt Burge in her diary, “laid by all of the corn . . . got a bag of cotton out.”) For most enslaved domestics, housework involved hard, steady, often strenuous labor as they juggled the demands made by the mistress and other members of the master’s family. Mingo White of Alabama never forgot that his mother had shouldered a workload “too heavy for any one person.” She served as personal maid to the master’s daughter, cooked for all the hands on the plantation, carded cotton, spun a daily quota of thread, and wove and dyed cloth. Every Wednesday she carried the white family’s laundry three-quarters of a mile to a creek, where she beat each garment with a wooden paddle. Ironing consumed the rest of her day. Like the lowliest field-hand, she felt the lash if any tasks went undone.³⁶

Though mistresses found that their husbands commandeered most bondswomen for fieldwork during the better part of the day, they discovered in black children an acceptable alternative source of labor. Girls were favored for domestic service, but a child’s gender played only a secondary role in determining household assignments. On smaller holdings especially, the demands of housework, like cotton cultivation, admitted no finely honed division of labor, although masters always chose boys to accompany them on hunting trips and to serve as their personal valets. Until puberty, boys and girls shared a great deal in terms of dress and work. All children wore a “split-tail shirt,” a knee-length smock slit up the sides: “Boys and gals all dress jes’ alike . . . They call it a shirt iffen a boy wear it and call it a dress iffen the gal wear it.” After the age of six or so, many received assignments in and around the Big House from one or more members of the master’s family. Mr. and Mrs. Alex Smith, who grew up together, remembered performing different tasks. As a girl, she helped to spin thread and pick seed from cotton and cockle burrs from wool. He had chopped wood, carried water, hoed weeds, tended the cows, and picked bugs from tobacco plants. However, slave narratives contain descriptions of both boys and girls elsewhere doing each of these things. In the barnyard boys and girls alike gathered eggs, plucked chickens, drove cows to and from the stable, and “tended the gaps” (opened and closed gates). It was no wonder that Mary Ella Grandberry, a slave child grown old, “disremember[ed] ever playin’ lack chilluns do today.”³⁷

Parents could hardly voice their objections when their children began their initiation into the arduous world of grown-up labor, and at times mothers and fathers acquiesced willingly, because masters increased accordingly the food allotments of youngsters now forced to work hard. And so black girls and boys followed the mistress’s directions in filling wood boxes with kindling, lighting fires in chilly bedrooms in the morning and evening, making beds, washing and ironing clothes, parching coffee, polishing shoes, and stoking fires while the white family slept at night. They fetched water and milk from the springhouse and meat from the smokehouse. Three times a day they set the table, helped to prepare and serve meals, “minded flies” with peacock-feather brushes, passed the salt and pepper on command, and washed the dishes. They swept, polished, and dusted, served drinks, and fanned overheated visitors. Mistresses entrusted to the care of those who were little more than babies themselves the bathing, diapering, dressing, grooming, and entertaining of white infants. (One little girl, introduced to her new “young mistress,” looked at the child in her mistress’s arms and replied in disbelief, “No, I don’t see no young mistress, that’s a baby.”). As tiny ladies-in-waiting, black children did the bidding of fastidious white women and little girls. Cicely Cawthon, age six when the Civil War began, called herself the mistress’s “little keeper”; “I stayed around, and waited on her, handed her water, fanned her, kept the flies off her, pulled up her pillow, and done anything she’d tell me to do.” Martha Showvely recounted a nightly ritual with her Virginia mistress. After she finished her regular work around the house, the young girl would go to the woman’s bedroom, bow to her, wait for acknowledgment, and then scurry around as ordered, lowering the shades, filling the water pitcher, arranging towels on the washstand, or “anything else” that struck the woman’s fancy. Mary Woodward, only eleven in 1865, was taught to comb her mistress’s hair, lace her corset, and arrange her hoop skirts. At the end of the toilet, Mary was supposed to say “You is served, mistress!” Recalled the former slave, “Her lak them little words at de last.”³⁸

The privileged status and material comfort of mistresses rested squarely on the backs of their female slaves. Nevertheless, the system of bondage ultimately mandated the subordination of all women, both black and white, to masters-husbands whose behavior ranged from benevolent to tyrannical, but always within a patriarchal context. Wealthy southern planters, consumed with the rituals of “honor,” lorded over their wives, children, and enslaved workers—and in some cases these last two groups overlapped. Mary Boykin Chesnut believed that slave mistresses were “abolitionists in their hearts and hot ones too.” But if women’s resentment toward slavery found only indirect, or private, expression, the causes for that resentment are readily apparent. The slaveholders’ insatiable quest for more and better cotton lands mocked their wives’ desire for a more settled, orderly existence. On a more immediate level, slavery rubbed raw the wounds of white women’s grievances in two specific ways—first, it added greatly to their household responsibilities, and second, it often injected irreconcilable conflicts into the husband-wife relationship.³⁹

As they went about their daily chores, mistresses repeatedly complained about the burdens imposed on them; they were, they felt, “slaves of slaves.” To instruct youthful servants in the mysteries of table-setting, fire-stoking, and childcare; to cajole and threaten sullen domestics who persisted in sewing too slowly or carelessly; to keep track of those women assigned to duties in the yard, garden, or chicken house taxed the patience of the most lax white housewives. Impudence and recalcitrance among black women were recurring problems, but even more significantly, enslaved laborers could make a mistress’s life miserable by literally doing nothing. A white woman might banish a particularly stubborn cook to the fields (indeed, some black women calculated upon that response in order to be near their families), only to find herself faced with an even more contentious replacement. Obviously, in these cases, lines of dependency blurred; a mistress might have served in a managerial capacity, but she relied on enslaved cooks and chambermaids to perform a tremendous amount of work that she was unwilling or unable to do herself.⁴⁰

In their role as labor managers, mistresses lashed out at black women not only to punish them, but also to vent their anger on victims even more wronged than themselves. We may speculate that, in the enslaved woman, the mistress saw the source of her own misery, but she also saw herself—a woman without rights or recourse, subject to the whims of an egotistical man. At the same time, some evidence suggests that widowed slaveholding women, under intense pressure to fulfill the traditional male duties of labor managers, were particularly harsh in their dealings with their enslaved subordinates. Regardless of the source, white women’s anxieties frequently spilled over into acts of violence. Severe chastisement did not necessarily guarantee the repentance of the offender. However, patterns of mistress-initiated violence toward black women suggest that such acts were just as often spontaneous outbursts of rage as they were deliberate measures to reform behavior. When punishing slave women for minor offenses, mistresses were likely to attack with any weapon available—knitting needles, tongs, a fork or butcher knife, an ironing board, or a pan of boiling water. In the heat of the moment, white women devised barbaric forms of punishment that resulted in the mutilation or permanent scarring of their female servants.⁴¹

Predictably, jealousy over their spouse’s real or suspected infidelity led many white wives to openly express their anger and shame. Husbands who flaunted their predatory sexual behavior in the slave quarters essentially dared their wives to attack a specific woman or her offspring. When Roswell King’s wife learned that he had fathered children by the slaves Judy and Scylla, she had the two women whipped and sent to the low-country estate’s “penal colony” out of spite. Some promiscuous husbands made no attempts at gentlemanly discretion (or “transcendent silence”) within their own households, but rather actively sought to antagonize their wives. For example, Sarah Wilson, the daughter of an enslaved woman and her white master, remembered that as a child she was “picked on” by the mistress. The white woman chafed under her husband’s taunts; he would order her to “‘let [Sarah] alone, she got big, big blood in her,’ and then laugh.”⁴²

Divorce petitions provide one of the few sources that reveal white wives’ outrage in response to their husbands’ provocative behavior. A witness in a Virginia divorce case in 1848 offered the following testimony: A master one morning told his favorite slave to sit down at the breakfast table “to which Mrs. N [his wife] objected, saying . . . that she (Mrs. N) would have her severely punished.” The husband then replied “that in that event he would visit her (Mrs. N) with a like punishment. Mrs. N then burst into tears and asked if it was not too much for her to stand.” Like at least some other masters, Mr. N freely admitted that his initial attraction to his future wife stemmed from her “large Estate of land and negroes.” (Thus a favorable marriage became one more consideration for the ambitious slaveholder.) However, this particular husband went out of his way to demonstrate his “strong dislike and aversion to the company” of his bride by sleeping with the black woman “on a pallet in his wife’s room” and by frequently embracing her in the presence of his wife. Mrs. N’s first response was to lay “her hands in an angry manner on the said servant.” Her husband, besides threatening his wife with bodily harm, “told her if she did not like his course, to leave his house and take herself to some place she liked better.” Although the outcome of this case is not known, the patriarchalism of the southern legal system dictated that the odds would be against the humiliated Mrs. N. In any case, the considerable dowry she brought to the marriage would remain in the hands of her spouse.⁴³

Scattered evidence from other sources also indicates that slaveholders at times physically abused their wives. While this was hardly normative behavior, it appears to have been a natural by-product of a violent culture. Men who drank freely and whipped their slaves could hardly have been expected to respect the frail flower of white womanhood at all times. But again, the denigration of white women, whether manifested through physical force or in a more subtle, though no less painful way, was part and parcel of slavery. By directing their anger toward enslaved women, white wives achieved a fleeting moment of catharsis. Rarely in American history is there a more striking example of the way in which the patriarchal imperative could turn woman against woman, white against black.⁴⁴

Not surprisingly, then, interviews with former slaves suggest that the advantages of domestic service over fieldwork for women have been exaggerated in accounts written by whites. Fetching wood and water, preparing three full meals a day over a smoky fireplace, or pressing damp clothes with a hot iron rivaled cotton picking as back-breaking labor. Always “on call,” women servants often had to snatch a bite to eat whenever they could, remain standing in the presence of whites, and sleep on the floor at the foot of a mistress’s bed, increasing the chances that they would sooner or later be bribed, seduced, or forced into sexual relations with the master. Peeling potatoes with a sharp knife, building a fire, or carrying a heavy load of laundry down a steep flight of stairs required skills and dexterity not always possessed by every enslaved woman, let alone little boys and girls, and injuries were common. Chastisement for minor infractions came with swift severity; cooks who burned the bread, and children who stole sweets or fell asleep while singing to the baby, suffered all kinds of abuse, from jabs with pins to beatings that left them disfigured for life. The master’s house offered no shelter from the most brutal manifestations of slavery.⁴⁵

For any one or all of these reasons, black women might prefer fieldwork to housework. During his visit to a rice plantation in 1853, Olmsted noted that hands “accustomed to the comparatively unconstrained life of the negro-settlement detest the close control and careful movements required of the house servants.” Marriage could be both a means and an incentive to escape a willful mistress. Jessie Sparrow’s mother wed at age thirteen in order “to ge’ outer de big house. Dat how come she to marry so soon.” Claude Wilson recalled many years later that “his mother was very rebellious toward her duties and constantly harassed the ‘Missus’ about letting her work in the fields with her husband until finally she was permitted to make the change from the house to the fields to be near her man.” Other women, denied an alternative, explored the range of their own emotional resources in attempting to resist petty tyranny; their defiance rubbed raw the nerves of mistresses already harried and high-strung. A few servants simply withdrew into a shell of “melancholy and timidity.”⁴⁶

The dual status of a bondswoman—an enslaved laborer and a female—afforded her master a certain degree of flexibility in formulating her work assignments. When he needed a field-hand, her status as an able-bodied adult took precedence over gender considerations, and she was forced to toil alongside her menfolk. At the same time, the master’s belief that most forms of domestic service required the attentions of a female reinforced the traditional role of woman as household worker. The authority of the master in adhering to or dispensing with a gendered division of labor was absolute, but at times individual women could influence his decisions to some extent. In certain cases, a woman’s preference for either fieldwork or domestic service worked to her advantage. For example, the rebelliousness of Claude Wilson’s mother prompted her removal from the Big House to the field, a change she desired. Similarly, a master might promise a woman an opportunity to do a kind of work she preferred as a reward for her cooperation and diligence. On the other hand, a slave’s misbehavior might cause her to lose a position she had come to value; more than one prized cook or maid was exiled to the fields for “sassing” the mistress or stealing. A system of rewards and punishments thus depended on the preferences of individual men and women, and a servant determined to make life miserable for the family in the Big House might get her way in any case.⁴⁷

Masters and mistresses allocated enslaved women’s labor according to at least three different considerations—the whites’ desire to increase staple-crop production; enlarge their workforce; and provide for the daily maintenance of, and childcare within, their own (white) households. As if it were not difficult enough to balance these competing objectives, the master often found that he and his overseer and wife were operating at cross-purposes when it came to exploiting the labor of black women. Profit-making was a “rational” basis upon which to set enslaved females to work in the fields, but long-term interests related to women’s childbearing capacity at times yielded to the demands of the harvest at hand. Owners and overseers alike might easily slip over the boundary between chastising black women for work-related offenses and terrorizing them as a means of asserting control over the entire slave labor force. Moreover, the sexual exploitation of a black woman could produce concentric rings of bitterness that engulfed the white mistress, resulting in further (though economically “irrational”) abuse of the victim herself. The slave master, armed with both a whip and legal authority over all plantation residents, was able to shield himself from the wellspring of hate that sprang from these peculiarly southern forms of inequality. Yet the slave community too had a claim on the energies of black women, and its own gendered division of labor helped to subvert the authority of the slaveowner in ways that he could not or would not fully understand.

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, enslaved women’s notions of what a woman “ought to be and to do” derived from gender roles shaped by specific ethnic identities. For example, the slaves brought to Virginia included Igbos, Senegambians, and Akans. In Igboland (present-day southeastern Nigeria), women possessed considerable authority in the realms of commerce, defense, and family life. Igbo wives had control over their own farmland, and their community and kinfolk supported them if they sought to remove themselves from abusive spousal relationships. Historians speculate that in the British North American colonies, Igbo women earned a well-deserved reputation for running away, and even committing suicide, because they were imbued with a sense of independence that had been nourished in their homeland.⁴⁹

More generally, throughout the antebellum period, African traditions continued to shape the lives of enslaved women in multiple ways. Descended from peoples of present-day Sierra Leone and Angola, slaves along the Georgia and Sea Island coast tended small garden plots with vegetables native to Africa—groundnuts, benne (sesame), and gourds. Wives and mothers used a traditional mortar and pestle to grind corn at night, an arduous task for women bone-tired from laboring in the fields all day. Techniques related to fishing, basket-weaving, cooking, and mourning the dead all derived from African practices. Men and women spoke a pidgin language, Gullah (in South Carolina) or Geechee (in Georgia), and called everyday items by their African names—seraka for rice cake, juba halta for water bucket, and wah-hoo bahk for slingshot.⁵⁰

Though dimmed by time and necessity, the outlines of African work patterns endured among enslaved laborers. As members of traditional agricultural societies, most African women played a major role in the production of the family’s food as well as in providing basic household services. The gendered division of labor was more often determined by a woman’s childcare and domestic responsibilities than by any presumed physical weakness among females as a group. In some tribes a woman might engage in heavy, monotonous fieldwork as long as she could make provisions for nursing her baby, which often meant keeping an infant with her in the field. She cultivated a kitchen garden that yielded a variety of vegetables consumed by the family or sold at market, and she milked the cows and churned butter.⁵¹

West Africans brought with them competencies and knowledge that slaveowners readily exploited and that enslaved communities depended upon. Many black women had experience spinning thread, weaving cloth, and sewing clothes. Moreover, enslaved laborers often used methods and tools handed down from their ancestors—the mortar and pestle for pounding rice, for example. Whites frequently commented on the ability of women to balance heavy and unwieldy loads on their heads, an African custom. These skills and cultural practices enhanced enslaved communities as well as the master’s overall operation.⁵²

The primary difficulty in generalizing about African women’s part in agriculture stems from the fact that members of West African tribes captured for the North American slave trade came from different hoe-culture economies. Within the geographically limited Niger Delta region, for example, men and women of the Igbo tribe worked together in planting, weeding, and harvesting, while female members of another prominent group, the Yoruba, helped only with the harvest. Throughout most of sub-Saharan Africa (and particularly on the west coast), women had primary responsibility for tilling (though not clearing) the soil and cultivating the crops; perhaps this tradition, combined with work patterns established by white masters in this country, reinforced the blacks’ beliefs that cutting trees and rolling logs was “men’s work.” In any case, it is clear that African women often did fieldwork.⁵³

In the United States, enslaved families assumed diverse forms that were, in many instances, the product of local economic and demographic patterns as much as black people’s inclinations. Some families lived together in nuclear units of husband, wife, and children, while some lived together with kin, fictive kin (persons who had been adopted into an extended family), and other nonblood relations. Most large plantations were self-contained entities, but many slaves lived on holdings connected to other nearby estates through patterns of marriage and nighttime trade and socializing. Young single women lived with their parents, while older single women lived together in some instances. Family structure, though based upon the ideal of the nuclear family, shifted in response to outside pressures (the demands of the slaveowner) and internal needs. Still, some generalizations are warranted: Most enslaved households consisted of cramped quarters for adults and children. Social relations between husband and wife and parents and children were ultimately fragile, reflecting the imperatives of the slave trade and the family life-process of even “benevolent” slaveholders, who routinely willed bequests and gave gifts of enslaved persons to their own children. Indeed, the demand for slaves in the lower South broke apart families living in the upper South. The extraordinarily high mortality rates associated with rice and sugar cultivation produced cultures of grief suffered by wives and mothers in the Georgia and South Carolina low country and the lower Mississippi Valley. The practice of keeping children with their mother meant that many enslaved communities were matrifocal, with women responsible for childcare and the day-to-day chores of family life.⁵⁴

The labors of enslaved women in the quarters constituted additional responsibilities for women already worked to the limits of human endurance in the fields or in the Big House. Indeed, it is difficult to distinguish with any precision work for the master on the one hand and work for one’s family on the other, since basic sustenance activities—cooking, sewing, caring for children, tending gardens—ultimately benefited the owner by maintaining the health and welfare of his bound labor force. Quilting, corn shucking, and other “working socials” also served the interests of the master even as these events provided enslaved men and women, young and old, male and female, with the opportunity to enjoy one another’s company.⁵⁵

Enslaved women of all ages toiled in the quarters. Older women provided a variety of services either communally or centrally for the whole plantation. On smaller farms, a cook and her assistants might prepare one or all of the meals for the other slaves each day except Sunday. Likewise, an elderly woman, with the help of children too young to work in the fields, often was assigned charge of a nursery in the quarters, where mothers left their babies during the day. To keep any number of little ones happy and out of trouble for up to twelve to fourteen hours at a time taxed the patience of the most kindly souls. Enslaved children grew up with a mixture of affection for and fear of the grandmothers who had dished out the licks along with the cornbread and clabber. Other “grannies” usurped the position of the white physician (he rarely appeared in any case); they “brewed medicines for every ailment,” gave cloves and whiskey to ease the pain of childbirth, and prescribed potions for the lovesick. Even a child forced to partake of “Stinkin’ Jacob tea” or a concoction of “turpentine an’ castor oil an’ Jerusalem oak” (for worms) could assert years later that “Gran’mammy was a great doctor,” surely a testimony to her respected position within the slave community if not to the delectability of her remedies.⁵⁶

On many plantations it was customary to release adult women from fieldwork early on Saturday so that they could do the week’s washing. Whether laundering was done in old wooden tubs, iron pots, or a nearby creek with batten sticks, wooden paddles, or washboards, it was a time-consuming and difficult chore. Yet this ancient form of women’s work provided opportunities for socializing “whilst de ’omans leaned over de tubs washin’ and a-singin’ dem old songs.” Years later, Mary Frances Webb remembered wash day—“a regular picnic”—with some fondness; it was a time for women “to spend the day together,” out of the sight and earshot of whites. Yet it is doubtful that these overworked older women shared the little girl’s unalloyed affection for laundry day.⁵⁷

Much of the work black women did for the slave community resembled the colonial system of household industry. Well into the nineteenth century throughout the South, enslaved women continued to spin thread, weave and dye cloth, sew clothes, make soap and candles, prepare and preserve foods, churn butter, and grow food for the family table. They mastered all these tasks with the aid of primitive equipment and skills passed on from grandmothers. Looking back, blacks of both sexes exclaimed over their mothers’ ability to prepare clothes dye from various combinations of tree bark and leaves, soil and berries; make soap out of ashes and animal skins; and fashion bottle lamps from string and tallow. Because of their lack of time and materials, wives and mothers rarely found in these activities an outlet for creative expression, but they did take pride in their resourcefulness, and they produced articles of value to the community as a whole.⁵⁸

Home textile production illustrates the ironies of women’s community labor under slavery, for the threads of cotton and wool bound them together in both bondage and sisterhood. Masters (or mistresses) imposed rigid spinning and weaving quotas on women who worked in the fields all day. For example, many were forced to spin one “cut” (about three hundred yards) of thread nightly, or four to five cuts during rainy days or in the winter. Women of all ages worked together, and boys and girls helped to tease and card wool, pick up the loom shuttles, and knit. In the flickering candlelight, the whir of the spinning wheel and the clickety-clack of the loom played a seductive lullaby, drawing those who were already “mighty tired” away from their assigned tasks.⁵⁹

As the “head spinner” on a Virginia plantation, Bob Ellis’s mother was often sent home from fieldwork early to prepare materials for the night’s work: “She had to portion out de cotton dey was gonna spin an’ see dat each got a fair share.” Later that evening, after supper, as she moved around the dusty loom room to check on the progress of the other women, she would sing:

Keep yo’ eye on de sun,
See how she run,
Don’t let her catch you with your work undone,
I’m a trouble, I’m a trouble,
Trouble don’ las’ always.

Enslaved women’s work for other community members challenged the master’s authority in direct ways. As the persons in charge of food preparation for both whites and their own families, they at times clandestinely fed runaways in an effort to keep them out of harm’s way for as long as possible. One elderly black man recalled that it was not uncommon on his master’s plantation for slaves to go and hide after they were punished, and added, “I’ve known my mother to help them the best she could; they would stay in the woods and come in at night, and mother would give them something to eat.” While the act of cooking might not differ in a technical sense when performed for blacks as opposed to whites, it certainly assumed heightened emotional significance for the black women involved, and, when carried out in such subversive ways, political significance for social relations on the plantation.⁶¹

In the quarters, the communal spirit was but an enlarged manifestation of kin relationships. Indeed, family, kin, and community blended into one another, for blood ties were often supplemented by fictive kin when the slaves defined patterns of mutual affection and obligations among themselves. Moreover, depending upon the size and age of the plantation, slave fertility and mortality rates, and the incidence of “abroad” marriages (formed by spouses who belonged to different masters), kinship might encompass a significant percentage of enslaved workers at any one time. For example, during the twenty-year period before the Civil War, the bondsmen and bondswomen on the Good Hope, South Carolina, plantation were related to three out of ten of their fellows. When calculated on the basis of household linkages, the average individual could find that fully 75 percent of all residences in the quarters “house[d] kin, or the kin of those kin.” These linkages were often more numerous for women than for men, simply because “abroad” marriages, combined with masters’ buying and selling practices, reinforced the matrifocality of family structure. In any case, a woman’s sense of responsibility for her own blood relations often found expression through her service to the community of slaves.⁶²

To varying degrees based on the proclivities of their owner and the type of crop culture in which they labored, enslaved women accumulated property and engaged in petty commodity production. Some planters gave their workers considerable leeway in tending a garden; keeping chickens, pigs, horses, and mules; marketing eggs, honey, and vegetables; and claiming ownership of a variety of things such as boats, animal traps, and fishing tackle. While making quilts and clothing often represented a burden imposed upon women exclusively, many wives and mothers welcomed the opportunity to market goods and foodstuffs, either openly to customers in the marketplaces of nearby towns, or illicitly to poor whites on back roads at night. Some planters, like the Manigaults (father and son) of Argyle Island, in the Savannah River, broke from local tradition and refused their overseers and enslaved laborers alike the privilege of keeping chickens; the planters believed that this type of economic activity caused inevitable squabbles over who owned what. Other owners, however, saw all kinds of work performed by enslaved laborers, including petty commodity production and other forms of enterprise, as both an enhancement of the plantation’s larder and as a means of discouraging men and women from running away and leaving their possessions, variously defined, behind.⁶³

At the same time, gender did matter in the quarters; out of the father-mother, husband-wife nexus sprang the slaves’ beliefs about what men and women should be and do. On smaller holdings, especially, husbands and wives remained separated from each other, leaving women with the bulk of child-rearing obligations. On the largest plantations, the presence of extended kin networks in the quarters blurred lines between nuclear families and their relatives, many of whom lived nearby if not under the same roof. Nevertheless, the family was a common (if not the exclusive) form of cohabitation regardless of the location, size, or economy of a plantation, the nature of its ownership, or the age of its slave community. Because of the omnipresent threat of forced separation by sale, gift, or bequest, these families were not stable. Yet, in the absence of such separations, unions between husbands and wives and parents and children often endured for many years. Households tended to be large; families with eight living children were not uncommon.⁶⁴

Within the quarters, the process of child socialization reflected both the demands made upon the slaves by whites and the values of an emerging African American culture. For most young women, sexual maturity marked a crucial turning point, a time when their life experiences diverged quite explicitly from those of their brothers. Until that point, boys and girls shared a great deal in terms of dress, play, and work. In early adolescence (ages ten to fourteen), a child would normally join the regular workforce in the fields as a half-hand. At that time (or perhaps before), he or she received adult clothing. This rite of passage apparently made more of an impression on boys than girls, probably because pants offered more of a contrast to the infant’s smock than did a dress. Willis Cofer attested to the significance of the change: “Boys jes’ wore shirts what looked lak dresses ’til dey wuz 12 years old and big enough to wuk in de field . . . and all de boys wuz mighty proud when dey got big enough to wear pants and go to wuk in de fields wid grown folkses. When a boy got to be man enough to wear pants, he drawed rations and quit eatin’ out of de trough [in the nursery].”⁶⁵

Whether or not slave girls received any advance warning from female relatives about menarche and its consequences is unknown. Despite the crowding of large families into small cabins, at least some parents managed to maintain a degree of privacy in their own relations and keep a daughter innocent until she acquired firsthand experience. It is possible that a “sizable minority” of girls became sexually active soon after they began to menstruate, though some scholars have argued that the average age of a slave woman at the time of the birth of her first child was twenty or twenty-one, four years after menarche and probably two years after the onset of fertility. The quality of that first sexual experience of course depended upon a number of personal factors, but all of these were overshadowed by the fact that enslaved women were always vulnerable to rape by white men.⁶⁶

For young black people of both sexes, courtship was both a diversion and a delight. Enslaved men formally initiated the courting process. When a young man saw “a likely looking gal,” he found the opportunity to woo her on the way to and from work, in the field behind the overseer’s back (George Taylor was “too crazy ’bout de girls” to keep his mind on cotton chopping), or at Saturday night dances in the quarters. Chivalry covered a broad spectrum of behavior, from refraining from chewing tobacco in the presence of a sweetheart to protecting her from the lash. At times it was difficult for the two to slip away by themselves, and flirting was carried on by pairs in a group setting. Delia Harris remembered a teasing song sung by the young men on the Virginia plantation where she lived. They began with, “Hi, Ho, Johnson gal . . . Johnson gal is de gal fo’ me,” even though there was no such person; “De boys jus’ start dat way to git all de gals to perkin’ up.” Then each youth proceeded to call the name of a favorite, and if any girl was left out she was bound to feel “mighty po’ly ’bout it, too.” Rivalry among suitors—“setting up to a gal and [finding] there was another fellow setting up to her too”—prompted some to obtain magic potions from conjurers and herb doctors. And girls would encourage attention in all the familiar ways. “Gals always tried to fix up fo’ partyin’, even ef dey ain’t got nothin’ but a piece of ribbon to tie in dey hair.” They played coy and “hard to get.”⁶⁷

When this process proceeded naturally and freely, the couple might eventually have a child, or if the girl had already had her first baby (perhaps by a different man), they might marry and settle into a long-lasting monogamous union. Husbands and wives expected each other to be faithful, and the slave community frowned on adultery. Not surprisingly, though, demographic conditions and cultural traditions specific to individual plantations could interfere with this romantic ideal. An unbalanced sex ratio, in addition to the slaves’ exogamous customs, often limited the number of available partners. Moreover, many partners, like the two in Mississippi married in the field between the handles of a plow, were reminded in no uncertain terms that their master considered them primarily as workers, not as lovers or husband and wife. An owner might prohibit a marriage for any reason, and he might forbid a male slave to seek a wife elsewhere, since the children of their marriage would belong not to him but to the wife’s owner. Andy Marion insisted that black men “had a hell of a time gittin’ a wife durin’ slavery. If you didn’t see one on de place to suit you and chances was you didn’t suit them, why what could you do?” He listed the options and stressed that the preferences of a number of parties had to be taken into consideration: “Couldn’t spring up, grab a mule and ride to de next plantation widout a written pass. S’pose you gits your marster’s consent to go? Look here, de gal’s marster got to consent, de gal got to consent, de gal’s daddy got to consent, de gal’s mammy got to consent. It was a hell of a way!”⁶⁸

Whites often intervened in more direct ways to upset the sexual order that black men and women created for themselves, thereby obliterating otherwise viable courtship and marriage practices. That masters failed to engage in systematic or widespread breeding (as evidenced by the relatively late age at which slave women bore their first child, for example) does not negate the obvious conclusions to be drawn from the FWP slave narratives—that white men and women at times seized the opportunity to manipulate slave marital choices, for economic reasons on the one hand, out of seemingly sheer high-handedness on the other.⁶⁹

At times, slaveholders took an unsolicited interest in a slave woman’s love life. “Don’t you ever let me see you with that ape again,” one South Carolina mistress would say to young girls with contempt. “If you cannot pick a mate better than that I’ll do the picking for you.” Masters frequently practiced a form of eugenics by withholding their permission for certain marriages and arranging others. Some enslaved women bitterly rejected the proposed spouse. Rose Williams, forced to live with a man named Rufus because the master wanted them “to bring forth portly chillen,” warned the slave to stay away from her “’fore I busts yous brains out and stomp on dem.” Threatened with a whipping, she finally relented, but never married. Many years later Rose Williams explained, “After what I does for de massa, I’s never wants no truck with any man. De Lawd forgive dis cullud woman, but he have to ’scuse me and look for some others for to ’plenish de earth.” Some masters followed a policy of separating quarreling spouses and then “bestow[ing] them in ‘marriage’ on other parties, whether they chose it or not.” These men and women often distinguished between their current mate and “real” husband or wife who had been taken from them.⁷⁰

Enslaved women’s bodies were the site of conflict between the women themselves and the owners and white physicians who sought to control their reproductive lives. Some white doctors went to extreme lengths to ensure a pregnant woman delivered a healthy baby; medical interventions could consist of a wide range of measures, including enemas, blister plasters, and drugs such as morphine and opium. At the other extreme were women who chewed the herb cotton root bar (gossypium hirsutum), an abortifacient, a practice that was well known throughout the South and one that masters sought to prevent at all costs. The former Texas slave William Byrd recalled that women would at times “slip out at night and get them a lot of cotton roots and bury them under their quarters.” On a Tennessee plantation, according to William Coleman, the master “would almost kill a negro woman if he caught her chewing cotton root, but still that did not do much good[;] they would slip and chew it in spite of all he could do about it.” Mary Gaffney attributed her childlessness to her own use of the herb: “Maser was going to raise him a lot more slaves, but still I cheated Maser, I never did have any slaves to grow and Maser he wondered what was the matter.” Gaffney told her son, “I kept cotton roots and chewed them all the time but I was careful not to let Maser know or catch me.” After she was free, she began to bear children.⁷¹

The economic significance of the American slave population’s natural increase over the years obscures the centrality of children to the slave woman’s physical, emotional, and social existence. Each new birth represented a financial gain for the slaveholder, but in the quarters the baby was a new member of the community. Some young girls had their first child out of wedlock, an event that proved functional to a girl’s family since masters were less likely to sell a woman who early demonstrated her fecundity; young people in their late teens and early twenties were prime candidates for sale if an owner needed the cash. A long-lasting marriage (though not necessarily to the first child’s father) often followed within a couple of years. After that, more children came with sustained regularity. Early in the nineteenth century, in areas of the upper South, fertility levels among slave women neared human capacity. A woman whose fertile years spanned the ages of eighteen to forty-five, for example, might conceive thirteen children and spend ten years of her life pregnant and almost the whole period nursing one child after another.⁷²

Children were a source of a mother’s pain as well as her joy. Extraordinary rates of slave infant mortality (twice that of whites in 1850) meant that many women regularly suffered the loss of a baby before or after its birth. Even more dramatically, on disease-ridden low-country rice plantations, infant mortality rates could reach as high as 90 percent; there, only one out of ten babies lived to see his or her first birthday. (Rice culture was especially hazardous to infants, who succumbed to gastrointestinal diseases and waterborne ailments.) If slaveholders faced a dilemma when they tried to maximize women’s productive and reproductive abilities simultaneously, mothers suffered the emotional and physical consequences. New mothers had to walk long distances from field to nursery to feed their infants, and their overheated milk provided inadequate and unhealthy nourishment. For these and other reasons, in the South as a whole, fewer than two out of three black children survived to the age of ten in the years between 1850 and 1860; the life expectancy at birth for males and females was only 32.6 and 33.6 years, respectively. Excessive childbearing, malnutrition, and heavy manual labor left many women weak and susceptible to illness. A slave mother’s love protected her children only up to a point: “Many a day my ole mama has stood by an’ watched massa beat her chillun ’till dey bled an’ she couldn’ open her mouf.” The reality or threat of separation from their families (a fact of slave life that became even more frequent during the late antebellum period) caused some women to descend into madness, the cries of “Take me wid you, mammy” echoing in their ears, while others donned a mask of stoicism to conceal their inner pain.⁷³

Men shared the obligations of family life with women. In denying slaves the right to own property, make a living for themselves, participate in public life, or protect their children, the institution of bondage deprived black men of access to the patriarchy in the larger economic and political sense. Nevertheless, whether or not they cohabited on the same plantation, men and women worked together to support the husband’s and father’s role as provider and protector. In the evenings and on Sundays, men collected firewood; made shoes; wove baskets; constructed beds, tables, chairs, and animal traps; and carved butter paddles and ax handles. Other family members appreciated a father’s skills; recalled Molly Ammonds, “My pappy made all de furniture dat went in our house an’ it were might’ good furniture too,” and Pauline Johnson echoed, “De furn’chure was ho-mek, but my daddy mek it good an’ stout.” Husbands provided necessary supplements to the family diet by hunting and trapping quails, possums, turkeys, rabbits, squirrels, and raccoons, and by fishing. They often assumed responsibility for cultivating the tiny household garden plots allotted to families by the master. Some craftsmen, like Bill Austin’s father, received goods or small sums of money in return for their work on nearby estates; Jack Austin, “regarded as a fairly good carpenter, mason, and bricklayer,” was paid in “hams, bits of cornmeal, cloth for dresses for his wife and children, and other small gifts; these he either used for his small family or bartered with other slaves.”⁷⁴

These familial duties also applied to men who lived apart from their wives and children, even though they were usually allowed to visit only on Saturday night and Sunday. Lucinda Miller’s family “never had any sugar, and only got coffee when her father would bring it to her mother” during his visits. The father of Hannah Chapman was sold to a nearby planter when she was very small. Because “he missed us and us longed for him,” she said many years later, he tried to visit his family under the cover of darkness whenever possible. She noted, “Us would gather ’round him an’ crawl up in his lap, tickled slap to death, but he give us dese pleasures at a painful risk.” If the master should happen to discover him, “us would track him de nex’ day by de blood stains,” she remembered.⁷⁵

Hannah McFarland of South Carolina recounted the time when the local slave patrol attempted to whip her mother, “but my papa sho’ stopped dat,” she said proudly. Whether or not he was made to suffer for his courage is unknown; however, the history of slavery is replete with accounts of husbands who intervened, at the risk of their own lives, to save wives and children from violence at the hands of whites. But in a more general sense, the sexual violation of black women by white men rivaled the separation of families as the foremost provocation injected into black family life by slaveholders. It is impossible to document with any precision the frequency of these encounters; the 10 percent of the slave population classified as “mulatto” in 1860 provides a very conservative estimate of the incidence of rape or concubinage on southern plantations. Scholars debate whether sexual relations between a master and an enslaved woman could ever yield true affection for either party, or whether the unequal power relations by definition precluded such affection. Yet it is true that the pervasive resentment on the part of black women as well as men, who knew that random or systematic assaults were always a possibility, cannot be quantified in any meaningful way. A women’s acquiescence in the sexual advances of an overseer or owner might offer a modicum of protection for herself or her family—especially when a master vowed to “put her in his pocket” (that is, sell her) or whip her if she protested. Nevertheless, black women often struggled to resist, and their fathers, sons, and husbands often struggled to protect them.⁷⁶

Regardless of the circumstances under which their womenfolk were sexually abused, black men reacted with deep humiliation and outrage, a reaction that at least some slaveholders intended to provoke. One Louisiana white man would enter a slave cabin and tell the husband “to go outside and wait ’til he do what he want to do.” The black man “had to do it and he couldn’t do nothing ’bout it.” (This master “had chillen by his own chillen.”) Other husbands ran away rather than witness such horrors. Recalled one elderly former slave, “What we saw, couldn’t do nothing ’bout it. My blood is bilin’ now at the thoughts of dem times.” It would be naive to assume that the rape of a black wife by a white man did not adversely affect the woman’s relationship with her husband; her innocence in initiating or sustaining a sexual encounter might not have shielded her from her husband’s wrath. The fact that in some slave quarters mulatto children were scorned as the master’s offspring indicates that the community in general hardly regarded this form of abuse with equanimity; hence the desperation of the young slave wife described by an FWP interviewee who feared that her husband would eventually learn of her ordeal at the hands of the master.⁷⁷

The black man’s role as protector of his family would find explicit expression in postemancipation patterns of work and family life. Until that time, the more freedom the slaves had in determining their own activities, the more clearly emerged a distinct division of labor between the sexes. During community festivities like log rollings, rail splittings, wood choppings, and corn shuckings, men performed the prescribed labor while women cooked the meals. At times, male participants willingly “worked all night,” for, in the words of one, “We had the ‘Heavenly Banners’ (women and whiskey) by us.” A limited amount of primary evidence indicates that men actively scorned women’s work, especially cooking, housecleaning, sewing, washing clothes, and intimate forms of childcare like bathing children and picking lice out of their hair. Some slaveholders devised forms of public humiliation that capitalized on men’s attempts to avoid these tasks. One Louisiana cotton planter punished slave men by forcing them to wash clothes; he also made chronic offenders wear women’s dresses in an effort to shame them in public.⁷⁸

If gender mattered to the division of labor within the slave quarters, so too did age. The overwhelming youth of the general slave population between 1830 and 1860 (more than half of all enslaved persons were under twenty years of age) meant that most plantations had only a few considered elderly—the 10 percent over fifty years of age. For antebellum slaves, these revered (and sometimes feared) women served as a tangible link with the African past. Interviewed by a Federal Writers Project worker in 1937, a Mississippi-born former slave, James Brittian, recalled his own “grandma Aunt Mary” who had lived for 110 years. A “Molly Gasca [Madagascar?] negro,” she was plagued by a jealous mistress because of her striking physical appearance: “Her hair it was fine as silk and hung down below her waist.” Ned Chaney’s African-born Granny Silla (she was the oldest person anyone knew, he thought) commanded respect by virtue of her advanced age and her remarkable healing powers: “Ever’body set a heap of sto’ by her. I reckon, because she done ’cumullated so much knowledge an’ because her head were so white.” When Granny Silla died, her “little bags” of mysterious substances were buried with her because no one else knew how to use them. Yet Chaney’s description of his own mother, a midwife and herb doctor, indicates that she too eventually assumed a position of authority within the community.⁷⁹

As a little girl in Georgia, Mary Colbert adored her grandmother, a strong field-hand, “smart as a whip.” “I used to tell my mother that I wished I was named Hannah for her, and so Mother called me Mary Hannah,” she recalled. Amanda Harris, interviewed in Virginia when she was ninety years old, looked back to the decade before the war, when her grandmother was still alive: “Used to see her puffin’ on dat ole pipe o’ her’n, an’ one day I ast her what fun she got outen it. ‘Tain’t no fun, chile,’ she tole me. ‘But it’s a pow’ful lot o’ easment. Smoke away trouble, darter. Blow ole trouble an’ worry ’way in smoke.” Amanda started smoking a pipe shortly before her grandmother died, and in 1937 she declared, “Now dat I’m as ole as she was I know what she mean.” In the quiet dignity of their own lives, these grandmothers preserved the past for future generations of African American women.⁸⁰

The formal task of spiritual leader remained a man’s job, and women could not aspire to the title or recognition that accompanied the preacher’s role. At the same time, women, especially older ones, exercised power through a variety of channels. Well into the antebellum period, elderly persons who had survived the horrific Middle Passage upheld Muslim traditions and religious practices. Midwives delivered babies and interpreted the signs that accompanied their birth—twins, seventh children, infants born with a caul. Plantation “doctresses” relied on a combination of herbs and other natural remedies, and liberal doses of social psychology, to treat all manner of ills. As conjurers, they used spells to ward off “hants” (ghosts and spirits) and witches, and insisted that couples intending to marry receive their permission even before they consulted the parents. Harriet Ware, a northern teacher assigned to the South Carolina Sea Islands, reported in 1862, “‘Learning’ with these people I find means a knowledge of medicine, and a person is valued accordingly.” Many older women practiced the healing arts in their combined role of midwife, root doctor, healer, and conjurer. By interpreting dreams and strange occurrences, they brought the real world closer to the supernatural realm and offered spiritual guidance to the ill, the troubled, and the lovelorn. Slaveholders paid grudging respect to the influence of enslaved women by complaining about them. Writing of the low-country antebellum Rice Kingdom, Charles C. Jones Jr. noted the “difficulty and annoyance” caused by what he termed “the interference of these old negro women—conjurers—who, in plying their secret trade, gave rise to disturbances and promoted strife and disquietude.”⁸¹

Within well-defined limits, enslaved men and women created—or preserved—an explicit gendered division of labor based on their own preferences. Husbands and wives and fathers and mothers had reciprocal obligations toward each other. Without a legal right to private property, men lacked the means to achieve economic superiority over their wives, one of the major sources of inequality in the (“free”) sexual order. But if married couples shared duties related to household maintenance and community survival, they were nonetheless reduced to a state of powerlessness that rendered virtually meaningless the concept of equality as it applies to traditional marital relations, especially since black women were so vulnerable to attacks by white men.

Moreover, task allocation among enslaved workers themselves revealed a tension between two different attitudes toward “women’s work.” The first involved a profound respect for the labor that women did and their ability to meet the demands imposed upon them by competing parties. For example, in an 1840 speech before a northern audience, John Curry, a former slave who grew up in North Carolina, recalled that “My mother’s labor was very hard.” He went on to outline her daily responsibilities in the cow pen (she milked fourteen cows) in addition to caring for the children of mothers who worked in the fields. She also cooked for the slaves on the plantation, and did all the ironing and washing for the master’s household as well as for her own husband and seven children (including three orphans she had adopted). At night, she “would find one boy with his knee out, a patch wanting here, and a stitch there, and she would sit down by her lightwood fire, and sew and sleep alternately.” Echoes of this type of appreciation for women’s work are found throughout the slave narratives, work recounted in loving detail by both sons and daughters.⁸²

Although men might regard women’s domestic labor as intrinsically valuable, this type of activity was nevertheless labeled “women’s work” on the assumption that it was the special province of females. In this sense, black women and men performed complementary functions whenever possible within their own “sphere” of socially defined responsibilities. Yet a husband was not “equally” willing to wash clothes compared to a mother’s “willingness” to gather firewood in the absence of her spouse. This twin impulse to honor the hardworking wife and mother and relegate “grannies” to positions of informal influence would help to shape the internal structure of the freed community after the Civil War.

In 1860, a quarter of a million southern blacks were free, compared to the nearly 4 million in bondage. This former figure had declined from 3 percent of the black population in 1830 to 1.5 percent in 1860. Most southern free people of color lived in cities, and some owned modest businesses—the men as draymen or butchers, the women as bakers, seamstresses, and caterers, and as peddlers of produce, brooms, and prepared foods. A handful of these entrepreneurs even owned enslaved workers, though it is difficult to tell whether individual holdings constituted exploited labor forces or shelters for relatives who would otherwise be forced to move out of state once they became free. The wives of the most successful of these entrepreneurs and artisans often dressed and conducted themselves in ways that alarmed whites determined to see all blacks as members of a dependent and impoverished class of people. In some places, black women were able to afford fancy clothes and expensive carriage rides; the Reverend Nehemiah Adams, a northern clergyman, visited Savannah in 1854 and commented on the elegant clothing of the city’s black church congregants, musing about “how impossible it must soon become to treat with indignity” any enslaved person who dressed so well. Yet Adams was mistaken in minimizing the vulnerability of even those black women arrayed in finery.⁸⁴

In southern cities, black women led religious and missionary societies sponsored by independent so-called African churches, as well as benevolent and burial societies that remained largely out of the eye of white people. Some free women of color taught clandestine schools for black children. Yet even they remained closely monitored by whites; most cities required all free people of color to have a “guardian,” a white man responsible for their good behavior. Though all black women in the urban South suffered under caste legislation intended to keep blacks from prospering, or learning to read or write, many managed to carve out for themselves lives that were less constricted than those of their sisters on the countryside. A rich associational life, marked by late-night parties and fancy balls no less than Sunday schools, provided urban women with a more varied existence than that of enslaved plantation workers.⁸⁵

In the North, most individual state emancipation laws had eliminated bondage by 1830, though some states eliminated slavery completely only gradually—Pennsylvania not until 1847, for example. Some black women toiled in rural areas as field-hands and domestics; those in the dairy shops of Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island, were unusual by the virtue of their regimented labor—they produced a quota of rounds of cheese daily. By 1860, six out of ten of all northern blacks lived in cities. During this period of rapid industrialization, when textile and shoe mills sprang up along the rushing rivers of New England and the Mid-Atlantic, black women remained confined largely to domestic work, but laboring at a number of different tasks. Enterprising souls, such as Elleanor Eldrige, born free in Rhode Island in 1785, and the African-born Chloe Spear of Boston, pieced together a living through a patchwork of jobs—taking in boarders, working as a nurse or laundress, weaving, spinning, or finding work in a hotel or with a private family. Married women were forced to assume more and more responsibility for breadwinning as their menfolk faced increasingly dire employment possibilities. Traditionally, northern black men had worked as laborers, cartmen, mariners, shoemakers, waiters, barbers, cooks, blacksmiths, tailors, chimney sweeps, and nightmen; but between 1840 and 1860, 4.3 million Irish and German immigrants to the United States began to make inroads into some of these jobs—especially those of waiters and barbers, rendering entire black communities more vulnerable than ever before. In 1848, Frederick Douglass took note of the legal liabilities that transcended region and oppressed black men and women, enslaved and free, north and south: “In the Northern states we are not slaves to individuals, not personal slaves, yet in many respects we are slaves of the community . . . It is more than a figure of speech to say that we are, as a people, chained together.”⁸⁶

Fugitives from slavery such as Frederick Douglass, William and Ellen Craft, and many others found a public voice by writing and by speaking in public against slavery; their firsthand accounts of life under bondage transfixed northern whites and in the process transformed the abolitionist movement. Harriet Jacobs escaped from bondage in North Carolina in 1842, when she was twenty-nine years old; abused by her master, she hid in her grandmother’s tiny attic for seven long years. In the North, she electrified readers of the New York Tribune with a serialized account of her dramatic journey, an account that was published in book form (under the pseudonym Linda Brent), in 1861. In 1851, Sojourner Truth, born Isabella Baumfree, a slave, in New York in 1757, addressed the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, and urged her listeners to consider the way that racial and gender ideologies oppressed black women:

Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that ’twixt the Negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what’s all this here talking about?

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne five children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?

In other ways too black women bridged the divide between North and South, slavery and freedom, by their defiant actions that challenged the very foundations of bondage. The fugitive Harriet Tubman put her life on the line by returning to her native Eastern Shore of Maryland at least a dozen times and bringing out of slavery up to seventy individuals, many of them extended kin. In the late 1850s, the abolitionist John Brown sought her good counsel as he planned an attack on a federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia; by that time Tubman was well known for her skills as a scout and her intimate knowledge of the eastern seaboard, from Virginia to Canada. As a group, northern black women helped organize the Free Produce movement, which urged northern consumers to refrain from buying products, including cotton, produced by enslaved workers. Boston and New York were home to substantial numbers of southern runaways. Together with white activists, most notably Angelina and Sarah Grimke, the daughters of a wealthy South Carolina planter (and the stepsiblings of some of their father’s slaves), the fugitives highlighted the routine sexual abuse of enslaved women, and the routine separation of enslaved families, as the most outrageous of slavery’s many horrors.⁸⁸

Ultimately these antislavery appeals, whether to reason or to sentiment, moved few white Americans. By 1860 slavery as an institution was well entrenched in the South, and vital to northern manufacturing interests. Enslaved workers represented fully one-third of the South’s total population, and in six lower-South states, the percentage of slaves ranged from 44 percent of the population (in Florida and Georgia) to 57 percent in South Carolina. Because slaveholders valued the reproduction of the plantation workforce just as highly as increases in their annual crop (in fact, the two objectives were inseparable), it would be difficult to argue that racial ideologies superseded gender ideologies as an ordering principle for this peculiar society. Rather than attempt to determine which was more oppressive, we would do well to remember that the two systems shared a dense, common tangle of roots, and that together they yielded bitter fruit in the antebellum South. Black women bore witness to that bitterness in ways different from those of black men on the one hand and white women on the other.

In their devotion to family ties—a devotion that encompassed kin and ultimately the whole slave community—black women and men affirmed the value of group survival over the slaveholders’ base financial and political considerations. Black family life, as the cornerstone of African American culture, combined an African heritage with American exigencies; and within the network of kin relations, black women and men sought to express their respect for one another, for the community on a single plantation or on neighboring plantations, even as they resisted white intrusions.

The work of black women helped to preserve that community. Janie Scott’s admiration for her mother, who was “much of a woman,” sustained her through the conflagration of civil war, for freedom demanded of black women the same kind of strength and resourcefulness they and their mothers had demonstrated under slavery. As workers, many freedwomen would still have to pick cotton and wash dishes for whites. Yet as wives, mothers, workers, church members, and leaders, they would help to define the priorities of a freedpeople—or rather, affirm the priorities they had developed under slavery—and thereby transform the southern society and economy, and all of American society, during the postbellum years.

WORKING FOR WHITES: ENSLAVED WOMEN’S LABOR AS A PROBLEM OF PLANTATION MANAGEMENT

WORKING FOR EACH OTHER: ENSLAVED WOMEN’S LABOR IN THE CONTEXT OF FAMILY AND COMMUNITY LIFE

PLACES AND PEOPLE THAT DEFIED THE RULE OF PLANTATION SLAVERY