First Generations by Carol Berkin

Author:Carol Berkin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466806115

Many slave quarters were bordered by plots of corn and tobacco and by gardens, all cultivated in the residents’ limited free time. Using Sundays and the rare holidays they were granted (including, after 1776, Independence Day), Chesapeake slaves made this small-scale agriculture an integral part of community life. In the Piedmont area, historians have traced the rise of an internal eco-omy, built upon the raising and trading of surplus food and livestock from the quarters, upon hunting and foraging, and upon materials stolen, or liberated, from the master’s stock of supplies. Slaves on a plantation traded with each other, but they also traded with peddlers traveling through the Chesapeake region, with neighboring plantation workers, and with white masters or mistresses who found it easier to purchase pies or chickens from their slaves than to compete with them in these areas. Slave women played active parts in expanding and sustaining this internal economy, raising and selling poultry and eggs, baked goods, garden products, and handmade baskets. Thus, although few slave women in the pre-Revolutionary Chesapeake were employed in housewifery by their mistresses, they developed a repertoire of household production skills within their own community economy. The records of one general store in Orange County, Virginia, show that by the 1780s, slave women were able to purchase kerchiefs and scarves, calico cloth, ribbons, thread, and even tableware with money made from production and trade.

Whatever initial reaction Piedmont masters may have had to the rise of this internal economy, they soon realized its benefits. The crops produced in the quarter allowed a master to reduce rations for his labor force, and in many cases the yield from slave gardens and fields helped reduce the pilferage of storerooms and the theft of livestock. Masters could demand that older slaves, no longer valuable in the fields, provide for themselves by gardening, farming, or keeping chickens. These masters saw the internal economy as a means to shift the burden of subsistence onto the slaves. For slave women and men, however, it was a means to carve out more autonomous space in their constricted world. This secondary, or internal, economy, in which women played active roles, had the potential to strengthen the slave community, as much because slaves established its protocols and regulated its operation as because of the material benefits it provided. Working collectively and cooperatively, slaves were able to carve out other autonomous realms. Slave midwives and slave doctors shaped the medical care of the quarter, and slave communities established their own burial societies and burial rituals. Slave women and their husbands also took the initiative in naming their children, using naming patterns to reinforce the kinship structures their community had developed. Mothers named their sons and daughters for their own brothers and sisters and for their husband’s siblings. By naming sons for their fathers, slave mothers attempted to reinforce the most often violated and thus most fragile link in the slave family chain: the paternal line.

Physical and psychological distance from the master and from his white culture surely aided the development of a slave culture.

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