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By Root 445 0

Carolina, where participants from historic properties around the country prepared dishes in the hearths there. But hearth cooking for fun and instruction in jeans is a very different prospect from cooking daily in eighteenth-century conditions. I’d never really thought about the weight of the utensils and the danger involved in cooking near open fire while wearing highly flammable ground-dragging garments. The museum brought the heat, the smoke, the lack of ventilation, and the sheer physical strength needed to haul water and wood vividly to life for one used to piped-in water and electric lights. It was a revelation, a small moment that transformed my ideas about the joys of hearth cooking forever.

For most of the early history of the country, whether in Big House kitchens, on small farms, or in the colonial taverns and alehouses, all cooks worked in dangerous conditions that are inconceivable to the modern cook. That peril was multiplied when the cook was enslaved and subject not only to the physical hazards but also to the whims and fits of temper of mistresses and owners. Yet throughout the colonial history of the country, many of the hands that turned the spits in the massive hearths and brought the tankards filled with ale to the lusty patriots and founding fathers were black. Their fortitude under the extraordinary pressure of the developing slave system that was turning their dreams of freedom and progress into ashes, like those in the hearths they tended, was nothing short of amazing.

Being black became unmitigated hell in the final years of the seventeenth century in the fledgling colonies. Blacks in the northern colonies that would become the United States lived a long, tortuous slide from can to can’t as the slave system became entrenched and the colony increased its dependence on slave labor. In the early years of settlement, a system of indentured work with a view to eventual freedom offered the hope of being able to build a life in the new land to blacks and whites alike. People signed up for a limited time of servitude, and when it was up, they were free to begin their lives anew. However, by the end of the 1600s, for most of those of African descent that hope had died. Indenture gradually evolved into enslavement, and by the end of the century, virtually all of the enslaved were black or Native American. The horrors of race-based slavery became entrenched as the American way of life, and soon it was extended to include unborn children and all future generations.

Color had become the key for enslavement in the American colonies, which were expanding their southern boundaries beyond Virginia and the Chesapeake. As new settlers arrived from the more established British Caribbean colonies to create virtual fiefdoms for themselves in the Carolinas, they brought their enslaved Africans. Soon, a darker skin came to mean a slave. Reverend Morgan God-wyn could decry in 1680 that “these two words, Negro and Slave” have “by custom grown Homogeneous and Convertible.” More blacks kept arriving. Many of the new black slaves came via the Caribbean, however an increasing number were “saltwater slaves”—a term designating those who came directly from the African continent and who had survived the Middle Passage. Both would become the backbone of the Northern American colonies’ workforce. Their labor was evident everywhere, from the taverns and eateries of Williamsburg and other colonial towns to, increasingly, the agriculture of the colonies. Soon, north and south, no self-respecting persons of means were without a workforce of black slaves who toiled for their benefit.

At no time was colonial life monolithic. In their early years, the American colonies by no means resembled the map of the thirteen colonies that we envision today. Then, the eastern seaboard of the United States was divided between the British in New England, the Dutch in what would become New York and New Jersey, the British again from Pennsylvania through the Carolinas, the Spanish in Florida, and the French in the Louisiana Territory. The European