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By Root 489 0

North and South, there was no monolithic South even in the antebellum period. The region was divided into upland and coastal, and then subdivided further into the Up South, the Caroli-nas and Georgia, the Deep South, and the Gulf South. The mountainous spine of the Appalachians further bisected the region and was an area in which slaveholding was minimal. Each area had a unique experience with enslavement. Our blue-versus-gray vision of slavery is further complicated by popular imagery of white-columned plantation houses manned by a flotilla of enslaved blacks hauling and toting and doing the bidding of Massa and Miz Ann. In fact, even in slaveholding areas, in many cases hard-pressed whites had only a few hapless slaves; and in more than a few cases, owners were apt to be working in the fields alongside their one or two slaves. Less than one quarter of white Southerners held slaves, and half of those held fewer than five. Only I percent of Southerners owned more than one hundred, and a minuscule number owned more than five hundred and had the large spreads that we imagine; they lived mainly in South Carolina, Georgia, and Louisiana. In 1860, the average number of slaves residing together was about ten. These realities, though, in no way mitigate the horror of enslavement. “Plantation,” in most cases in the South, was just a fancy word for the farm on which slaves toiled for their masters.

The work done by the enslaved was mainly agricultural and varied from locale to locale. Different crops—tobacco, rice, indigo, cotton, and sugar—produced different working environments, and the enslaveds’ daily tasks and degree of autonomy varied from crop to crop. In Virginia and the Upper South the crop tended to be tobacco or the Tidewater triad of corn, wheat, and tobacco. Coastal South Carolina and Georgia had rice-based economies where slaves had a particular task to perform, and once it was completed, their time was their own. As slavery progressed from North to South and onward toward the West, it became even more arduous. J. S. Buckingham, an Englishman who journeyed through the slave states of the South in 1839, recounted,

All the slaves have a great horror of being sent to the south or the west,—for the farther they go in either of these directions, the harder they are worked, and the worse they are used.

The cotton kingdoms of the Deep South were the ones that have provided us with most of our mental images. The sugar empires of the Gulf Coast offered different systems based on Caribbean models, in which life was cheap and the enslaved were often simply worked to death then replaced. What ever the crop or the system, all were horrific in that the enslaved, whether under a beneficent or a harsh master, had no control over their own destinies. A gambling debt to be paid, a wedding in the master’s family, a bequest given, or something as simple as an argument or a whim could result in a slave family being broken up forever.

Slaves, what ever their number in a house hold, were omnipresent, and they were dependent on their master for the essentials of life: housing, clothing, and especially food. Throughout the period of enslavement, discussion raged about how to feed the slaves. As the agricultural backbone of the region, the slaves not only produced the cash crops; they also were tasked with growing and processing most of the food that was consumed by all on the plantations, whether white or black. Feeding the enslaved, however, had of necessity to be an economically viable pro cess. Rations had to be sufficiently nourishing to allow the enslaved to perform their tasks but could not be so lavish as to be unprofitable. In some cases, however, rations were so parsimonious as to be tantamount to starvation. On plantations of some size, there were basically two different systems of food distribution: one in which the enslaved were fed from a centralized kitchen somewhere on the plantation, and another wherein the enslaved were given their rations on a schedule and allowed to prepare them in their own cabins or within what ever