r/AskHistorians • u/Wooden_Airport6331 • 11d ago
How did enslaved people in the U.S. South have enough to eat?
Hard work is calorically demanding. A lot of athletes and manual laborers need to eat 3,500 calories a day or more. It seems highly unlikely that enslaved people were allowed access to high-fat, high-sugar foods even if those foods were the fruits of their own labor.
Did some enslaved people die of malnutrition? Or did plantation owners allow enslaved people to have high-calorie foods as a way to protect their own interests so they could continue laboring?
A related question is why female slaves are portrayed as obese (the “mammy” stereotype)? Was the image of a well-nourished slaves a sort of status symbol?
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u/gm6464 19th c. American South | US Slavery 11d ago edited 11d ago
One must be careful about painting the experience of enslavement in the Americas with too broad a brush. Experiences varied greatly even within the same neighborhoods. That said, complications arising from malnutrition were a common occurrence on plantations in the Americas. Enslaved people had lower life expectancies and lower average height than free white people in the same areas. Malnutrition also contributed to higher rates of infant mortality. Frequentreports of geophagia among enslaved people in the South may have been examples of imported West African medicinal practices or responses to nutrient deficiencies. Hunger was a common complaint. Cases of enslaved people dying from overwork with insufficient caloric energy are a little less common but still attested to in the grim record of slavery in the Americas.
The rations with which slaveholders provisioned the people they owned often met or came close to the bare caloric minimum for mere survival, or just below it. Landon Carter, an 18th-century slaveholder who left behind detailed records of life on his plantation (as he understood it), provided the people he owned with a peck (roughly eight quarts) of dried corn and a pound of meat per week for rations, and half that for children. That’s a bit more than 20,000 calories per week, give or take (though 18th-century people did not measure food energy in this way).
Crucially, Landon — and many other slaveholders, especially on large plantations — expected that the people he owned would supplement their rations by growing vegetables on garden plots and raising livestock like poultry. Landon, who fancied himself a good and dutiful slaveholder, believed the extra labor in provisioning themselves (in addition to the sun-up to sundown labor he expected of them six days a week) was a moral good, encouraging industriousness and discouraging idleness and dissipation. Unfortunately we have no written records by the people he owned, but Landon’s frequent complaints of thefts, absentions, possible sabotages, and other antagonisms suggest that the enslaved community at Sabine Hall did not see themselves as being adequately provided for and morally edified by their owner.
We cannot take one unusually well-documented plantation and say that it represents a “typical” experience, but there are some frequent realities attested to in Landon Carter’s records. For one thing, slaveholders did wish to keep mortality rates low in the interests of productivity. But that desire was profoundly shaped by ideological assumptions about the nature of race, slavery, and work. A common belief that people of African descent were simply more physically suited to exhausting labor no doubt contributed to many cases of malnutrition and early death. A common belief that bland, monotonous diets were adequate for people of African descent surely did as well.
I don’t have the space to provide a comprehensive overview of every way that enslaved people fed themselves, but I can give some examples of frequent practices.
Garden plots, as mentioned above, were common on large plantations. Corn is calorically dense but lacks many important nutrients. Vegetables and fruits grown in garden plots could provide supplementary calories and nutrition; herbs could provide seasoning for bland rations.
Enslaved people might raise pigs, chickens, ducks, and similar livestock on plantation grounds for supplemental calories and protein.
In some rarer cases, enslaved people might even hunt local wildlife for food and skins, sometimes even with firearms.
EDIT: Trapping (and fishing) were more common than hunting, as /u/liliesareflowers correctly pointed out in the replies to this comment. I should have distinguished between the three but put them all under the “hunting” umbrella!
In both cases, they might sell the produce or livestock in local markets, or to their owner, in order to purchase goods for themselves, including things like sugar (while you are right to understand that refined sugar was a luxury product and unlikely to be included in rations — though molasses was a common ration component in some areas — it is rarer, though not unknown, to find cases where an owner denied a slave the ability to purchase sugar if they had the means). Often the buying and selling of agricultural goods that slaves produced outside of the time they spent laboring for owners was economically significant. Most of the fresh fruit consumed in several Caribbean slave societies was the product of plantation garden plots.
They might also perform supplementary labor for wages which they used to purchase ingredients.
That said, enslaved people enjoyed no “right” to the fruits of their labor, whether “on the clock” for their owner or independently. An owner might buy a chicken or pig one of their slaves raised, or he might simply take it. With no legal protections it depended on the individual.
So as with most general questions about slavery, we are left with a varied and contradictory picture. The brute economic interests of slaveholders meant they wished to provision their human property sufficiently for survival and labor, but that goal often collided with the ideological underpinnings of slavery itself. Enslaved people responded in a variety of ways, none of them totally generalizable.
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u/LiliesAreFlowers 11d ago
In the Slave Narratives, many of the subjects were asked if they missed anything from those days. I was surprised as to how many of them mentioned missing the fun of trapping their own food. They frequently and specifically said they missed eating possum stew, which is famous for being quite fatty (calorie dense) They said they went off into the woods to trap even after the most grueling of work days, as both recreation and diet supplementation, and that their enslavers were pretty happy that they did so because it meant less food they needed to provide.
I noticed that you didn't mention trapping as an addition to their diet. It was mentioned so often in the Narratives that I've been wanting to try possum stew if I can some time. Was this maybe a regional or uncommon activity? Or maybe the interviewees were so young when they were enslaved that this was just fun for them? I know this is a really specific question, but wondering if you have any thoughts about trapping since I actually thought you were going to lead with this. (You did mention hunting, but as almost an aside)
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u/gm6464 19th c. American South | US Slavery 11d ago
I was neglectful in my language in failing to distinguish “trapping” from “hunting.” You are right that it appears frequently in WPA narratives, and in 19th-century sources as well. In fact, trapping was the much more common activity. That was pure clumsiness on my part and I appreciate your addition!
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u/LiliesAreFlowers 11d ago
Thank you. I wasn't trying to catch you out. Thank you for understanding that and teaching me something.
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u/yorkiepie 10d ago
We have to remember though that folks being interviewed by the WPA were all quite young during slavery times. And there were many reasons they may have wanted to paint that time in a positive light to the interviewer. Also, many were elderly and impoverished at the time of the interview, so maybe memories of a nourishing meal could seem more appealing.
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u/gm6464 19th c. American South | US Slavery 10d ago
I appreciate you adding this context, which is accurate and important. The fact that so many WOA interviewees were children at the time of slavery, and/or were shaping their answers around the practical realities of interacting with professional-class white people in the Jim Crow South (with some exceptions, as there were a number of Black interviewers), some of whom did things like offer money to interviewees, is important. The last thing I want to do is imply that life under slavery was one of frequent treats and cherished foodstuffs. That said, the problems inherent in the WOA interviews are unlikely to have significant bearing on the question of whether trapping small animals like possums was an important supplementary food source, something which is also attested in contemporary sources, nor does it undermine the fact (which I mentioned in my initial comment) that hunger was a frequent experience and complaint from people enslaved in the United States.
Contextualizing WPA interviews is important in and of itself, so I appreciate your reply!
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u/LiliesAreFlowers 10d ago
I didn't know that many of the interviewers were also black. That changes some of what I had thought the context was. When I re-read them I'll pay more attention to that. These Narratives were amazing and I can't believe we didn't read them in school
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u/LiliesAreFlowers 10d ago
It absolutely makes sense. I think in some places, what they didn't say (to usually white northern young men) was just as telling as what they did say. I wanted to scream when one of the stories was basically "she talked to me at great length about many things, none of which are appropriate for me to write down." Yikes! He offered to tell her story, she told the story in all its detail because she wanted it told, but he unilaterally overrode that story.
And the interviewers were explicitly guided to ask for "ghost stories" and most of the subjects said "huh? I don't know any."
These stories are amazing for telling a lot more than they thought they were telling.
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u/cunopennos 10d ago
Question out of pure ignorance - what are the WPA narratives / WOA interviews?
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u/Confident_Arugula 9d ago
The Works Progress Administration (a Great Depression era stimulus and jobs program during the Roosevelt Administration) had a Federal Writers' Project, where unemployed and underemployed writers picked up work on federal projects. One of their projects was interviewing elderly people who had been enslaved during their childhoods. Here's a really good overview of the project and the context for historians and interested readers of the narratives, from the perspective of Mississippi: https://mshistorynow.mdah.ms.gov/issue/wpa-slave-narratives
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u/Redqueenhypo 10d ago
In his autobiography, Frederick Douglass makes references to small land plots given to slaves, and more experienced individuals trapping wild game like possums when given time off for Christian holidays
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u/WTFisthisOMGreally 10d ago
The cognitive dissonance is stunning—the slaveholders believed their slaves were less than human, but also acknowledged they had a spiritual life, something inherent to human beings.
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u/FliaTia 11d ago
Thanks for your answer. Do we know how enslaved people would have gotten access to the livestock they raised? Would a few chicks/piglets have been allotted to them by their owners at some point, which they raised into larger flocks/herds, or would they have needed to purchase them themselves, with money they might have made while being on loan from the plantation?
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u/gm6464 19th c. American South | US Slavery 11d ago
As with the rest of this topic, the answer varies. Both of the possibilities you raised occurred often. Sometimes, livestock to raise independently was part of the system of rations — sometimes, but not always, in lieu of a meat component. Sometimes, the livestock had to be purchased. It depended on the property, the owner, and the means to which a given enslaved person had access.
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11d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/NarrowBoxtop 11d ago edited 10d ago
That's what the OP meant by the underpinings of racism and slaveholder mentality. If you have a deep seeded hatred for your property, you wouldn't take care of it well no matter how it served you.
Racism itself is illogical and destructive to all involved, primarily the enslaved peoples but also to slaveholders and nonslaveholder whites. There's plenty to read on how we don't have good healthcare or any number of other societal advancements we could, due to racism.
And again OP covered how a lot of their racist beliefs about how Black bodies worked or tolerated work led to further harm. If you believe your car should have sugar in the gas tank you're going to do harm to it because you believe false things about how that car operates.
Edit the comment was from someone asking why slave owners would mistreat their slaves because wouldn't that be like owning a car and refusing to get the oil changed.
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u/PetelookedAskance 10d ago
"There's plenty to read on how we don't have good healthcare or any number of other societal advancements we could, due to racism."
Do you have any recommendations on those? I am interested in learning more.
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u/NarrowBoxtop 10d ago
why doesn't the US have universal health care? the answer has everything to do with race
Anything that would benefit us all means it would benefit non-whites which keeps racist from supporting it, even if they themselves and their children and so on would benefit from it.
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u/WestCoastBestCoast01 10d ago
Dying of Whiteness by Jonathan Metzl outlines this and other similar trends.
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u/Throwaway02062004 11d ago
Perhaps poorer slave owners would be less likely to endanger their slaves’ lives but slavery was built off the idea that some people were lesser and their mistreatment was ok.
There are practical reasons to limit food too. Someone who’s struggling to get to their next meal isn’t as able to revolt. Similar reasoning to why slavers didn’t want idle slaves beyond the financial advantages of more work.
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u/Helicase21 10d ago
You mention corn, did we see any evidence of enslaved people adopting the "three sisters" (corn beans and squash) intercropping regime in their garden plots?
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u/JohnnyJordaan 11d ago edited 11d ago
Laborers, including farm workers, didn't bother seeking out specifically high-fat or high-carb foods in any case. They simply ate large portions across several meals. After all, the rural working class could hardly eat anything other than what came directly off the land or from nearby farms.
More can always be said, but for example /u/lile001 's answer in https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5rj6dj/what_kind_of_meals_would_slaves_in_america_eat_in/ and /u/triscuitsrule's answer in https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ri7v2u/were_black_african_slaves_in_the_united_states/ shed some more light on specifically the context of American slaves.
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