WHO WAS BETTER OFF?
A COMPARISON OF AMERICAN SLAVES AND ENGLISH
AGRICULTURAL WORKERS, 1750-1875
BY
ERIC V. SNOW
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. WHY COMPARE
ENGLISH LABORERS AND AMERICAN SLAVES TO BEGIN WITH? . . 10
The
Standard Comparison of Factory Workers with Slaves 10
Why
Do Such a Comparison? 10
What
Exactly Is Compared Out of Each Diverse Group 12
Five
Broad Areas for Comparison Purposes 12
2. A
HISTORICAL PERENNIAL: THE STANDARD OF
LIVING DEBATE 14
Some
Theoretical Problems in Comparing Slaves and Laborers'
Standard of Living 14 ...
Diet
and the Standard of Living for Slaves 17
Fogel
and Engerman's Optimistic Reconstructions of the Slave
Diet 18
The
Slave Diet as Crude, Coarse, and Boring 21
Differing
Diets for Slaves with Different Positions 23
The
Slaves' Role in Providing Themselves with Food on Their
Own 25
Variations
in What Food Different Slaveowners Provided Their
Own
Slaves With 26
The
Diet of English Farmworkers: Regional
Variations 28
The
Southern English Agricultural Workers' Diet Was Poor,
Often Meatless 30
Grains,
Especially Wheat, Dominate the Agricultural Workers'
Diet 32
The
Role of Potatoes in the Laborers' Diet, Despite
Prejudices Against Them 33
Did
Farmworkers Prefer Coarse or Fine Food? 34
The
Monotony of the Farmworkers' Diet in the South of England 36
The
Superior Conditions of the Northern English Farmworkers 37
Meat
as a Near Luxury for Many Farmworkers 39
The
Effects of Enclosure and Allotments on Hodge's Diet 40
Comparing
Food Received by English Paupers, Slaves, and Their
Nation's Army 42
Better
Bread Versus Little Meat? The Slave
Versus Farmworker
Diet 43
Clothing
for Slaves 44
Bad
Clothing Conditions for Slaves 45
Differences
in Clothing Provided for Slaves with Different
Position 46
The
Factory Versus Homespun: The Master's
Decision 48
Slaves
and Shoe Shortages 49
Fogel
and Engerman's Optimistic Take on Slaves' Clothing
Rations 51
Clothing
and English Agricultural Workers 51
The
Low Standards for Farmworkers, Especially in Southern
England 52
Homespun
More Common in America than England by C. 1830 53
Special
Measures Needed to Buy Their Own Clothes 54
Housing
For Slaves: Variations around a Low
Average Standard 55
Cases
of Good Slave Houses 58
Was
Poor White Housing Little Better than the Slaves'? 59
Fogel
and Engerman's Optimistic View of Slave Housing 59
Genovese's
Overly Optimistic Take on Slave Housing 60
The
Moral Hazards of Crowded, One-Room Slave Houses 62
Slave
Housing--Sanitation and Cleanliness 63
English
Farmworkers' Housing--Quality/Size 64
Poor
Housing Leads to Sexual Immorality 66
How
the Artist's Eye Can Be Self-Deceiving When Evaluating
Cottages' Quality 68
How
Rentals and the Poor and Settlement Laws Made for Poor
Quality Housing 69
The
Problem of Cottages Being Distant from Work 70
The
Aristocracy's Paternalism in Providing Housing, and Its
Limits 71
Little
Difference for Slaves and Farmworkers in the Quality of
Their Housing 73
Agricultural
Workers--Sanitation/Cleanliness 74
Slaves--Furniture
and Personal Effects 76
English
Agricultural Workers: Home Furnishings,
Utensils,
etc. 78
Fuel--Sambo's
Supply Versus Hodge's 79
Sambo's
Medical Care 82
The
General Backwardness of Antebellum Medical Care 83
Masters
Sought Ways to Reduce Medical Expenses 84
Masters
and Overseers as Amateur Healers for Slaves 84
Black
Medical Self-Help: Conjurors and
Midwives 86
Medical
Care for English Agricultural Workers 87
Whose
Medical Care Was Better? Hodge's? Or Sambo's? 91
The
Overall Material Standard of Living:
Was Hodge or Sambo
Better Off? 92
Trickle-Down
Economics with a Vengeance: How the
Slaves
Benefited 93
3. THE QUALITY
OF LIFE: SLAVES VERSUS AGRICULTURAL
WORKERS.. 95
The
Quality of Life as Opposed to the (Material) Standard of
Living. 95
Literacy
and Education for African-American Slaves
96
Why
Slaveholders Sought to Keep Slaves Illiterate
98
English
Farmworkers, Literacy and Education 102
A
Brief Sketch of the Development of English Public Education 104
What
Age Did Child Labor Begin and Schooling End? 105
Ignorance
Versus Skewed Knowledge: Different
Models for
Controlling a Subordinate Class 106
Slaves--The
Treatment of Elderly "Aunts" and "Uncles" 109
Altruism
and Self-Interest Did Not Necessarily Conveniently
Coincide to Protect Elderly Slaves'
Lives 110
Did
Slavery Provide More Security Against Starvation than
Laissez-Faire? 110
Odd
Jobs for Elderly Slaves 112
The
Senior Hodge: Cared for, or Fends for
Himself? 113
The
Effects of the New Poor Law on the Elderly, Non-Working
Poor 115
How
the Local Authorities Profited from the Workhouse Test 117
Whose
Elderly Were Better Off? The
Farmworkers' or the
Slaves'? 118
The
Slave Childhood: Full of Fun or Full of
Fear? 119
Pastimes
for Slave Children 120
Plantation
Day Care: How Slave Childhood Was
Different 123
Is All
Work Bad for Children? 124
The
Slave Childhood: Good, Bad, or
Indifferent? 125
Hodge's
Childhood: More Work, But More
Worthwhile? 126
Just
How Common Was Child Labor, Especially in the
Countryside 128
The
Parental Push for Child Labor 130
Day
Care Not a Common Experience 131
Young
Hodge at Play 132
The
Relative Quality of Life for the Children of Slaves and
Laborers 133
Religion--A
Site for Enlightenment, Social Unity, and Social
Conflict 134
Slave
Religion--The Slaveholders' Options on Christianizing
the Slaves 135
The
Earlier Practice of Not Evangelizing the Slaves 137
The
Gospel of Obedience Distorts the Christianity Given to
the
Slaves 137
The
Slaves Add to the Religion Given Them by Their Masters
and
Mistresses 139
No
Surprise: The Slaves' Lack of Religious
Freedom 141
The
Slaves Unbend a Bent Christianity 142
Slave
Preachers: Their Role and Power 144
Did
Slaveholders Achieve Religious and Ideological Hegemony
Over the Slaves? 145
English
Agricultural Workers and Christianity 149
Reasons
for the Established Church's Unpopularity with the
Laborers 149
How
the Local Elite Can Use Charity to Control the Poor 151
The
Laborers’ Turn to Nonconformity and Its Mixed Results 153
Christianity: An Instigator of Laborers' Resistance? 154
Similarities
in Southern White and English Lower Class
Religion 155
Somehow
Seeking Participation in and Control of One's
Destiny: The Consolations of Faith? 156
The
Slave Family: How Well Did It Survive
Slavery? 157
The
Family Bonds of Slaves Made Conditional Upon the
Stability of the Slaveholders 159
The
Routine Destruction of Family Relationships under Slavery 161
Fogel
and Engerman's Mistakenly Low Figures on Marriage
Breakup 164
How
the Slaves' Fears about Family Breakup Could Make For
Continual Anxiety 165
The
Process of Being Bought and Sold as Itself Dehumanizing 166
How
Slavery Undermined the Families of Slaves 166
How
Slavery Weakened the Father's Role 167
Factors
Which Encouraged Slaves to Treat Marriage Bonds
Casually 170
How
Slavery Encouraged a Casual Approach to Family
Relationships 171
The
Ways Slavery Destroyed Family Relationships 173
How
the Master Could Routinely Interfere in Slave Family
Relationships 174
Master-Arranged
Marriages 175
Just
How Common Was Miscegenation? 176
Despite
the Pressures, Slaves Still Maintained Some Form of
Family Life 178
The
Key Issues Involved in Examining the Quality of Farm-
worker Family Life 179
The
"Weber/Gillis" Thesis Summarized:
Was Brutish Family
Life
the Norm? 180
The
Limits to Snell's Rebuttal Against Seeing Lower Class
Family Life as Harsh 182
How
Not Being Independent and Self-Sufficient Could Improve
Family Life 184
The
Limits to Applying the Gillis-Weber Thesis to the
English Case 186
Some
Evidence Bearing on the Quality of Farmworkers' Family
Life 187
Why
the Slave Family was Fundamentally Worse Off than the
Laborer Family 189
Why
the Laborers Had a Higher Overall Quality of Life than
the
Slaves 190
The
Problems of Comparing the Slaves' and Laborers' Quality
of
Religious Experience 190
How
Elderly Slaves Could Have Been Better Off Than the
Elderly Farmworkers 192
How
the Slaves' More Carefree Childhood Was Not Necessarily
a
Better One 192
The
Hazards of Historical Analysis that Uses the Values of
Those in the Past 194
4. THE SEXUAL
DIVISION OF LABOR: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS 196
The
Sexual Division of Labor:
African-American Slaves 196
Kemble
on a Stricter Sexual Division of Labor's Advantages 197
Jobs
Female Slaves Had 198
Qualifications
about the Generally Weak Sexual Division of
Labor among Slaves 201
Plantation
Day Care Revisited 202
The
Sexual Division of Labor: English
Agricultural Workers 203
Women's
Work in Arable Areas at Harvest Time Increased
Later in the Century 204
The
Female Dominance of Dairy Work Declines 205
How
the Separate Spheres' View on Sex Roles Influenced the
1867-68 Report 206
Why
Did Laboring Women Increasingly Fall Out of the Field
Labor Force? 207
Allotments
Partially Restore the Family Economy 209
Quality
of Life Issues and the Sexual Division of Labor 209
The
Division of Labor: Blessing or Curse? 211
Who
Was Better Off Depends on the Values One Has 213
5. CONTROLLING
SUBORDINATE CLASSES--HOW IT WAS DONE 213
The
Central Reality of Work and the Elite's Needs for
Controlling Its Workers 213
Dawn
to Dusk--Work Hours for Slaves 215
Using
Force to Get Slaves into the Fields in the Morning 215
Finishing
Work for the Day--Some Variations 217
Hours
of Work--Agricultural Workers 218
Were
Workdays Shorter for the Farmworkers than the Slaves? 219
The
Length of the Workweek and Days off--Slaves 221
Slaves
Normally Did Not Work on Sundays 221
Holidays
the Slaves Did Not Work On 223
Unplanned
Days Off Due to Weather or the State of Crops 224
The
Days of Work for Agricultural Workers 225
Those
Laborers Who Had to Work Sundays, and Those Who Did Not 226
Seasonal
and Other Changes in the Workweek, and Their Effects
on
Unemployment 228
How
"Voluntarily" Did Slaves Work?
The Necessity of Coercion
and
Supervision 230
Why
the Whip Had to Be Used to Impose Work Discipline on the
Slaves 231
How
Commonly Were the Slaves Whipped? The Time
on the Cross
Controversy 233
The
Deterrence Value of Occasional Killings 235
The
Danger of Corporal Punishment Backfiring, Requiring
"Massive Retaliation" 236
How
Even Good Masters Could Suddenly Kill a Slave in the
Heat of Passion 237
Miscellaneous
Punishments that Masters Inflicted on Slaves 238
Examples
of Corporal Punishment Backfiring 239
Did
Slaveowners Successfully Implant a Protestant Work Ethic
in
the Slaves? 240
The
Slaves' Sense of Work Discipline Like that of Other
Pre-Industrial
People 242
Genovese's
Paternalism: How Successful Were
Planters in
Imposing Hegemony? 244
Scott
Versus Hegemony 244
Were
the Slaveholders Really Believers in Paternalism?: The
Implications of Jacksonian Democracy
and Commercial
Capitalism in the American South 247
Counter-Attacks
Against Portraying Slaveholders as Bourgeois
Individualists 249
Ignorance
as a Control Device Revisited 252
How
Masters Would Manipulate the Slaves' Family Ties in Order
to
Control Them 253
Positive
Incentives Only a Supplementary Method for
Controlling the Bondsmen 255
The
Brutal Overseer as a Historical Reality 258
The
Task Versus Gang Systems: Different
Approaches to Work
Discipline 260
The
Infrapolitics of Task (Quota) Setting 261
The
Gang System's Advantages 262
The
Patrol/Pass System 264
The
Slaveowners Who Liberally Granted Passes or Dispensed with
Them
Altogether 266
How
the Divisions Among White Slaveholders Benefited the
Enslaved 267
How
Mistresses and other Family Members Often Restrained Ill-
Treatment 268
The
Central Reality of Violence as the Main Tool to Control
the
Slaves 269
The
High Levels of Violence Between the Slaves and Masters
Compared to England 271
Both
Sides committed Far Less Violence During the Swing Riots
in
England 272
The
Lower Goals and Greater Divisions among Local Elites in
the
English Case 273
The
Routine Police State Measures in the South 275
Coercion,
Not Incentives or Ideology, as the Basic Means of
Enforcing Slavery 276
Basic
Differences Between the American and English Elites'
Methods of Control 276
The
Freedom of Action Local Government Officials Had in
England 277
The
Basic Strategy to Better Control the Farmworkers 278
Enclosure
as a Method of Social Control and "Class Robbery" 279
Enclosure: Direct Access to the Means of Production and
Some Food Both Lost 280
Open
and Close Parishes: One Dumps Laborers
onto the Other 282
The
Decline of Service 284
Why
Service Declined 285
How
Poor Relief Itself Promoted Population Growth 287
Assorted
Methods that Deterred Applicants for Relief 288
Why
"Make-Work" Jobs Failed to Deter Applicants and
Undermined Work Discipline 289
The
New Poor Law: Deterring Applicants for
Relief by
Using the Workhouse Test 290
Falling
Productivity: One More Consequence of
the Old Poor
Law 292
The
Workhouse Test as a Tool for Increasing Labor
Productivity 293
The
Workhouse Test Was a Tool for Lowering Wages Also 294
Allotments
Help Reduce Increases in Rates Caused by Enclosure 296
Why
the Rural Elite Still Sometimes Opposed Allotments 297
Miscellaneous
Ways Allotments Were Used to Benefit the Rural
Elite 298
Another
Positive Mode of Creating Work Discipline:
Piecework 300
The
Legal System and Its Influence on the Laborers 303
The
Justice of the Peace/County Court System Necessarily
Expressed Class Bias 303
The
Biases of the Courts Against the Laborers Should Not Be
Exaggerated 304
Ignorance
of the Law as a Control Device 305
Examples
of How the Contents of the Law Could be Against the
Laborers 306
The
Important Differences Between Controlling the Laborers
and
Slaves at Work 307
Ideological
Hegemony, Paternalism, Class Consciousness, and
Farmworkers 309
Did
Some in the Elite Begin to Repudiate Paternalistic,
Communal Values? 309
How
the Rural Elite Tried to Have Paternalism and Capitalism
Simultaneously 310
Paternalism
Vs. Capitalism: The Trade-Offs between
Freedom
and
Security 311
How
the Waning of Paternalism Made the Laborers' Class
Consciousness Possible 313
The
Power of Gifts to Control, and When They Do Not 313
The
Failure of Paternalism as an Ideological Control Device
from
C. 1795 314
The
Laborers' Growing Class Consciousness, C. 1834 to 1850 315
When
the Laborers as a Class in Itself Began to Act for
Itself 317
A
Comparison of Respective Elite Control Strategies: Slave-
owners and Squires 318
How
Much Success Did These Two Elites Have at Hegemony? 322
6. ON
RESISTANCE BY A SUBORDINATE CLASS 325
The
Infrapolitics of Daily Life 325
Analytical
Problems with "Day-to-Day Resistance"
(Infrapolitics) 325
The
Continuum of Resistance from Infrapolitics to Organized
Insurrection 326
The
Need for a Subordinate Class to Wear a Mask to Conceal
Their Knowledge 328
Early
Training in Mask Wearing 329
The
Costs of Being Open and the Mask Falling Off 330
The
Subordinate Class's Compulsions to Lie 330
Why
the Rituals of Deference Still Had Meaning 332
Elkins's
"Sambo" Hypothesis and Its Problems 333
An
Act of Routine Resistance: Stealing 338
Various
Motives for Theft 338
The
Intrinsic Costs of Double-Standards in Morality 339
Evading
Work by Claiming Sickness 341
Work: Slowdowns and Carelessness 342
The
Strategy of Playing the White Folks Off Against Each
Other 343
Manipulating
White Authority for the Slaves' Own Purposes 343
How
Pleadings and Petitions Could Restrain Masters and
Mistresses 343
The
General Problem of Slaves Running Away 344
Temporary
and Local Flight 346
"Negotiating"
a Return 347
How
Runaways Could Resist Capture 348
Maroons: Settlements of Escaped Slaves 349
The
Most Successful Runaways 350
"Strikes"
Conducted by Groups of Slaves Running Away 352
Small
Scale Open Confrontations and Violence 353
"Nats"
or "Sambos"?--Selective Perception by the Master Class 355
The
Rarity of Slave Revolts in the United States Compared
to
Elsewhere 356
The
Factors Militating Against Slave Revolts in the United
States 357
Many
Slaves Knew How Much the Deck Was Stacked Against
Successful Revolt 359
Why
then, If Revolts Were So Rare, Were the Whites So
Paranoid? 360
Resistance
to Slavery in the United States Is Dominated by
Infrapolitics 362
Resident
Slaveholders Supervising Small Units of Production
Smother Resistance 363
Resisting
Enslavement Is Not the Same as Resisting Slavery
as
a Social System 364
Hodge: The Predominance of Daily Infrapolitics Over
Outright
Riots 366
Social
Crime--The Infrapolitics of Poaching 367
The
Laborers' Counter-Ideology Against the Elite's Game Laws 368
The
Role of Theft, More Generally Defined, in English
Rural Infrapolitics 369
The
Correlation between Poverty and Theft 370
Hodge's
Thinner Mask 370
How
Farmworkers Could "Run Away"--Resistance Through Migra-
tion 372
The
Reluctance of Laborers to Move and Other Obstacles to
Migration 373
The
Tamer Confrontations between Hodge and His Masters 375
Food
Riots as a Method of Resistance 376
The
Swing Riots Generally Considered 378
How
the Laborers Did Benefit Some from the Swing Riots 379
The
Relative Weakness of the Farmworkers' Unions Compared
to
Others in England 380
The
Organization of the Agricultural Labours' Union in 1872 381
Comparing
Two Subordinate Classes' Methods of Resistance 383
7.
CONCLUSIONS: THE BALANCE BETWEEN
"RESISTANCE" AND "DAMAGE"? 386
Resistance
and the Subordinate Class's Quality of Life 386
Slavery
Is on a Continuum of Social Systems of Subordination 388
Selected
Bibliography 390
1. WHY COMPARE
ENGLISH LABORERS AND AMERICAN SLAVES TO BEGIN WITH?
The Standard Yet Problematic Comparison of Factory
Workers with Slaves
Mississippi slaveowner and politician John A. Quitman "professed
little respect for the northern free-labor system, where 'factory wretches'
worked eleven-hour days in 'fetid' conditions while their intellects were
destroyed 'watching the interminable whirling of the
spinning-jenny.' . . .
The Quitman plantations functioned satisfactorily, and his bondsmen were
appreciative of their condition. He
described his slaves as 'faithful, obedient, and affectionate.'" Quitman's comparison is still made today
when debates break out over the standard of living about who was better
off: slaves versus [Northern] factory
workers, not farm servants.
Similarly, while examining general European conditions for workers,
Jurgen Kuczynski states: "It is precisely
these bad conditions which justify the arguments of the slaveowners of the
South, that the slaves are materially better off than the workers in the
north. This would in many cases have
been true." Despite its frequency,
this comparison is actually problematic:
It discounts the additional effects of urbanization, crowding, and doing
industrial/shop work inside. In the
countryside, with its low population density and work in the fields outside,
people experience a different way and quality of life. The conditions of urban factory life simply
are not tied to the legal status of being free or slave. This common comparison actually contrasts
two very different ways of life, urban versus rural, factory versus farm, to
which widely varying value judgments can be attached. As E. P. Thompson observes:
"In comparing a Suffolk [farm] labourer with his grand-daughter in
a cotton-mill we are comparing--not two standards [of living]--but two ways of
life."1 By likening
some other agricultural labor force to the slaves of the American South before
the Civil War, many of the apples/oranges comparison problems are
eliminated. This work shows the largely
landless English agricultural workers during the general period of the
industrial revolution (c. 1750-1875) had a superior quality of life of compared
to the black slaves in the American South (c. 1750-1865), but that the latter
at times had a material standard of living equal to or greater than the
former's, at least in southern England.
Why Do Such a Comparison?
A
historical comparison brings into focus features of both subjects under study
that might otherwise go unnoticed. New
insights may be gained, which might be missed when highly specialized
historians devoted to a particular field analyze historical phenomena stay
strictly within their area of expertise.
Suddenly, through historical comparison and contrast, the pedestrian can
become exceptional, and what was deemed unusual becomes part of a pattern. For example, both the agricultural workers
and the slaves found ways to resist the powerful in their respective societies,
but their forms of resistance differed since their legal statuses
differed. In the preface of his study
of American slavery and Russian serfdom, Kolchin observes some of the
advantages of doing such a comparison.
It reduces parochialism in given fields, allows features to be seen as
significant that otherwise might be overlooked, makes for the formulation and
testing of hypotheses, and helps to distinguish which variables and causal
factors had more weight.2
A comparative topic is justified, even when it deals with phenomena long
since analyzed by historians, if it wrings new insights out of the same old
sources. It may expose assumptions
about events or processes experts take for granted or overlook in the fields
being compared. One suspects sometimes
labor historians and African-American slavery historians may be letting their
respective historiographical work pass each other like ships in the night, not
knowing the valuable insights one group may have for the study of the other's
field.3
Comparing
and contrasting English agricultural workers during the industrial revolution
and American slaves before and during the Civil War allows for the exploration
of (perhaps unexpected) similarities and differences in their experiences in
the same general time frame. Placing
side by side for inspection two agricultural work forces who lived at the same
basic time who spoke the same language seems "a natural," but
specialists in both fields have largely overlooked this identification. The history of black slavery is
"labor history." On a daily
basis slaveholders got people to labor for them, tried to motivate them by fear
and the stick, or, less commonly but ideally, by love and the carrot. Of course, fundamental differences remained
between the two work forces. The blacks
were not really seen as part of the surrounding society for racial reasons,
while the English agricultural workers still had some real rights, despite
their evident subordination. Excepting
for children, farmworkers were never subjected to the supreme indignity of
being flogged while on the job, but the whip was virtually the emblem of the
slaveowner's authority over his or her property. Exploring the similarities and differences between these two work
forces is the burden of this work.
What Exactly Is Compared Out of Each Diverse Group
This
work compares from these groups those who lived in rural areas and did farm
work as their main or exclusive occupation.
Neither urban slavery in the American South nor slavery in the North
before its demise are analyzed here.
However, some source documents used below involve slaves who either may
have lived in a small town or in both city and country. Artisans who lived in rural areas, such as
blacksmiths and carpenters, receive some attention in the American case but
almost none in the English. Servants
are included, whether American slave or English free, whether doing domestic
chores, learning husbandry, or a combination of the two, but slave domestics receive
much more attention than English ones.
Slaves working in industry or factories are omitted, as well as their
English counterparts, since this work is about agricultural/rural workers. Workers in English domestic industry are
also passed over. But cases in which
substantial machinery and mills functioned on plantations, such as for rice and
sugar refining, are covered since they functioned amidst a rural setting. Unless otherwise mentioned, it should be
assumed, as "Southern slaves" are compared with English agricultural
workers, that the former live in rural areas or perhaps small towns, and that
they are either field hands or servants, not urban and/or industrial
workers. Since about ninety percent of
the slaves did not live in cities, the vast bulk of them lived in rural areas.4 Blacks without masters--"free
Negroes"--are not covered here.
The focus shall be on ENGLISH farm workers, not Scottish, Welsh, Irish,
or "British." Exclusions and
limits are necessary for what is compared here within these two large, diverse
groups, since more could always be added.
Five Broad Areas for Comparison Purposes
In
five broad categories English farmworkers and African-American slaves are
compared. The first concerns the
material standard of living, such as in diet, clothing, housing, and medical
care. The second concerns the less
quantitative but essential "quality of life" issues, such as in
family relationships, education, religious activities, and having an informed
outlook on life. Although through sheer
ignorance and good treatment perhaps some slaves were relatively content with
their lot, their satisfaction does not make their situation to be actually
good. It is better to be Socrates
dissatisfied than a pig satisfied, a dictum which a few quantitative economic
historians seem tempted to forget. Only
those slaves with a "live for today" philosophy, who made themselves
totally oblivious to the future, could possibly forget what masters selling
their family members would do to them.
Sales due to death or bankruptcy were always remained a sword of
Damocles hanging over the bondsmen. Third,
the sexual division of labor between men and women is compared for the English
farm workers and African-American slaves.
These two groups had glaring differences in this area which, perhaps
ironically, declined sharply after freedom for the slaves came. Fourth, work conditions, labor discipline,
and the ways the masters attempted to control their respective subordinate
classes are compared, including by and through the state. Abuses at work are dealt with, such as
whipping, hours of work, holidays/days off, and the incentives used by "management,"
broadly considered. The reality of
paternalism and the quality of work relationships are examined. Fifth, the means by which the subordinate
classes resisted the will of the dominant class is analyzed. How the oppressed classes wore a
"mask" is considered here.
Both of these groups carefully concealed, by lies, feigned ignorance, or
the simple non-volunteering of information, what they REALLY thought from their
"betters" to avoid punishment or exploitation. The infrequent, but spectacular, cases of
revolts and mass actions are covered, as well as union activities among the
agricultural workers. Using the broad
categories of the material standard of living, the quality of life, the sexual
division of labor, work conditions and controls, and resistance against those
in authority and their controls, the most important similarities and contrasts
between these two work forces are focused upon.
This
comparison uses the general time period of 1750-1875. Making for the drawing of sharper parallels, these dates allow two
largely contemporary work forces to be compared who both lived in
industrializing nations and spoke the same language. The nineteenth century is emphasized, partly due to greater
documentation, but also because then the factors creating these two work
forces' conditions peaked. The
proletarianization of the farmworkers reached a height in the first half of the
nineteenth century, before allotments spread more widely, mechanization became
common, and out-migration had partially emptied the English countryside. Similarly, after generally experiencing a
boom in the preceding thirty years, the Cotton Kingdom clearly reached an
economic high point in 1860. This work
emphasizes portraying the respective climaxes of the two work forces'
conditions as determined by events and processes that began in the seventeenth
and early eighteenth centuries, such as the initial arrival of slaves in the
English colonies and the second general wave (i.e., post-Tudor) enclosure
acts. Changes from earlier conditions
(pre-1750) are treated largely in passing, which makes the conditions of the
slaves look better, due to the improvements in their treatment from the early
colonial period, while these make the agricultural workers apppear worse off,
because of the negative effects enclosure and the French Wars had on their
standard of living compared to (say) 1725.
Both
work forces lived in industrializing countries. The South's industrial sector before the Civil War that could
employ the slaves paled before what was available to rural English
workers. Nevertheless, they still
resided in the nation that was, by the eve of the Civil War, the world's second
greatest industrial power. The North's
industrial sector clearly affected them.
Often Northern factories made the clothes and shoes they wore, and the
tools and machines they worked with.
Corresponding with the period of England's industrialization, the
enclosure acts affected the laborers largely negatively. They greatly reduced the independence and
social mobility the farmworkers had had.
If they were willing to migrate, industry gave them an outlet from bad
rural conditions. It even provided some
competition for their labor that raised their wages when they stayed put, at
least in northern England. Importantly,
a major chronological difference separates the two groups: Freedom abruptly came to the slaves in 1865,
but the improvements and changes in the farmworkers' conditions were gradual,
without any radical discontinuity.
Perhaps the farmworkers' gaining the vote in 1884 was the one event that
changed their lives the most, for although the Swing Riots of 1830-31 badly
shook the British establishment, their effects on their lives were a pittance
before the effects of emancipation on American blacks.5 The mechanization of English agriculture was
a long, slow process, undoubtedly hindered early in the nineteenth century by
the massive labor surplus that prevailed in much of the English countryside,
and even by "Captain Swing" himself.
Hence, some sources about post-1875 conditions are cited for the English
case, since their conditions changed more slowly, but post-1865 conditions are
mostly ignored for the freedmen, although racial subordination continued by
means other than bondage.
2. A
HISTORICAL PERENNIAL: THE STANDARD OF
LIVING DEBATE
Some Theoretical Problems in Comparing Slaves and
Laborers' Standard of Living
The debate over standard of living during
industrialization, and the role of capitalism in lowering or raising the
masses' consumption and use of various material goods, is one of
historiography's greatest footballs. The
Long Debate on Poverty6 has an aptly chosen title! Unfortunately, for both Southern slaves and
English farmworkers, no solid nationwide statistical economic data exists that
could decisively settle the issue. The
English (and Welsh) had no fully inclusive census until 1801, no occupational
census until 1841, and no official registration for deaths and births until
1839.7 American census data begins with 1790, but a
mere count of people, crops grown in a given year, and their occupations is not
enough to calculate per capita income.8 Furthermore, what the average slave received
hardly equaled what the American did!
To run such calculations, it is necessary to know what the slaves alone
got. The available historical evidence,
such as it is, can give clues and indications of what the actual standard of
living was. But, at this late date,
nothing with full rational certainty capable of convincing all the disputants
involved is likely to turn up.
Anecdotal evidence is valuable, because it can descriptively expose the
relationships within an society that an overemphasis on quantitative data can
obscure. But it cannot totally settle
this debate, since conflicting stories appear to support both sides, such as
how kindly or harshly the "typical" master treated the "average"
slave. This point leads to the next big
problem in the standard of living controversy . . .
Just
what exactly IS the "average" slave or the "typical"
agricultural worker? These abstractions
represent groups that experienced a great variety of working conditions,
climates, lifestyles, occupations, family statuses, and masters
supervising. What is
"average" for slaves when comparing the relatively mild bondage of
the Border States, such as Virginia and Kentucky, with the harshness of the
frontier Deep South, such as Texas and Arkansas? What is "average" for agricultural workers between
Northumberland, where one observer said the wages and the standard of living
surpassed America's for farmworkers, as opposed to the utter misery of
notoriously low-waged Wiltshire in southern England?9 Theoretically, after warming up the
computers armed with spreadsheet programs, adding the two together and dividing,
the issue would be settled, if accurate, broad-based, quantitative statistics
did exist (but they do not).
Number-crunching can obscure the essential reality of an unequal or
extreme situations within the working class or bondsmen as a whole. The economist who warned against wading a
river with an average depth of four feet drew attention to a serious
theoretical problem that pervades quantitative analysis when applied to the
standard of living debate. Although the
"average" bondsman or the "mean" farmworker are handy
abstractions, they remain generalizations.
It is mistaken to allow them to obscure the underlying realities of
(especially) regional diversity for the farmworkers, or the widely varying
treatment meted out by various masters and mistresses to their bondsmen.
Diet and the Standard of Living for Slaves
The
essence of the standard of living debate seems to be diet, and how far the
masses lived above bare subsistence.10 Related issues include:
How much and what kinds of "luxuries," such as sugar, coffee,
and tea, did the groups in question enjoy?
How much and what kinds of meat did they have? Did they eat wheat, the most expensive grain, or barley, rye,
oats, etc.? How coarse was the food
they ate? For the American slaves, as
for American Southerners generally, the main grain was corn (maize), and the
main meat, pork.11
The absolutely archetypal rations slaves received consisted of so many
pecks of corn and pounds of pork or bacon per week. Anything adding to or replacing these items as basic foodstuffs
was at least mildly unusual. As escaped
slave Christopher Nichols testified to Drew:
"My master used to allow us one piece of meat a day, and a peck and
a half of corn meal a week." After
being sold for $1,200 in Natchez, Eli Johnson was "put on a cotton farm,
and allowed a peck of corn a week and three pounds meat." Traveler Frederick Law Olmsted inquired of
one white Southerner: "'What do
they generally give the niggers on the plantations here?' 'A peck of meal and three pound of bacon is
what they call 'lowance, in general, I believe. It takes a heap o' meat on a big plantation.'" Aged ex-slave Andy Anderson painfully
recalled that the new overseer, Delbridge, cut rations as the Civil War
began: "He weighs out the meat,
three pound for the week, and he measure a peck of meal." The "meat" in question was
normally from the flesh of hogs, although exceptions appeared. Once a slave in eastern Maryland, Frederick
Douglass mentioned how the standard monthly rations included fish
sometimes: "The men and women
slaves received, as their monthly allowance of food, eight pounds of pork, or
its equivalent in fish, and one bushel of corn meal." Charles Ball similarly described Calvert
County, Maryland, where
the practice amongst slave-holders, was to allow each
slave one peck of corn weekly, which was measured out every Monday morning; at
the same time each one receiving seven salt herrings. This formed the week's provision, and the master who did not give
it, was called a hard master, whilst those who allowed their people any
thing more, were deemed kind and indulgent.12
Hence, the normal bondsman and woman expected a diet
that included several pounds of pork or bacon and, even more certainly, corn.13
Were
the standard rations enough? Sometimes
they were not, at least for some adult men.
As Blassingame notes:
"Equally serious was his [the slave's] dependence on the 'average'
amount of food and clothing his master decided was sufficient for all
slaves." What was sufficient for
one man or woman may be insufficient for others!14 Ex-slave Anderson added, after describing
his plantation's new standard rations:
"And 'twa'n't enough. He
half-starve us niggers, and he want more work." Runaway slave Williamson Pease ironically commented to Drew about
the draught animals' superior treatment:
"Horses and mules have food by them all the time, but the slaves
had four pounds of fat bacon a week, and a peck of corn meal,--not enough to
last some men three days." Francis
Henderson similarly commented:
"Our allowance was given weekly--a peck of sifted corn meal, a
dozen and a half herrings, two and a half pounds of pork. Some of the boys would eat this up in three
days."15
Underfeeding almost inevitably caused theft, as Pease and Henderson also
observed. Harriet Brent Jacobs, alias
Linda Brent, described well how miserly the rations could be doled out. Her mistress would
spit in all the kettles and pans that had been used
for cooking. She did this to prevent
the cook and her children from eking out their meager fare with the remains of
gravy and other scrapings. The slaves
could get nothing to eat except what she chose to give them. Provisions were weighed out by the pound and
ounce, three times a day. I can assure
you she gave them no chance to eat wheat bread from her flour barrel. She knew how many biscuits a quart of flour
would make, and exactly what size they ought to be.16
So according to the slaves' own testimony, the nearly
universal "standard rations" were inadequate for many of them, at
least by themselves without what they could raise, hunt, or steal on their own,
or what more indulgent masters might issue.17
Fogel and Engerman's Optimistic Reconstructions of the
Slave Diet
Fogel
and Engerman in Time on the Cross argue that slaves were well fed:
The average daily diet of slaves was quite
substantial. The energy value of their
diet exceeding that of free men in 1879 by more than 10 percent. There was no deficiency in the amount of
meat allotted to slaves. On average,
they consumed six ounces of meat per day, just an ounce lower than the average
quantity consumed by the free population.18
Although such data as average heights and rapid
population growth indicate American slaves were not seriously underfed, this
result was not entirely due to their masters and mistresses' efforts.19 The slaves struggled to get food on their
own, such as by hunting and trapping (both relatively productive in a sparsely
populated/frontier region), gardening small patches of land, purchasing food
using money they earned from extra work, not to mention stealing. The testimony cited above casts some doubt
on the "standard rations" of pork and corn alone always being enough
to satisfy at least adult male bondsmen.
Fogel
and Engerman clearly make many dubious assumptions and casual mistakes while
reconstructing the slave diet, as shown by Richard Sutch's searching and
intensive critique of their data. Their
disappearance method uses data from only 44 generally backwoods counties out of
Parker and Gallman's sample of 413 counties' farm and plantation food
production. They assume the slaves must
have eaten most of the food produced on the plantations in their subsample
because (they reason) these were too far from significant urban markets. Their subsample of this sample excluded
farms and small plantations with fewer than fifty-one slaves, thus discounting
the possibility of local sales of produce by the big plantations to neighboring
farms and small plantations. Indeed,
their subsample comes down to just seventy-seven plantations, including less
than 10 percent of the total population and 1.5 percent of the total productive
landholdings in the Parker-Gallman sample.
With such a narrow sample focused on the largest plantations, a bias
similar to U.B. Phillips's American Negro Slavery, distortions
inevitably appear. Since plantations
were commercial and non-subsistent by nature, they sold produce for cash. Using a subsample of them in backwoods areas
more than fifty wagon miles from urban areas would not eliminate the
distortions caused by local sales of produce or the driving of animals on the
hoof to market. The latter point
undermines Fogel and Engerman's evidence for the slaves having a high beef
consumption based on their subsample since 15 percent of all the cattle in it
were on four Texas farms in two counties which fell outside the fifty-mile
radius. But since Texas was notorious
for long distance cattle drives to market, it is implausible to think these
ranches' slaves ate most of the steer raised on them! They underestimate the resident white population's consumption in
these areas, such as by using conversion ratios (such as dressed to live
weight) which lower how much pork the slaves ate and raise how much the whites
ate in the subsampled areas. Between
all the mistakes and questionable assumptions Sutch identifies, many of them
omitted here, nobody should place much stock in Fogel and Engerman's arguments
for a varied and nutritious slave diet.20
Much
of the debate on the slave diet between Fogel and Engerman and their critics
like Sutch surrounds mineral and vitamin deficiencies. For example, was the phenomenon of dirt/clay
eating, which still survives among Southern rural blacks in the United States
today, due to malnutrition? A thiamine
deficiency could easily explain some plantations' outbreaks of sudden
dirt-eating frenzies.21
Being high in pork and maize, the classic slave diet clearly was
tailor-made for producing pellagra, just as it did among poor whites. Due to its chemically bound form, corn lacks
niacin that the human body can easily use.
Its high content of the amino acid leucine partially even interferes
with the body's digestion of whatever niacin that is consumed. Although the body can convert the amino acid
tryptophan into niacin from crude protein, the low quality fat pork slaves
normally ate unfortunately was a poor source of it. Even nowadays, let alone in antebellum times, physicians had
difficulty diagnosing pellagra because its symptoms seem to be like other
afflictions; it also manifests itself in the early stages in disparate ways in
different individuals. It normally does
not develop along standard, classical lines.
Nineteenth-century American doctors simply did not know about this
disease, so they would think the bondsmen under their care had other diseases. The description of the "negro
disease" called black tongue by Southern physicians, however, fits nearly
perfectly pellagra in its earlier stages.
Employing such arguments, Kiple and Kiple suggest that pellagra's
symptoms manifested themselves during hard times when planters cut back on
their rations. It also became operative
in many bondsmen in an early, endemic form that emerged during winter and early
spring, only to disappear again due to seasonal fresh fruits or vegetables
entering their diet. Sutch observes
that the standard ration falls way short of supplying enough niacin. It even lacks the extra protein with which
the body could convert tryptophan into niacin.
The unsupplemented standard ration had other vitamin and mineral
deficiencies, such as in thiamine, riboflavin, and calcium. It was short even in vitamin A, since the
corn and sweet potatoes of the antebellum South were evidently normally white,
not yellow, in color.22
Since the bondsmen likely suffered from dietary deficiencies, at least
during winter and early spring when forced to survive on the easily stored
items of the standard ration and/or under harsher masters and mistresses' more
restrictive diets, this casts doubt upon Fogel and Engerman's rosy
reconstruction.
The Slave Diet as Crude, Coarse, and Boring
Besides
being likely vitamin deficient, the slave diet was obviously crude, coarse, and
boring. As Frederick Douglass commented: "Not to give a slave enough to eat, is
regarded as the most aggravated development of meanness even among
slaveholders. The rule is, no matter
how coarse the food, only let there be enough of it." Victoria McMullen remembered her slave
grandmother described the average slave's diet this way: "But the other slaves didn't git
nothing but fat meat and corn bread and molasses. And they got tired of that same old thing. They wanted something else
sometimes." Mary Reynolds recalled
during slavery days what she was fed:
"Mostly we ate pickled pork and corn bread and peas and beans and
'taters. They never was as much as we
needed." Although monotonous, this
diet showed her master at least gave more than just the stereotypical "hog
and hoecake" diet. As Olmsted
observed: "The food is everywhere,
however, coarse, crude, and wanting in variety; much more so than that of
our [Northern] prison convicts."
The restricted food types they received, the crude cooking equipment
they used, and the sharp time limits imposed by both sexes working a
"sunup to sundown" work day all combined to produce a dreary
diet. As actress turned reluctant
mistress Fanny Kemble observed at her husband's rice plantation:
They got to the fields at daybreak, carrying with them
their allowance of food for the day, which toward noon, and not till then,
they eat, cooking it over a fire, which they kindle as best they can, where
they are working. Their second meal in
the day is at night, after their labor is over, having worked, at the very
least, six hours without intermission of rest or refreshment since their
noonday meal.
Since the adults of both sexes worked such long hours
of hard labor in the fields, the cooking equipment consisting generally of
fireplaces or open fires, and relatively few or no metal pots, forks, knives,
and spoons being available, crudely prepared meals inevitably followed. Solomon Northrup, a free man sold into
slavery, said slaves often lacked the motivation to hunt after work because
"after a long and hard day's work, the weary slave feels little like going
to the swamp for his supper, and half the time prefers throwing himself on the
cabin floor without it." Little
time remained for the slave woman, if one applies unrealistically the
contemporary Victorian middle class' ideology of the separate spheres to this
situation, to spend long hours bringing supper's food up to some elevated level
of gustatory delight. John Brown, once
a young slave in southern Virginia, described how simply slaves often prepared
their food: "We used to make our
corn into hominy, hoe and Johnny-cake, and sometimes parch it, and eat it
without any other preparation."23 If issued unground, just grinding/pounding the corn into something
cookable took enough effort and time itself.
Nevertheless, the slave diet's fundamental problem was the lack of
variety in what slaveowners issued their human chattels to begin with, not the
lack of time originating in long days of field work by both sexes that reduced
the number of domestic chores, including cooking, that could be done.24
Setting
up communal facilities army-style was one partial solution to slaves without
enough time to cook. Kemble mentioned
that one old woman in a shed boiled and distributed the daily allotment of rice
and grits on her husband's Georgia rice-island plantation. Francis Henderson, who escaped from the
Washington D.C. area, said slaves cooked food on their own, but often lacked
the time to do so: "In regard to
cooking, sometimes many have to cook at one fire, and before all could get to
the fire to bake hoe cakes, the overseer's horn would sound; then they must go
at any rate." Frequently he had to
eat on the run and could not sit down to eat due time constraints. During harvest, this problem was solved by
cooking everything at the big house "as the hands are wanted more in the
field. This was more like people, and
we liked it, for we sat down then at meals."25 But the cost of removing this burden this
way was still greater regimentation and further weakening of the slave family's
role by reducing their freedom as part of individual households to make
decisions about consumption, i.e., how dinner was cooked.
Differing Diets for Slaves with Different Positions
Since
masters and mistresses were "respecters of men," they treated
different slaves--or groups of slaves--differently.26 In particular, the household servants and
drivers and their families were apt to receive better material conditions, in
exchange for (inevitably) the tighter controls and supervision due to being in
the white owner's presence more. (This
is the classic trade-off of a sincerely practiced paternalism). The bleak picture of field hands subsisting
on "hog and hominy" diets did not apply to all their neighbors
dwelling in the quarters. Not having
just to subsist on the standard rations, servants benefited from the leftovers
of their master and mistress' table, as Kemble observed. Mary Boykin Chesnut's servants mobbed her
while visiting near her husband's father's plantation, wanting her to come
home. Her cook said, when asked if she
lacked anything: "Lacking
anything? I lack everything. What is cornmeal and bacon, milk and molasses? Would that be all you wanted? Ain't I bin living and eating exactly as you
does all these years? When I cook fer
you didn't I have some of all? Dere
now!" Her complaint was, in part,
"Please come home, so we could eat better again!" Freedman Edward Jenkins of Mount Pleasant,
South Carolina, told Armstrong how house servants gained from their owner's
meals: "What de white folk had ter
eat, de servan's had also, when de white folks done eat dey fill." Although his parents were field hands, aged
freedman Tony Washington remembered his mistress made him "the
waiter-and-pantry" boy. This job
allowed him to get extra food, including leftover alcohol, as he nostalgically
remembered:
Dey [the visiting white gentlemen] set down ergain,
an' Massa say: 'Sonny, bring de
glasses!' I'd bring de glasses, an' de
brandy from de sidebo'ahd. Dey know how
ter treat dey liquor in de old days an' nobody git drunk. Co'se, I got er little dizzy once when I
drink all dat de gen'lemans lef' in dey glasses--heh heh!--but Missus say she
gwine tell Massa ter whip me if'n I do dat ergain!
Sam Jackson benefited from having relatives in the
right places in "the big house."
He enjoyed reminiscing about his boyhood job's perks:
I was de waitin'-boy fo' de table. Don' you know, in dem conditions, I had a
sof' bed ter lie in? Yaw
. . . did I git plenty ter eat?
Jus' guess I did. De waiter-boy
allays got plenty, an' when his Maw was house-woman, an' his Auntie de cook,
guess he goin' go hungry? Ho!27
By having family members close to the master or the
mistress, this slave child avoided the customary lack of good treatment
("investment") most received from their owners because they were too
young to work in the fields.
Further
evidence of tiers within slave society in the quarters, as reflected by
differences in diet, comes from archeological investigation. At Thomas Jefferson's Monticello estate,
investigators found bones deposited from different animals, domesticated and
wild, in different parts of his estate. Although the differences in bones
buried between Building 'o' and the storehouse, both areas mainly for slaves,
could be explained by some other mechanism, apparently higher quality cuts of
meat were eaten at the former but not at the latter. As Crader notes:
"Meaty elements such as lumbar vertebrae, the pelvis, and the front
and hind limbs also are present, elements that virtually are absent from the
Storehouse assemblage."28 Differences between the secondary butchery marks, caused by
removing the meat at the cooking stage, appeared between Building 'o' and the
storehouse's artifacts. (Primary butchery
involves taking the animal apart at the joints after its slaughter). The bone marks found at the site of Building
'o' are like those that would be produced by the way the whites at the mansion
ate, but are completely absent from the Storehouse's assemblage of bones. The master, as well as his evidently
better-off slaves, ate their meat as roasts, while the worse-off slaves stewed
their meat in pots, with the bones chopped up much more.29 The evidence Crader literally unearthed may
indicate that Jefferson's domestic servants consumed the big house's leftovers
at their homes in the quarters, which gave them a somewhat better diet than the
field hands.30
The Slaves' Role in Procuring Their Own Food
Slaves
could seek additional food, if they were able and willing to put time into it
after a long day working for their masters and mistresses, by hunting,
trapping, fishing, and tending their own plots of crops. Some masters banned these activities, but
the slaves might still go secretly hunting (at least) anyway. As freedwoman Jenny Proctor of Alabama
recollected: "Our master, he
wouldn't 'low us to go fishing--he say that too easy on a nigger and wouldn't
'low us to hunt none either--but sometime we slips off at night and catch
possums." A strong majority still
permitted their slaves extra ways to get food, showing a strongly different
spirit from the English rural elite's about almost anyone else hunting besides
themselves. Northrup stated why: "No objections are made to hunting,
inasmuch as it dispenses with drafts upon the smoke-house, and because every
marauding coon that is killed is so much saved from the standing
corn." After nearly tripping over
a huge pile of oyster shells on her husband's cotton-island plantation, Kemble
later commented: "This is a horrid
nuisance, which results from an indulgence which the people here have and value
highly; the waters round the island are prolific in shell-fish, oysters, and
the most magnificent prawns I ever saw.
The former are a considerable article of the people's diet, and the
shells are allowed to accumulate."
The slaves also set out somewhat ineffective traps for birds at the
upstream rice-island estate. A
neighboring master shot and killed an old man of Douglass' master in Maryland
while "fishing for oysters" for the trivial offense of trespassing on
his land. In this way they "made
up the deficiency of their scanty allowance." Hunting could be of critical importance to the bondsmen's
diets. Archeological evidence from the
Hampton St. Simons island plantation had 17.6 percent of the bones gathered
from wild animals, while one at Cannon's Point had an amazing 89.8 percent by
number of bones (44.5 percent by estimated meat weight) from such fauna. These percentages sharply contrast with the
2 percent or less figures from Monticello, the Hermitage, and the plantation at
Kingsmill.31 Hence, depending
the environment and slaveowners' provisions (or presumed lack thereof),
hunting, fishing, etc. could be just a minor way to supplement the slaves'
diet, or a mainstay perhaps required for survival.
Many
slaveowners allowed their bondsmen to cultivate small patches of land, similar
to the allotments that English agricultural workers tended. The slaves often benefited little from them,
because this extra food was eventually obtainable only by working on their
gardens after having put in a full day's work for someone else, thus increasing
their real workweek. As aged ex-slave
Mary Reynolds of Louisiana recalled:
Sometimes Massa let niggers have a little patch. They'd raise 'taters or goobers. They liked to have them to help fill out on
the victuals. . . . The
niggers had to work the patches at night and dig the 'taters and goobers at
night. Then if they wanted to sell any
in town, they'd have to git a pass to go.
Some masters stopped their slaves from having gardens,
as ex-slave Jenny Proctor remembered.
Although this practice was common, Olmsted noted, various planters
prohibited it "because it tempts them to reserve for and to expend in the
night-work the strength they want employed in their service during the day, and
also because the produce thus obtained is made to cover much plundering of
their master's crops, and of his live stock." Planter Bennet Barrow allowed his slaves to have gardens, but
stopped them from selling anything grown on their plots because it
created a "spirit of trafficing" which required of them "means
and time" they had no right to possess.
Further, he added:
A negro would not be content to sell only What he
raises or makes or either corn (should he be permitted) or poultry, or the
like, but he would sell a part of his allowance allso, and would be tempted to
commit robberies to obtain things to sell.
Besides, he would never go through his work carefully, particularly When
other engagements more interesting and pleasing are constantly passing through
his mind, but would be apt to slight his work.
But by allowing animals such as pigs and chickens to
be raised by their bondsmen, other slaveowners were more generous. Fanny Kemble noted that the blacks of her
husband's rice-plantation could raise as many domestic birds as they wished,
but no longer had permission to raise their own pigs. Some slaves were free to grow even cash crops on their
"allotments." Overseer John
Mairs wrote to Mrs. Sarah Polk about how much cotton her hands had raised for
themselves, which was marketed with the rest of the plantation's output: "Youre servents crope of coten in 1849
was about 8400 lbs of sead coten."32 Hence, the practice of giving plots of land to slaves to raise
some of their own food or crops was common in the South, but slaveowners many
times placed major restrictions on it.
Variations in What Food Different Slaveowners Provided
to Their Slaves
Much
variation arose in what food and how much of it slaves had from master to
master and plantation to plantation. On
the one hand, enough disturbing cases of slaves who rarely or never got any
meat appear to cast some doubt on the utter universality of the "standard
rations." After all, would
Louisiana have a law requiring slaves to be fed (Olmsted believed) four pounds
of meat a week if slaveowners were already doing it? He added also:
"(This law is a dead letter, many planters in the State making no
regular provision of meat for their force)." Frederick Douglass noted Master Thomas Auld in Maryland allowed
him and three fellow slaves in his kitchen less than half a bushel of cornmeal
a week, "and very little else, either in the shape of meat or vegetables. It was not enough for us to subsist
upon." Thomas Hedgebeth, born free
in North Carolina, worked on some farms there.
As he recounted to Drew:
I have known that the slaves had not a bite of meat
given them. They had a pint of corn
meal unsifted, for a meal,--three pints a day. . . This is no hearsay--I've seen it through the
spring, and on until crop time: Three
pints of meal a day and the bran and nothing else.
After being beset by a minor mob of children begging
her for meat, Kemble later wrote that at the rice plantation her husband
owned: "Animal food is only
allowed to certain of the harder working men, hedgers and ditchers, and to them
only occasionally, and in very moderate rations." A neighboring plantation owner told her
somewhat offhandedly that a meatless diet was a good social control
device: "He says that he considers
the extremely low diet of the negroes one reason for the absence of crimes of a
savage nature among them; most of them do not touch meat the year
around." John Brown remembered as
a slave child in Virginia that:
"We never had meat of any kind, and our usual drink was
water."33
Contrary to what some may think, this evidence indicates that the corn
in the standard rations was more "standard" than the pork!
Other
slaves enjoyed a more luxurious, or at least varied, diet. For example, Thomas Jefferson's slaves had
at least a diversity of meats in their diet.
They received .5 to 1.5 pounds of beef, 4 to 8 fish, and 4 to 4.5 pounds
of pork per month per man or woman.
Judging from archeological remains at Andrew Jackson's Hermitage,
Jefferson's Monticello, and the Hampton Plantation in Georgia, beef may have
been more significant in the slave diet than commonly believed. Aged freedwoman Harriet McFarlin Payne
recalled in the quarters: "Late of
an evening as you'd go by the doors you could smell meat a-frying, coffee-making,
and good things cooking. We were fed
good." Although admittedly this
coffee may have been ersatz, McFarlin's account still shows these slaves were
far removed from the basically corn and water diet Brown described above. Although now seen as a proven public health
menace, the giving of tobacco to slaves by planter Bennet Barrow demonstrates
they received more than the bare necessities.
In Louisiana Olmsted encountered a plantation that to a minute degree
made up for the almost inhuman hours of grinding season: It issued extra rations of flour and allowed
the sugar refinery's hands to drink as much coffee and eat as much molasses as
they wished. Tobacco rations were
regularly dispensed year around, and molasses during winter and early summer. Cato of Alabama remembered as a slave his
mistress on Sunday gave out chickens and flour. He also had vegetables and dried beef for eating later. Plowden C. J. Weston, a South Carolina rice
planter with several plantations, prepared a standard contract for his
overseers which included standard rations (some weekly, some monthly, some in
only certain seasons or conditional upon good behavior) of rice, potatoes,
grits, salt, flour, fish or molasses, peas, meat, and tobacco. Some masters also issued (appropriately)
buttermilk to the often lactose-intolerant slaves. Many slaves got their hands on alcohol through their own earnings
or by selling property stolen from their masters.34 So although Fogel and Engerman's rosy
perceptions of the slave diet have some support, the weight of the literary
sources available fails to sustain their case overall, thus implying the
existence of flaws in their quantitative sampling methodology. The slaves usually "enjoyed" a
spartan diet--although their poor white neighbors perhaps often were only
somewhat better off--but a number had more than the standard rations through
having more progressive and/or indulgent masters and mistresses and/or unusual
opportunities or abilities to get food on their own.
The Diet of English Farmworkers: Regional Variations
Turning
to the English agricultural workers' diet, strong regional variations must be
remembered. In the same way the Border
States usually treated their slaves better than the Deep South partially
because of their ability to more easily escape to the North, the English
farmworkers living in areas north of the Midlands lived better than their
brethren to the south, where the most desperate rural poverty prevailed. Additionally, the grain-growing arable
districts in the southeast, due to greater seasonal variations in employment,
normally had worse conditions for their generally more numerous inhabitants
than the pastoral, shepherding, dairying districts in the southwest. Sir James Caird's dividing line, drawn from
the Wash (north of East Anglia) across England through the middle of Shropshire,
quite accurately divides the high-wage north from the low-wage south. In the north, because farmers as employers
faced the competition of mine operators and factory owners for labor, they had
to pay higher wages. Otherwise, low
wages would provoke farmworkers to "vote with their feet," causing
them to migrate to nearby booming urban areas benefiting from the economic
expansion produced by the industrial revolution. Even the likes of E.P. Thompson admits that the real wages of
laborers in such areas probably "had been rising in the decades before
1790, especially in areas contiguous to manufacturing or mining districts. 'There wants a war to reduce wages,' was the
cry of some northern gentry in the 1790s." By contrast, in the south, outside of London, a city of trades
dominated by skilled artisans which also contained relatively little factory
employment, few nearby urban areas possessed employers competing for
unskilled labor. The increasingly
overpopulated southern English countryside during this period (c. 1750-1860),
and the very understandable reluctance of rural laborers to relocate long
distances, enabled the gentry and farmers to successfully rachet down wages to
levels often barely above subsistence, especially for married men with large
families. According to Brinley, in
1850-51 southern England's average weekly agricultural wages were eight
shillings, five pence, about 26 percent lower than northern England's. By James Caird's calculations, the
difference was 37 percent.35
Under the old poor law (pre-1834), parish relief increasingly became a
way of life for many of the rural poor, especially during winter months in
arable counties due to their strongly seasonal swings in agricultural employment. The subsidizing of wages directly out of
parish relief funds raised by local property taxes ("the poor rates")
put mere bandages over the deep wounds ultimately inflicted by the decline of
service, the enclosure acts, and population growth. Unfortunately, such "solutions" as the Speenhamland
system, which gave supplemental allowances from parish relief funds to members
of families commensurate with the rise and fall of bread prices, only served to
depress wages further. The grim picture
of southern farmworkers' families depending year around mostly on the
(frequently irregularly employed) father's wages of ten shillings a week or
less and little else besides parish relief sharply contrasts with the northern
agricultural workers' much higher wages, the greater availability of work for
wives and/or children, and the frequent survival of service (the hiring of
(unmarried) farm servants under one year contracts).
The agricultural workers south of
Caird's wage line often endured truly desperate material conditions. A majority of them probably had a lower
standard of living than the moderately better-off slaves. In particular, meat had largely fallen out
of the diets of southern English farmworkers.
Remembering as a child how scarce meat was in Warwickshire, Agricultural
Labourers' Union organizer and leader Joseph Arch (b. 1826) commented:
Meat was rarely, if ever, to be seen on the labourer's
table; the price was too high for his pocket,--a big pocket it was, but with
very little in it . . .
In many a household even a morsel of bacon was considered a luxury. Flour was so dear that the cottage loaf was
mostly of barley.
He then discusses how scarce potatoes were in
"country districts"--or at least in 1830s Warwickshire. (For the growing dependency of the English
on potatoes, see pp. 33-35). Locally
only one farmer, a hoarder in 1835, had grown them. Similarly, a "Rector and Conservative" described the
status of "bacon, [which] when they can get it, is the staff of the
laborers' dinner." A careful
rationing exercise accompanied its appearance, which befit male privilege, or
female self-sacrifice, depending on one's perspective: "The frugal housewife provides a large
lot of potatoes, and while she indulges herself with her younger ones only with
salt, cuts off the small rasher and toasts it over the plates of the father and
elder sons, as being the breadwinners; and this is all they want."36
The Southern English Agricultural Workers' Diet Was
Poor, Often Meatless
William
Cobbett, the great Tory-turned-radical journalist and gadfly, saw up close the
poor, largely meatless diet of southern farm laborers. While travelling in Hampshire, he noted the
"poor creatures" who "are doomed to lead a life of constant
labour and of half-starvation."
After mentioning the snack of a pound of bread and a quarter pound of
cheese he and his young son ate came to five pence, or almost three shillings,
if they had it daily, he wondered:
How, then, Gracious God! is a labouring man, his wife,
and, perhaps, four or five small children, to exist upon 8s. or 9s. a
week! Aye, and to find house-rent,
clothing, bedding and fuel out of it?
Richard and I ate here, at this snap, more, and much more, than the
average of labourers, their wives and children, have to eat in a whole day, and
that the labourer has to work on too!
When facing such tight budgets, laborers spent little
on meat, but concentrated on cereal foodstuffs or (perhaps) potatoes, which
Cobbett hated to see. Later in the same
county, he indignantly observed:
These poor creatures, that I behold, here pass
their lives amidst flocks of sheep; but, never does a morsel of mutton
enter their lips. A labouring man told
me, at Binley, that he had not tasted meat since harvest; [this was written
Nov. 7th] and his looks vouched for the statement.37
Cobbett's
polemics constitute only a small part of the evidence describing how poor the
laborers' diet was in southern England.
Caleb Bawcombe, a shepherd, recalled for Hudson how the sight of deer
tempted his father Isaac into poaching while living in Wiltshire (c. 1820):
For many many days he had eaten his barley bread, and
on some days barley-flour dumplings, and had been content with this poor fare;
but now the sight of these animals [deer] made him crave for meat with an
intolerable craving, and he determined to do something to satisfy it.
Somerville encountered one man, who was better fed in
prison (he had participated in the Swing Riots of 1830) than when freed to live
in Hampshire. In prison he ate four
times a week 14 ounces of meat.
"No working man like me as can get it [good meat]. I wish I had as much meat now as I had in
the hulk; and I wishes the same to every poor hard-working man in
Hampshire." While visiting England,
Olmsted learned of this pathetic vignette from a farmer. Illustrating how scarce fresh meat was in
the laborers' diets, they gorged themselves the few times they could afford
it:
They [the laborers] will hardly taste it [fresh
meat] all their lives, except, it may be, once a year, at a fair, when they'll
go to the cook-shops and stuff themselves with all they'll hold of it; and if
you could see them, you'd say they did not know what it was or what was to be
done with it--cutting it into great mouthfuls and gobbling it down without any
chewing, like as a fowl does barleycorns, till it chokes him.
Edward Butt, a Sussex relieving officer and farmer,
recalled for the Committee on the New Poor Law that when he was younger (before
1794) the laborers had some meat everyday with their bread when they came to
eat in his father's farmhouse. But by
1837, they mainly ate bread and vegetables, especially potatoes. Unable to get milk in his area, the
farmworkers also ate little meat.
Somerville found one Wiltshire laborer, although saddened by his young
son's death, not fully regretting it either:
"We ben't sorry he be gone.
I hopes he be happy in heaven.
He ate a smart deal; and many a time, like all on us, went with a hungry
belly." Ironically, while serving
a sentence in Bermuda for poaching:
"We had terrible good living . . . by as I ever had for
working in England. Fresh beef three
times a-week, pork and peas four times a-week." When imprisoned laborers ate better free ones, Wiltshire's dire
conditions can only be imagined.
Similarly, one laborer in Hampshire told Somerville: "They say meat be wonderful cheap in
Reading, but what of it being cheap to we who can't buy it at no
price?" Speaking more generally,
Deane and Cole note an increase in England's grain growing acreage took place
"at the expense of the nation's meat supply" during the French
Wars. As shown by meat having
disappeared from their dinner tables, many agricultural workers in southern England
were beaten down to the edge of subsistence.38
Grains, especially Wheat, Dominate the Agricultural
Workers' Diet
Perhaps
best illustrating the importance of grain in Hodge's diet, consider the case of
one Hampshire laborer and his family.
They normally only ate bread, with some vegetables. Somerville learned the father had for
breakfast just dry bread, if anything at all, before mid-day. Especially in hard times, the laborers's
budgets might be 80 percent or more committed to buying bread and/or
flour. Looming large in the diet of
southern English agricultural workers, wheat was the dominant grain, at least
in good times. Barley, rye, or oats
also put their appearances, with the last being the north's dominant
grain. These grains had the advantage
of avoiding some of the nutritional pitfalls of corn (maize). For all his travails, Hodge in southern
England did not suffer from pellagra, as many black slaves in the American
South likely did for some part of the year.
Since reliance on grains other than wheat in southern England was deemed
a sign of poverty, laborers often resented eating bread made out of anything
else. Showing barley did not always
make for palatable fare, and pointing to exceptional poverty for the southern
English, consider this story Hudson learned about conditions in Wiltshire (c.
1830) for those on the parish make-work detail during the winter months. Some of his most elderly informants told of
how the laborers played with their food in the fields:
The men would take their dinners with them, consisting
of a few barley balls or cakes, in their coat pockets, and at noon they would
gather at one spot to enjoy their meal, and seat themselves on the ground in a
very wide circle, the men about ten yards apart, then each one would produce
his bannocks, and start throwing, aiming at some other man's face; there were
hits and misses and great excitement and hilarity for twenty or thirty minutes,
after which the earth and gravel adhering to the balls would be wiped off, and
they would set themselves to the hard task of masticating and swallowing the
heavy stuff.
Admittedly, food fights during lunch with barley balls
were exceptional. For the southern
English, wheat was their mainstay, with 94 percent of the population in
southern and eastern England subsisting on wheat in 1801. In contrast, the northern English, despite higher
incomes, had less of a taste for wheat.
According to Thomas, just some 25 percent of them lived upon it, while
50 percent consumed oats, 18 percent barley, and 6 percent rye. During the 1760s, Charles Smith judged,
assuming a population of around six million in England and Wales, that
3,750,000 ate wheat, 888,000 rye, 623,000 oats, and 739,000 barley. Evidently, wheat bread grew in market share
until the 1790s, when over two-thirds of the population relied upon wheat. The southern English desire to cling to the
wheaten loaf and to resist shifting to potatoes or other grains despite their
low wages and the effects of enclosure combined, Thomas infers, to cause them
possibly to eat less wheat than formerly and perhaps even less food
overall. The northern English
preference for oats (similar to the Scots') was made largely possible by the
availability of inexpensive milk to the poor.
Due to enclosures taking away most of their cows, laborers in the south
could not easily do likewise, as the Hammonds saw.39 By opposing having coarser grains the
mainstay of their diet, the southern English may well kept the finer
"luxury grain" (wheat) in their diet only by eating less of it.
The Role of Potatoes in the Laborers' Diet, Despite
Prejudices Against Them
Potatoes
played an important role in the laborers' diet, especially as the nineteenth
century drew on, and desperation broke down resistance against substituting
them for grain. Exemplifying this
contempt for potatoes, Cobbett saw them as a sign of the English sliding down
to the Irish level:
I see [in Sussex] very few of "Ireland's lazy
root;" and never, in this country, will the people be base enough to
lie down and expire from starvation under the operation of the extreme
unction! Nothing but a potatoe-eater
will ever do that.
Further, rather than see the English working people
reduced into living on potatoes,
he would see them all hanged, and be hanged with them,
and would be satisfied to have written upon his grave, 'Here lie the remains of
William Cobbett, who was hanged because he would not hold his tongue without
complaining while his labouring countrymen were reduced to live upon potatoes.'40
Despite Cobbett's opposition, a man full of the
prejudices of the southern farmworker which in spirit he remained, potatoes
became important in Hodge's diet.
Demonstrating the decay of farm laborers' anti-potato sentiments, one
Dorsetshire landowner in Dorset successfully got laborers to reclaim wasteland
for him in return for planting potatoes, despite they knew next year the
process would be repeated with another piece of land. In Somerset in 1845 during the Irish potato famine the blight
wiped out all the potatoes. Due to the
laborers' extreme dependence on them, this was a disaster because their wages
averaged a mere seven shillings and six pence a week year around: "For years past their daily diet is
potatoes for breakfast, dinner, and supper, and potatoes only. This year they are not living on potatoes,
because they have none." In
Sussex, Somerville found a laborer's wife complaining about "how it hurts
the constitution of a man to work hard on potatoes, and nothing else but a bit
of dry bread." This family ate
four days a week normally only potatoes and dry bread. Somerville even exaggerated how important
potatoes were in the diet of English laborers.
When commenting on how the potato blight had wiped out the crop in the
south and west of England, he said this event had gotten far less attention
than the Irish disaster: "Surely
the English potatoes are not to be overlooked, nor the English labourers, whose
chief article of diet potatoes are. . . .
How much greater must be the suffering be when to dearness of bread
there is the companionship of scarcity of potatoes!" Now although potatoes loomed increasingly
large in the laborers' diet, and 1845-46 was a bad year for both England and
Ireland, grains still remained their staff of life generally, unlike for the
Irish. Still, Cobbett's anti-potato
campaign must be ranked an ultimate failure:
Near the town of Farnham where Cobbett was born and buried, Somerville
found "the finest specimens of this year's crop which I have seen in any
part of England," having seen some excellent patches of potatoes between
that place and the location of Cobbett's farm at Normandy.41
Did Farmworkers Prefer Coarse or Fine Food?
Against
the view that the farmworkers (or slaves, by implication) prefer finer and less
coarse foods, Jeffries once commented on Hodge's desires and the problems with
changing what Mrs. Hodge winds up cooking:
The difficulty arises from the rough, coarse tastes of
the labourer, and the fact, which it is useless to ignore, that he must have
something solid, and indeed, bulky. . . . Give him the finest soup; give him pates,
or even more meaty entrees, and his remark will be that it is very nice,
but he wants 'summat to eat'. His teeth
are large, his jaws strong, his digestive powers such as would astonish a city
man; he likes solid food, bacon, butcher's meat, cheese, or something that
gives him a sense of fullness, like a mass of vegetables. This is the natural result of his training
to work in the fields. . . .
Let anyone go and labour daily in the field, and they will come quickly
to the same opinion.
Although his rather condescending views were on target
concerning food preparation, they ignore the farmworkers' desires for a less
coarse grain since it may compose 80 percent or more of their diets. Certainly, some class bias is definitely
coloring Jeffries' views of Hodge's real desires. Consider the implications of bread remaining the staff of life
for the laborers and making up most of their daily calories. To switch from wheat to barley, or to
oatmeal without milk, would tax anyone's digestive system used to the first
grain when it is most of what he or she eats, not just an incidental as
(wheat) bread is in many contemporary Americans' diets. Anyway, Jeffries was not discussing grain
substitution at all. Unlike most aristocrats,
the laborers engaged in heavy physical work needed serious bulk in their diet
in order to have sufficient calories to sustain their efforts, but their food
need not be unusually hard to digest or unpalatably coarse after its
preparation to fulfill their needs.
Indeed, according to Young, food that was too bulky might slow down the
laborers eating it. As E.P. Thompson
confirms: "There is a suggestion
that labourers accustomed to wheaten bread actually could not work--suffered
from weakness, indigestion, or nausea--if forced to change to rougher
mixtures."42
Although these complaints were likely partially psychosomatic, they
still show the laborers preferred less-coarse grain in their diet.
Admittedly,
the southern farmworkers' partiality for the white wheaten loaf was rather
unwise from a modern dietician's viewpoint, as Olmsted observed: "No doubt a coarser bread would be more
wholesome, but it is one of the strongest prejudices of the English peasant,
that brown bread is not fit for human beings." This comment raises the issue of taking into account the
laborers' definitions of "good conditions" before judging these by
purely modern criteria. Snell discusses
this issue at length. If Hodge placed a
strong priority on eating fine white wheat bread, outsiders are presumptuous to
rearrange his life for him, saying he should like what they judge to be
"good for him," even though objective reasons justify the would-be
imposition, i.e., the health advantages of increasing the amount of bran in the
daily diet. The threat to the status of
English laborers posed by coarser or non-wheaten bread in times of dearth was
rather irrational, but it still was probably more sensible than a contemporary
preference among the young for designer brand jeans or sneakers over store
brands of similar quality. The
"Brown Bread Act's" attempts to force laborers to consume bread made
of wholemeal flour provoked riots even during the terrible 1800-1801
agricultural year. In Surrey and Sussex
in southern England, the resistance to this law was especially strong;
unsurpisingly, it lasted less than two months.43
The
Monotony of the Farmworkers' Diet in the South of England
The
southern English agricultural workers' diet was monotonous, like the slaves'. In the Salisbury area (1850) Caird found it
largely consisted of water, bread, some potatoes, flour with a little butter,
and possibly a little bacon. He reports
what sounds like a prisoner's meal:
"The supper very commonly consists of bread and water." In 1840s Wiltshire, Somerville found two
laborers who could not afford bacon and vegetables with every dinner on eight
shillings a week. Following a recent
wage reduction, "they did not know how they would with seven
[shillings]." In Wooburn parish,
even in an apple orchard area most laborers did not earn enough to make apple
pies! Years later (c. 1875), in this
same general area, Jefferies still commented while noting improvement: "A basketful of apples even from the
farmer's orchard [as a gift] is a treat to the children, for, though better fed
than formerly, their diet is necessarily monotonous, and such fruit as may be
grown in the cottage garden is, of course, sold." Near Monmouth, Olmsted ran into a laborer
who, although he also had a pig and a small potato patch, "oft-times
. . . could get nothing more than dry bread for his family to
eat."44 Thomas Smart, a
Bedfordshire laborer, and his family subsisted upon garden-grown potatoes,
bread, and cheese, with a little bacon occasionally, supplemented by tea and a
little sugar. At times he went without
meat for a month. Milk was difficult to
buy from the local farmers.45
The hot dinner laborers had around noon on Sunday Jeffries
described as their "the great event" for the day. Of course, beer certainly emerged in Hodge's
diet around harvest time, and often not just then. The alcoholic part of the laborers' diets provoked the rural
middle and upper classes into nearly endless moralizing, at least about its
abuses that caused the father's wages to be wasted in beerhouses and a lack of
labor discipline. Due to the near
absence of meat, this diet was arguably less satisfying than slaves', except
that its bread often was purchased baker's bread. This bread, or even what the laborer's wife made at home, was a
much more carefully prepared and refined product than the cornmeal the slaves
often had to pound into a crude hoecake or johnnycake (cornbread). As Olmsted (c. 1851) observed while in
southern England:
The main stay of the laborer's stomach is fine, white
wheaten bread, of the best possible quality, such as it would be a luxury to
get any where else in the world, and such as many a New England farmer never
tasted, and, even if his wife were able to make it, would think an extravagance
to be ordinarily upon his table.46
Admittedly, white wheat bread likely was the only
luxury Hodge and his family in the south of England enjoyed. Despite this particular boon, a lack of meat
still characterized the southern English agricultural laborer's diet,
although not the northerner's. All in
all, the slaves' "standard rations" arguably, minus the problems of eating
crude corn bread and the risk of pellagra without further supplements, likely
surpassed in overall satisfaction what the majority of the free agricultural
laborers of England depended on because meat (and milk) fell out of their diet
as enclosure advanced, making it difficult or impossible for them to keep their
own cows or pigs (see pp. 40-41 below), and they often did not consume enough
even of starches (potatoes and bread) in hard times.
The Superior Conditions of the Northern English
Farmworkers
The
northern English agricultural laborer clearly enjoyed superior conditions to
his southern brother (or sister) during the general period of
industrialization. Joseph Arch recalled
why the union failed in organizing the northern farmworkers:
We could not do much in the north; about Newcastle and
those northern districts the men were much better paid, and they said, 'The
Union is a good thing, but we are well off and can get along without it.' The Union was strongest, and kept so, in the
Midland, Eastern, and Western counties.
In northern England near Scotland, in Northumberland
and Durham, the 1867-68 Commissioners found the wages were high and that the
labor market favored the laborers. The
institution of service still persisted in northern Northumberland in the mid to
late 1860s. They were often paid in
kind and received fifteen to eighteen shillings a week. Day laborers--those not under a contract for
their service--received two and a half to three shillings a day. Since the laborers' cottages were dispersed,
they avoided the pitfalls of the gang system since they lived on or near their
employer's premises, thus eliminating long walks to work. Wages were high enough so their children
rarely went to work before age fourteen except during summers, when
eleven-twelve year olds took to the fields during agriculture's seasonal peak
in labor requirements. In southern
Northumberland, none under ten worked.
Higher wages allowed northern laborers' children to receive more
education than their southern counterparts, where the much smaller margin above
subsistence correspondingly increased the need for them to earn their keep as
soon as possible. As another sign of
the North's tight labor market, routinely single women living in their
parents' home often were in farm service--"bound" in
"bondage"--and did all types of heavy farm work.47 Excepting perhaps for housing (see p. 69),
this area's agricultural workers were about as well-off as non-skilled manual
laborers then could expect.
Away
from these areas near Scotland, wages gradually decline until the
Lincoln\Leicester area is reached, where a rather abrupt transition to southern
English conditions occurs. Lincoln and
Nottingham had wages of fifteen to seventeen shillings a week, but Leicester
just eleven. Their diets reflected
these wage differences, since in Lincoln laborers' families had meat two or
three times a day, while in Leicester only the father had it, and then just
once a day. Similarly, for Oxfordshire
and nearby, Somerville described many laborers as "always under-fed, even
if always employed." By contrast,
Yorkshire's higher wages of fourteen shillings per week encouraged parents to
keep their children in school longer.
There farm service still remained, with foremen receiving thirty pounds
a year and board, a wagoner, sixteen to twenty pounds, and plowboys, ten to
fourteen. Tom Mullins of Stafford
remembered at age seventeen (c. 1880) he earned sixteen pounds per year and his
keep. In Stafford, where during his
life he moved from the southern to the northern part. (Incidently, Caird's wage line falls at this county's southern
border). Oatmeal, frequently turned
into thin sour cakes shaped like disks, along with dairy products, formed the
mainstay of the diet before c. 1890.
"Though wages were low people managed on them and also saved a
bit. Ten shillings went a lot further
then than now. Bread was 3d. the
quartern loaf, milk 3d. a quart, tobacco 3d. an ounce . . . beer was 2d., the
best was 3d." Since service
persisted in his area, an annual hiring fair took place about October tenth
each year. "But I never need to
hire myself out, as I always had more jobs offered than I could undertake. Pity I couldn't have spread myself a
bit!"48 As these
descriptions illustrate, the diet of the farm laborers north of Caird's line
was quite good, showing unquestionably that they were better off on average
than most slaves in the United States even before considering any quality of
life factors.49
Meat as a Luxury For Many Farmworkers
Unlike
most slaves, the meat English farm laborers ate often came from what animals
they personally owned and slaughtered themselves, assuming they were not sold
to meet rent, clothing, or other expenses.
In Wiltshire, near Cranbourne, Somerville found "all of them [the
laborers] kept a pig or two; but they had to sell them to pay their
rents." A Sussex farmer/relieving
officer told Parliamentary Commissioners that "every labourer at that time
[pre-1794] had a pig." Farmworkers
in that area then got pork from feeding their own animal, not directly from the
farmers they worked for. Showing a
serious decline in living standards had set in, Somerville found in 1840s
Dorset that often laborers were not allowed to keep a pig: "The dictum of the father of Sir John
Tyrrell, in Essex, is understood and acted on in Dorset--'No labourer can be honest
and feed a pig!'" Betraying a
materialistic bent, Cobbett summarized well how important owning pigs was to
the laborers: "The working people
[near Worcester] all seem to have good large gardens, and pigs in their
styes; and this last, say the feelosofers what they will about her 'antallectal
enjoyments,' is the only security for happiness in a labourer's
family." Of course, as part of
their duties for their masters, slaves raised pigs and other animals for
slaughter. But they did not own them
personally, except where their masters and mistresses allowed them to, such as
the task-system-dominated area of lowland Georgia and South Carolina. In England, butcher's meat (i.e., the meat
of animals killed and already cut up for the buyer) was regarded as a
luxury. Consequently, classes above the
laborers were its main consumers.50 Jefferies heaped scorn on maidservants, born of fathers still at
the plow, who when at "home ha[d] been glad of bread and bacon," but
after having worked for wealthy tenant farmers, "now cannot possibly
survive without hot butcher's meat every day, and game and fish in their
seasons."51
The meat laborers ate was often what they had raised themselves, whether
it was on the commons before enclosure, on allotments, or in their own
gardens. Depending on the commercial
market for meat was not a way to economize.
Scarce until after around 1830, allotments helped laborers raise their
own pigs (when so allowed). Indeed, in
some areas with allotments many or most did keep pigs, in part because these
produced some of the needed manure to keep their (say) fourth or half acre
fertile.52 But as the
enclosure movement gained strength after 1760, stripping farmworkers of grazing
land, they largely lost their ability to raise their own animals until
allotments slowly, partially, and haphazardly restored this ability after c.
1830.
The
Effects of Enclosure and Allotments on Hodge's Diet
Although
a more general discussion enclosure and alllotments' social effects appears
below (pp. 279-282, 296-299), the effects of both on the diet of the farmworkers
are considered here. Enclosure affected
cottagers and others who mixed wage earning and subsistence agriculture using
the commons by cutting out the latter, throwing them fully upon what their
wages could purchase. As E.P. Thompson
observes: "In village after
village, enclosure destroyed the scratch-as-scratch-can subsistence economy of
the poor--the cow or geese--fuel from the common, gleanings, and all the
rest." Ironically, as the
Parliamentary Commissioners observed in 1867-68, allotments undid this
consequence of enclosure, although they came later and affected significantly
fewer laborers, especially before the late nineteenth century. They allowed the laborers to grow
vegetables, especially potatoes, on a quarter or half acre of land specially
rented out to them. Despite his
notoriety as an advocate of enclosure, agricultural improvement writer Arthur
Young learned that enclosure usually oppressed the poor:
In twenty-nine cases out of thirty-one noted [by
ministers making additional comments on a survey checking the effects of
enclosure on grain production], the poor, in the opinion of the ministers, were
sufferers by losing their cows, and other stock. . . . [In some
cases] allotments were assigned them; but as they were unable to be at the
expense of the enclosure, it forced them not only to sell their cows, but their
houses also. This is a very hard
case, though a legal one; and as instances are not wanting of a much more
humane conduct, it is to be lamented that the same motives did not operate in
all.
These Anglican clerics (members of a group known to be
generally unfriendly to the laborers' best interests, as Cobbett and Arch made
clear) made comments that indicate enclosure's role in worsening the diet of
the poor in various areas following the loss of cows and other animals. One for the parish of Souldrop, Bedford
observed: "The condition of the
labouring poor [is] much worse now than before the enclosure, owing to the
impossibility of procuring any milk for their young families." Another added, for Tingewick,
Buckingham: "Milk [was] to be had
at 1d. per quarter before; not to be had now at any rate." Repeatedly they saw many had to sell off or
otherwise lose their cows (sixteen of the thirty-one mentioned this
specifically). For Passenham,
Northampton, one commented: "[The
poor were] deprived of their cows, and great suffers by loss of their
hogs." A man of the cloth for
Cranage, Chester remarked: "Poor
men's cows and sheep have no place, or any being." Such deprivations helped to breed resentment
one laborer expressed against almost anyone richer than himself. While attacking farmers, lords, and parsons,
he additionally brought Somerville into his line of fire: "I see you ha' got a good coat on your
back, and a face that don't look like an empty belly; there be no hunger
looking out atween your ribs I'll swear."53 Clearly, enclosure robbed meat and milk from
the mouths of many farm laborers and their families, and was a major cause for
eliminating animal foods from their diets as the enclosure movement gained
steam after 1760 in areas with a labor surplus, such as southern rural England.
Allotments
returned some of what enclosure had taken.
These small pieces of land gave underemployed and unemployed farmworkers
something to fall back upon financially.
Because of the Swing riots of 1830-31 and the rising burden of poor
rates caused by laborers applying for relief when their wages were insufficient
to support them, the movement to rent out fourth- or half-acre pieces of land
picked up speed as the nineteenth century passed. Intensively cultivated, small amounts of land could produce
impressive amounts of food, as the 1843 Committee reported. One rood of land--usually one-fourth of an
acre--could grow six months' worth of vegetables! Perhaps one-half would be planted in potatoes, with the rest
being beans, peas, and other vegetables.
One-eighth of an acre could grow five pounds' worth of crops--equal to
ten weeks or more of wages for many laborers in southern England. In at least once case, such a tiny parcel
produced eighty bushels of carrots, fourteen-fifteen bushels of other
vegetables, which was double or triple what the typical farmer would have
raised on the same land. A rood's worth
of land could also yield a hundred bushels of potatoes. Young even published calculations suggesting
that if 682,394 laborer's families each grew a half acre's worth of potatoes,
then England would have required no grain imports in the disastrous 1800-1801
agricultural year. Because of the
laborers' enormous desires for parcels to grow potatoes on--Cobbett's hated
root--some landlords unscrupulously charged rents up to eight pounds per acre
per year, which greatly exceeded what a tenant farmer would pay. Allotments could allow the farmworkers to
keep animals such as pigs, as noted above (pp. 39-40), potentially enabling
them to eat meat more regularly. One
M.P. for Lincoln helped tenants by renting out small allotments to keep animals
on. The 1867-68 Commission reported
that in Yorkshire some laborers benefited from having "cow gates" to
pasture cows in lanes nearby.54 Allotments often made a major difference in the diets of English
agricultural laborers fortunate enough to have them. These were unquestionably more important in their lives than the
patches of land slaveowners allowed many American slaves to cultivate. Unlike for the farmworkers, masters and
mistresses automatically gave to the slaves the standard rations, which was
most of what they ate, excepting some in task system areas, unlike in England
unless the worker was a live-in farm servant.
Comparing the Diets of English Paupers, Slaves, and
Their Government's Army
Indicating
that many southern English agricultural workers arguably had a diet worse than
that of many slaves, consider this comparison between the food they received
and what their respective governments gave to lowly privates in their
armies. The laborers per family on
parish relief received less than what one soldier in the Royal Army did, but at
least some slaves received rations that compared favorably to the American
army's. As Cobbett vehemently
protested:
The base wretches know well, that the common
foot-soldier now receives more pay per week (7s. 7d.) exclusive
of clothing, firing, candle, and lodging; . . . [and]
more to go down his own single throat, than the overseers and
magistrates allow [in parish relief] to a working man, his wife and three
children.55
As a growing population raised unemployment rates and
enclosure eliminated agriculture's subsistence economy, many laborers, probably
a solid majority in the south, were on parish relief for extended periods
during their lives, especially during the winter.56 Since arable agriculture was a highly
seasonal business, many more laborers were out of work in winter than in
summer, causing many to depend on parish relief or at various parish make-work
jobs such as stonebreaking on the highways or flint gathering in the
fields. The disproportion between at
least some slaves and the U.S. Army's rations for privates appears smaller than
the ratio between farm laborers on parish relief and average English
soldiers. Olmsted cited an
advertisement in the Richmond Enquirer which listed one and a quarter
pounds of beef and one and three-sixteenths pounds of bread--presumably
hardtack--as the daily ration, with an additional eight quarts of beans, two
quarts of salt, four pounds of coffee, and eight pounds of sugar distributed
out over each hundred days. In
contrast, the Daily Georgian noted the rations for slaves being hired
for a year to work on a canal. Each was
to receive "three and a half pounds of pork or bacon, and ten quarts of
gourd seed corn per week." At
least some masters would beat this ration of pork: Planter Barrow Bennet gave "weakly" "4 pound &
5 pound of meat to evry thing that goes in the field--2 pound over 4 years 1 1/2 between 15 months and 4 years
old--Clear good meat."57
Evidently, the disproportion was greater between what the British
government gave its privates and its laborers in parish relief (admittedly,
those not working) and what the American government gave its soldiers and a
number of slaveowners gave their slaves.
Better
Bread Versus Little Meat?: The Slave
Versus Farmworker Diet
Many
bondsmen in America had arguably better diets than many farmworkers in England,
at least when living south of Caird's wage line. Three pounds of pork or bacon routinely appeared in the diet of
most adult slaves, while many southern English agricultural workers, once both
population growth and enclosures took off, had meat generally eliminated from
their diets during the period c. 1780-1840.
On the other hand, the grain the slaves ate often was coarser, and (perhaps)
more nutritionally suspect. Wheat
bread, often made by a baker, which most southern farm workers mainly subsisted
upon, was clearly a more refined and tasty product than maize crudely pounded
and cooked in the forms of hoecake and johnnycake. Reflecting how the laborers had lost meat, but had a much finer
grain product compared to the slaves, J. Boucher, vicar of Epsom, observed in
late 1800: "Our Poor live not only
on the finest wheaten bread, but almost on bread alone."58 It remains unclear who ate more
vegetables. In this regard, those
laborers fortunate enough to have allotments--a serious possibility only
towards the end of the period being surveyed here--probably were better off
than a majority of the slaves, many of whom lived almost exclusively on the
"standard rations" of corn and pork.
Most farmworkers were not this lucky, and the stories of privation noted
above (pp. 30-32) suggest what
vegetables they had were limited to potatoes.
Regional variations within England complicate this picture: The minority of farmworkers fortunate enough
to live in the north near where competition for labor by industry and mining
pushed up their wages were certainly better off materially than most American
slaves, even before considering any more ethereal quality of life
criteria. As for American regional
variations, the Border States such as Virginia or Kentucky may have treated
their slaves better. But the difference
may have been been more in the form of less brutal treatment than in better
food, since Frederick Douglass, John Brown, and Charles Ball in Maryland and
Virginia describe rations similar to the evidence encountered from elsewhere in
the South. (Regional variations in the
food given to slaves, however, need much more research). The differences between America, a sparsely
populated, newly settled country, and England, a relatively densely populated
and intensively farmed land suffering from the Malthusian effects of rapid
population growth during its period of industrialization (and the mismanagement
of enclosure), helps explain this supreme irony: The free farm laborers of southern England arguably had a diet
worse than that of American bondsmen in Mississippi or Georgia. If those kept in slavery--the worst American
human rights abuse, all things considered--may have eaten better than English
rural laborers, that is deeply to the shame of England's elite--"old
corruption."59
Clothing for Slaves
The
amount of clothing slaves received is relatively well-documented, because it was
a significant item of expense often bought off-plantation and then shipped and
issued to the slaves instead of being made right on it. This generalization does not deny how
prevalent homespun clothing was in the South, but shows planters and other
masters often chose not to run truly self-sufficient plantations or farms in
matters of clothing. Because low
quality purchases were made, not many months passed before the slaves'
"new" clothes became loose-fitting half-rags. Bennet Barrow dispensed a not-atypical
clothing ration per year, at least for larger planters. In his "Rules of Highland
Plantation" he stated: "I
give them cloths twice a year, two--one pair shoues for winter evry third year a blanket--'single
negro--two.'" His relatively
frequent issue of blankets was perhaps unusual. He dutifully noted their issuance sometimes in his diary. Escaped slave Francis Henderson, from
"Washington City, D. C.," recalled that his master dealt with
blankets less generously--he received only one before running away at age
nineteen. "In the summer we had
one pair of linen trousers given us--nothing else; every fall, one pair of
woolen pantaloons, one woollen jacket, and two cotton shirts." In Virginia, Olmsted learned that:
As to the clothing of the slaves on the plantations,
they are said to be usually furnished by their owners or masters, every year,
each with a coat and trousers, of a coarse woollen or woollen and cotton stuff
(mostly made, especially for this purpose, in Providence, R. I.) for winter,
trousers of cotton osnaburghs for summer, sometimes with a jacket also of the
same; two pairs of strong shoes, or one pair of strong boots and one of lighter
shoes for harvest; three shirts, one blanket, and one felt hat.
This optimistic description probably pertained to the
more ideal masters and what slaveowners by reputation were supposed
to do, or reflected the better treatment of slaves the Border States such as
Virginia were known for. Later, in a
conversation with an old free black man, he observed: "Well, I've been thinking, myself, the niggars did not look
so well as they did in North Carolina and Virginia; they are not so well
clothed, and they don't appear so bright as they do there." Additionally, Christmas gifts of certain
finery could supplement the basic yearly ration of two summer suits and one
winter suit, as he noted about four large adjacent plantations "situated
on a tributary of the Mississippi" owned by one normally absentee
planter. Slaves also could purchase
clothes with earnings from working on Sundays, holidays, or late at night.60 Hence, the slaves normally were issued a
certain amount of clothing yearly, but was it enough?
Bad Clothing Conditions for Slaves
Evidence
repeatedly points to the everyday work clothes of enslaved blacks being near
rags. The semi-tropical weather of the
Deep South no doubt contributed to slaveowners' complacency with ill-dressed
slaves. Perhaps the reason why Olmsted
had observed better dressed slaves in Virginia and North Carolina was because
planters and other slaveholders knew these states had harsher climates compared
to the Deep South, which encouraged them to distribute more and/or better
clothes. Even so, ragged slaves were
common throughout the South. Born free
in North Carolina, Thomas Hedgebeth had worked for various slaveholders. He saw how badly dressed the slaves were at
one place. They had no hats while
having to work in the fields in summer.
As he described:
They were a bad looking set--some twenty of
them--starved and without clothing enough for decency. It ought to have been a disgrace to their
master, to see them about his house. If
a man were to go through Canada [where he was living at the time] so, they'd
stop him to know what he meant by it--whether it was poverty or if he was
crazy,--and they'd put a suit of clothes on him.
The slaves Olmsted saw while passing by on a train in
Virginian fields were "very ragged."
At one farm in Virginia, "the field-hands wore very coarse and
ragged garments." A different problem
appeared on the rice-island estate Kemble stayed at. The slaves issued a fair amount of thick cloth to turn into
clothes. But in coastal lowland
Georgia's hot climate the resulting garments were virtually intolerable during
summer, even to the blacks accustomed to the climate.61 Simply put, their clothes were so bad
because their owners basically determined how much would be spent on them, not
the slaves themselves. Their masters'
self-interest naturally led to them to minimize "unnecessary clothing
expenditures."
Slave
children suffered most from inadequate clothing rations. Often they ended up with just a long shirt,
although nakedness was not unknown. Aged
freedwoman Mary Reynolds of Louisiana recalled what she wore when she was
young: "In them days I weared
shirts, like all the young-uns. They
had collars and come below the knees and was split up the sides. That's all we weared in hot
weather." Frederick Douglass
recalled his want of clothing when he was a child:
I suffered much from hunger, but much more from
cold. In hottest summer and coldest
winter, I was kept almost naked--no shoes, no stockings, no jacket, no
trousers, nothing on but a coarse tow linen shirt, reaching only to my knees.
He found the thought of owning a pair of trousers at
the age of seven or eight--offered because he was being sent to Baltimore to
work as a servant--"great indeed!"
Aged freedman Cicero Finch of Georgia remembered how both slave boys and
girls wore the same basic piece of clothing:
An' de chillun?
When dey big 'nough ter put on anything, it's a shirt. Boys an' girls de same. Run roun' in dat shirt-tail. Some de gals tie belt roun' de middle, an'
dat's de only diffrunts.
In an upbeat recollection presumably blurred by
nostalgia, old ex-slave Kike Epps of South Carolina described a still lower
standard that prevailed for children's clothing on his master's
plantation: "Dis hy'ar [banyan]
shu't . . . wuh made jus' lak a sack. Got hole in top fo' de haid, an' holes fo' de arms. Pull it over yo' haid, push yo' arms t'rough
de side holes, an' dar yo' is!"
They would wear this bag with holes "till dey mos' growed
up!" Due to South Carolina's warm
climate even in winter, he wore this outfit without complaint, making for a
decidedly different memory from Frederick Douglass's bitter experience in
Maryland's much harsher winters.
Although this pattern had exceptions, generally little was spent on
children's clothes because they did no field labor when young, causing the less
forward-looking "entrepreneurial" slaveowners to "invest"
less in their "human capital" at this point in their lives, to use
desiccated cliometric terminology.62
Differences in Clothing Provided for Slaves with
Different Positions
Just
as for food, different groups of slaves received different kinds and/or amounts
of clothing. Most obviously, the larger
planters issued better clothes to servants than to field hands, since they had
to look presentable to the big house's visitors.63 They also received the cast-offs of the
master's family, in the same way they enjoyed the scrapings and leftovers of
the master's table. After being made a
servant as a child, old freedman Henry Coleman remembered his mother told his
father about one of his new needs:
"That black little nigger over there, he got to git hisself some
pants 'cause I's gwine to put him up over the white folks's table." His job was to swish away flies from a swing
with a brush of peacock feathers over his owner's table. To wear only a shirt from that elevated
position just might prove to be too revealing!
Slaves with managerial duties also acquired better attire. Olmsted described the
"watchman"--the top slave who served virtually as a steward and
storekeeper for a large South Carolina rice planter--as being as well-dressed
and as well-mannered as any (white) gentleman.
One ex-slave said his father, a driver, was "de only slave dat was
give de honor to wear boots."64 So at the cost of living under a master's or mistress's closer
supervision, drivers and domestic servants enjoyed greater material benefits
such as having better food and clothing.
Many
slaves saved their best clothing for going to church on Sundays or special
occasions, but reserved the worst for work.
Gus Feaster, a South Carolinian freedman, remembered:
Us wore the best clothes that us had [at
church]. . . . Us kept
them cleaned and ironed just like the master and the young masters done
theirn. Then us wore a string tie, that
the white folks done let us have, to church.
That 'bout the onliest time that a darky was seed with a tie.
Solomon Northrup, held in bondage in Louisiana,
recalled that on Christmas slaves dressed up the best they could:
Then, too, 'of all i' the year,' they array themselves
in their best attire. The cotton coat
has been washed clean, the stump of a tallow candle has been applied to the
shoes, . . . [and, perhaps] a rimless or crownless hat
. . . [was] placed jauntily upon the head.
Many women wore red ribbons in the hair or
handkerchiefs over their heads then as well.
Kemble saw a similar phenomenon, comparing it to poor Irish immigrants
who spent (judging from her middle class standpoint) too much on clothes after
coming to America:
I drove to church to-day in the wood-wagon, with Jack
and Aleck, Hector being our charioteer, in a gilt guard-chain and pair of
slippers to match as the Sabbatic part of his attire. . . . The [male] Negroes certainly show the same
strong predilection for finery with their womenkind.
Most strikingly, a free black man from North Carolina
peddling tobacco in South Carolina told Olmsted how differently the slaves
dressed while on the job compared to church:
Well, master, Sundays dey is mighty well clothed, dis
country; 'pears like dere an't nobody looks better Sundays dan dey do. But Lord!
workin' days, seems like dey haden no close dey could keep on 'um at
all, master. Dey is a'mos' naked, wen
deys at work, some on 'em.65
Of course, since they normally worked six days out of
seven, bondsmen could not wear good clothes every work day without ruining all
they had. Most lacked the necessary
changes of shirts and pants to do that.
Dressing badly at work compared to church or other special occasions
also may have reflected their different attitudes towards the two
situations. On the day they are free
from work and "own their own time," they dressed to express
themselves. But when they are in the
fields, six days out of seven, and their time is the master's time, they
avoided dressing above average or trying to impress their companions in
bondage, unlike at church on Sundays.
Doing so might well bring the unwanted attentions of the overseer or
master against some "uppity" black.66 Bondsmen and women indulged in what Kemble
called "the passion for dress" not everyday, but only on days where
the immediate coercion associated with work ceased.
The Factory Versus Homespun: The Master's Decision
Masters
acquired clothing for their slaves in two different ways. First, they could place orders with
factories in the North or in England.
Second, they could make homespun right on the farm or plantation
itself. Olmsted time and time again
refers to the ubiquity of homespun as worn by whites in the South,
including the smaller planters, which he rarely witnessed in the North. When summarizing the economic backwardness
of the South, he pointed out: "How
is it that while in Ohio the spinning-wheel and hand-loom are curiosities, and
homespun would be a conspicuous and noticeable material of clothing, half the
white population of Mississippi still dress in homespun, and at every second
house the wheel and loom are found in operation?"67 One of Bennet Barrow's most common diary
notations describing his slaves' daily work concerned slave women spinning on
rainy days which kept them (at least) busy.
Slaves and others recalled the making of homespun clothing.68 Here the white population's standard of
living constitutes a ceiling on the black/slave population's conditions. Slaves are exceedingly unlikely to have
anything routinely better than their white neighbors, outside of exceptional
individuals such as the aforementioned "watchman" on one South
Carolina rice plantation. Homespun was
coarser cloth and required much time to produce, but had the advantage of
reducing cash outlays for subsistence farmers.
They gained more independence from the market, but at the cost of many
extra hours of labor. Submitting to the
division of labor, which small farmers accessed through the market, always
presents trade-offs: They could stay
independent, and either go without or put more hours of their lives into
producing at home what could be bought instead, or pay for it, using cash
earned from cash crops sold on an open market, knowing that a sustained price
drop could ruin them.
Unfortunately
for the slaves, when their masters chose to rely on the market, the clothing
often specially manufactured for them was of a cheap, low-grade quality. Clothes made of "Negro cloth" were
durable but rough on the skin. Even
clothes made of this material may not last that long, since they often had only
one or two sets of clothes to wear, besides any finery they might luckily
possess. Having so few clothes made it
hard to wash and clean their clothes more than once a week.69 Since they often did not have another full
set of clothes to change into, the daily wear and tear on what they did own was
nearly ceaseless during the work week.
Clearly, since the slaveowners normally chose what and how much the
market produced, it was hardly a savior in providing better clothes for the
slaves.
Slaves and Shoe Shortages
Slaves
also suffered from not having enough pairs of shoes or boots. The South's warm climate fortunately
mitigated this shortage's negative effects, especially in the Deep South. Old freedwoman Nicey Kinney recalled that
the freedmen after emancipation when going to church were "in their Sunday
clothes, and they walked barefoots with their shoes acrost their shoulders to
keep 'em from gitting dirty. Just 'fore
they got to the church they stopped and put on their
shoes . . ." This
obviously implies that many slaves preferred to go barefoot at times, at
least in summer. Still, Barrow knew the
dog days of August could torment even his blacks' feet: "ground here verry hot to the negros
feet." But when cold weather
closed in, lacking adequate protection for the feet suddenly became
dangerous. Once the jealous mistress of
Harriet Brent Jacobs ordered her to take off her creaking new shoes. Later she was sent on a long errand during
which she had to walk in the snow barefoot.
After returning and going to bed, she thought might end up sick, even
dead. "What was my grief on waking
to find myself quite well!" As a
slave child, Frederick Douglass recalled what going barefoot did to his
feet in Maryland's winter: "My
feet have been so cracked with the frost, that the pen with which I am writing
might be laid in the gashes."
Freedwoman Mary Reynolds had to wear shoes with brass studs in the toes
and sides which hurt her ankles because they were too small. Despite rubbing tallow into these shoes and
putting rags in them, they still left her with life-long scars. Similar to their clothing situation, slave
children were even more neglected about being given proper shoes--many received
none at all. One Virginia slaveowner
ruefully regretted the deadly result of failing to shod one slave, telling
Olmsted that: "He lost a valuable
negro, once, from having neglected to provide him with shoes."70 Judging from how masters and mistresses
tended to neglect supplying their bondsmen with sufficient clothing, deeming it
rather optional, especially in the Deep South, the slaves were even more apt to
be ill-supplied with shoes, especially since they themselves did not always
wish to wear them. Slaves certainly
were unlikely to have more shoes than they needed!
Just as for clothing, masters and
mistresses could get their bondsmen shoes from two different basic
sources. One standard approach,
commonly used by the larger planters, was to order them from some company in
the North or England. Brogans, basic,
hard, and heavy work shoes, were not purchased while meditating on the tenderness
of the slaves' feet. They were often
ordered a size large, since the certainty of the fit was questionable when
ordering from a distance. Barrow
repeatedly recorded giving shoes to his slaves, always in October when
noted. He said they were issued for winter
yearly, which has its implications about the rest of the year. Alternatively, shoes could be made locally
and individually by a shoemaker, perhaps by a slave craftsman owned by the
planter himself.71
Either way, the ration of shoes given out each year was unlikely to last
until the next year's new allowance arrived while suffering under the strain of
heavy field work. The bondsmen's
pre-teen children were fortunate to get any shoes at all, since they rarely
worked with the crops.
Fogel and Engerman's Optimistic Take on Slaves'
Clothing Rations
Pressing
forth an optimistic line on slave clothing allowances, Fogel and Engerman
claim:
These [records from large plantations] indicate that a
fairly standard annual issue for adult males was four shirts (of cotton), four
pairs of pants (two of cotton and two of wool), and one or two pairs of
shoes. Adult women were issued four
dresses per year, or the material needed to make four dresses. Hats were also typically issued annually
(women received headkerchiefs).
Blankets were issued once every two or three years.
They add that sometimes slaveowners issued socks,
underclothes, petticoats, jackets, and coats, the latter for winter
months. Likely only the most
paternalistic masters indulged in such a high yearly issue. Two or three sets of clothes seem a more
likely average annual ration, as Sutch argues.
Barrow issued blankets every three years, but Francis Henderson's master
was apparently far less generous. The
exemplary planters Fogel and Engerman cite must be offset against the very
neglectful ones. Ball gave his editor a
horror story about his fellow slaves' lack of clothing on a large cotton
plantation in South Carolina. In the
work gang, none had a full set of clothes, with "not one of the others
[besides himself] had on even the remains of two pieces of apparel," and
many of the teenage slaves were naked.
Although an abolitionist editor's bias may have distorted this story,
undeniably most slaves looked on workdays terribly ragged by Northern free
white standards.72
Clothing and English Agricultural Workers
Turning
to the English case, documenting conditions becomes significantly harder. Since the farmworkers normally bought
clothing on their own, sources similar to that of the planters' records of
clothing bought for their slaves do not exist.
Furthermore, the kind of clothing the lower classes wore in England was
often differed little in general appearance from the middle class's. Unlike other European societies, England had
no required "peasant costume" that automatically marked off those working
the land from the rest of society. But
similar to many French peasants, many agricultural workers did wear
smocks. Somerville once saw a crowd, of
at least one thousand men, women, and children, who gathered to hear anti-corn
law speeches. The men, composing
two-thirds of it, mostly wore "smock-frocks or fustian coats, just as they
had come from their work." This
outfit's prevalence gradually declined as the nineteenth century progressed. As a youth in Warwick (c. 1840), Joseph Arch
was given a smock of the coarsest cloth to wear, like other plowboys in his
village. Since the sons of the local
artisans sported cloth-coats (albeit made of shoddy material), they felt
superior to the farmworkers' sons. The
difference resulted in "regular pitched battles of smock-frock against
cloth-coat." In Sussex, Cobbett
saw a boy wearing a faded, patched blue smock, which made him reflect that he
had worn the same when he was young himself (c. 1775). This boy also had on nailed shoes and a worn
but clean shirt.73
Conspicuously, by comparison, African-American slaves, the lowest of the
low in their society, wore no smocks while in the fields, nor did the white
farmers either.
The Low Standards for Farmworkers, especially in
Southern England
Clothing
standards for agricultural workers, at least in southern England, approached
the bottom of the heap even for the working class. While attacking the upper class's hypocrisy on this score,
Cobbett quoted Sir John Pollen, an M.P. for Andover. Attempting to justify the corn laws as a means of helping the
agricultural laborers, Pollen said the "poor devils" had
"hardly a rag to cover them!"
Somerville knew of one child who lent his shoes to another without any
while they played together. Many of the
budgets that researchers collected on the farmworkers normally had nothing
devoted to purchasing clothing. After
constructing a fairly reasonable, non-luxurious budget, Cobbett found that
maintaining a family of five on five pounds of bread, one pound of mutton, and
two of pork a day cost (c. 1825) over sixty-two pounds a year. This figure, for just food alone,
was more than double what their average annual wages likely totaled, based on a
nine to ten shillings a week average.
Those on parish relief received still less (just seven shillings six
pence per week, by Cobbett's reckoning).
Of course, they ate far less meat than this in reality, ensuring their
budgets came closer to balancing. With
the extra harvest earnings, clothing (perhaps) could be bought for a brief
period annually, since these put the agricultural workers somewhat above
subsistence in much of southern England.
Otherwise, they had to get them by charity or even begging. The Hampshire girls Cobbett saw in their
Sunday best had received from charity a camlet gown, a white apron, and a plaid
cloak each. But the upper class's
generosity was unreliable, especially when by promoting enclosure and high
excise taxes it had taken forcibly from the laborers much more than it ever
gave back. As a result, many
agricultural laborers could only afford to own one change of clothes
altogether, putting them right at or below the level of many slave field hands
in America.74
This conclusion is hardly surprising, because of the high cost of food
for large families where the father was the main or sole support, especially
when his family was scraping bottom during the family life cycle. With the parents struggling to raise a large
number of children, household duties heavily burdening the mother, and only one
child (perhaps) able to start earning a little at age eight or nine, a
virtually guaranteed family financial crisis lasting some years struck working
class families until their children became teenagers and could earn their keep. Under these conditions, clothing expenses
were necessarily cut to the bare bone.
Although
necessary for life, clothing was often an easily postponable purchase, since
the laborer's wife (almost inevitably) could somehow patch and mend what
near-rags the family had for another year or more when a major crisis for the
family or region struck. Encountering a
laborer in northern Hampshire along the road, Somerville found he had four
children and a wife to support on a mere eight shillings per week. Hovering near the bottom of the family
life-cycle, having a wife unable to leave home everyday, and having one
twelve-year-old earning two shillings a week, they could not think of buying
new clothes: "Clothes, bless you! we never have no clothes, not new--not to
speak of as clothes. We thought to have
something new as bread was getting cheaper, but wages came down, and we ben't
better nor afore; it take all we earn to get a bit of
bread . . ."
Although many laborers locally raised pigs, they saw little of them as
food--they sold them to pay the rent, and maybe buy some clothing. As the trade of Poole, Dorset scraped bottom
in 1843, and the surrounding countryside held in the grip of economic distress,
the local people avoided coming into town to buy clothes. Similarly, when the potato blight wiped out
the potatoes of southern and western England in 1845, and high bread prices
came with little or no increases in wages, Somerville heard that: "The village shopkeepers and tradesmen
feel it [the potato famine], and complain that the labourers are neither paying
what they owe for clothes and groceries, nor are they making new
purchases."75
So whenever a family or general distress hit, laborers put off buying
new clothes, since bread or potatoes were more immediately vital to life.
Homespun More Common in America than England c. 1830
A
major difference between the America of 1860 and the America of a generation or
two earlier Cobbett lived in (1792-1800, 1817-1819) was how commonly Northern
farm families made their own homespun clothing. One time he observed "about three thousand farmers, or
rather country people, at a horse-race in Long Island, and my opinion was, that
there were not five hundred who were not dressed in home-spun coats." By the eve of the Civil War, this state of
affairs had plainly changed. Having a
farm on Staten Island, Olmsted certainly had a reasonable idea of conditions on
Long Island. He commented how rare
homespun was in the North, even in a more recently settled state such as Ohio
(see pp. 48-49 above). Cobbett saw the
decline of the home manufacture of clothing as a real privation for farm
families. Correspondingly, he condemned
concentrating its manufacture in the factories of the "Lords of the
Loom." Noting its bad effects
on keeping women employed at home, he points to the downside of the regional
division of labor:
The women and children, who ought to provide a great
part of the raiment, have nothing to do.
The fields must have men and boys; but, where there are men and
boys there will be women and girls; and, as the Lords of the Loom
have now a set of real slaves, by the means of whom they take away a
great part of the employment of the country-women and girls,
these must be kept by poor-rates in whatever degree they lose employment
through the Lords of the Loom.
Clearly, regional specialization and the division of
labor had its costs in economic displacement.
Since the industrial belt in the Midlands made most of England's cloth,
and the tailors of London stitched much of it together, both undermined the
economic independence of agricultural workers and farmers by making much of
England's clothes. In this case,
strongly counter-balancing the advantages of raising the quality and lowering
time spent on making clothes for rural families, the laborers' womenfolk had
much less to do, causing a kind of generalized and semi-hidden underemployment. As general population growth raised the
unemployment rate and the regional and sexual division of labor intensified,
women were pushed out of fieldwork as the eighteenth century drew to a close
and the nineteenth century opened, further impoverishing southern English agricultural
workers. One farmer/relieving officer
in Sussex remembered that the poor once made their own clothing (c. 1794), but
that had changed by 1837.76
By contrast, since America boasted a nearly empty wilderness crying out
for settlement, far more work was available for everyone. Under these conditions, women need not
suffer such want, in part because male wages or work brought in much more
income. Hence, differing national
conditions led to a paradoxical result:
Olmsted saw the American South's heavy dependence on homespun clothing
as a sign of its poverty/economic backwardness, but Cobbett saw its absence in
England as evidence of the rural working class's increased impoverishment.
Special Measures Used to Buy Clothes
Illustrating
the rather desperate clothing situations southern English agricultural workers
endured, consider the implications of one typical self-help used to help solve
it: benefit clubs. In Dorset, Caird knew of a clothing club
that operated in the area around Blandford.
Similar to medical clubs and friendly societies in concept, this
particular one helped meet the clothing needs of rural workers and their
families. The workers contributed one
penny for themselves and per child per week, the employer one penny also, in
equal proportion. At the end of the
year, club members received clothing equal in value to their accounts' totals. Despite only applying a mere bandaid over
the gaping wound of low wages, this approach still encouraged laborers to
exercise more self-discipline. They
already had to operate carefully within low incomes to meet their most
immediate needs outside food and shelter (rent). One anonymous resident rector had the program of selling
"blankets, shoes, and various articles of clothing, at two-thirds of the
prime cost" to laborers. After
having sold them to all in his parish, he later limited sales to the sober,
reliable, and church-going. In a
pamphlet published during the Swing riots stating the laborer's case against
the farmer and landlord's, an anonymous Christian paternalist calculated the
cost for laborers of a "reasonable" set of men's clothes and shoes
per year at £3 14s. 6d. and women's (much of it in cloth, not ready-to-wear) at
£2 18s. 2d. Since the list for men
consisted of three shirts, one pair of "trowsers," one jacket, one
waistcoat, two pairs of socks, and one pair of shoes, it indicates prevailing
clothing standards must have been still lower than this for southern
rural districts in England. Also
including other basic items such as soap and candles, these expenses "must
be raised by the extra work of the labourer, by his profits in the hay
and corn harvest, by the produce of his garden, by the leasings of his family,
and by the earnings, if any, of his wife and children."77 Simply put, the regular weekly earnings of
Hodge south of Caird's wage line usually failed cover anything beyond food and
perhaps rent if he was the sole support for a large family. Ironically, the anonymous Christian
paternalist's clothing budget's list of items being fewer than what many larger
American planters issued their slaves annually. Special measures such as a "clothing club" or the use
of harvest earnings for a vital necessity at a low-level of purchases help
demonstrate the constant struggle the southern English agricultural workers had
against ending up with mere rags to wear.
Slave Housing:
Variations around a Low Average Standard
Since
their homes often were crude log cabins with dirt floors, the housing
conditions of slaves were hardly ideal even for their day and age. The impulse to heap indignation against
these conditions, however, must be stiffled, at least to the extent the slaves
lived on the frontier, where their master and mistress' "big house"
often surpassed what their chattels endured by only a few steps. The housing slaves had in (say) South
Carolina or Virginia in the 1800s illustrated how long settled areas treated
them, but it cannot be safely extrapolated to what blacks endured when moving
westward with their white owners into Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi,
Louisiana, and especially Texas.
Correspondingly, the slaves suffered with very crude housing when they
were first taken to America en masse in the early 1700s, as slavery
became widespread. But as the decades
passed, at least some more paternalistic masters upgraded their slaves'
dwellings, even if they remained beneath those most Northern free workers
had. Hence, some antebellum defenses of
slavery focused on the conditions of slaves on large plantations in
long-settled regions such as lowland Georgia or South Carolina and Tidewater
Virginia, where some authentic paternalism and mutual outgoing concern may have
developed because (by the mid-1800s) the same white families had owned several
generations of slave families. Having
played with the children of slaves when young, the planter's white sons and
daughters, as they became older and the master or mistress of the plantation
themselves, would have long-standing personal relationships with at least some
bondsmen.78 These
relationships simply could not exist when the earlier colonialists had imported
freshly enslaved Africans directly from West Africa. Nor did this situation arise among non-hereditary slaveowners on
the make on the frontier, where housing conditions were inevitably worse
anyway. Hence, variations in slave
housing partially correspond to how long a given area of the South had been
settled, how paternalistically inclined the slaveowners were, and how long they
and their ancestors had lived in one area with the same slave families over the
generations.
As
overwhelming evidence indicates, the slave quarters normally consisted of
"houses" little better than the barns and sheds that sheltered many
animals during the winter in the North or in England. One room was all many, perhaps most, slaves had, with perhaps a
loft for the children to sleep in, such as where former slave Charley Williams
lived in Louisiana. As freedwoman
Harriet Payne commented:
"Everything happened in that one room--birth, sickness, death and
everything."79
Slaves often lived in log cabins which allowed them to see through the
chinks between the logs. Dirt floors
were a standard feature.80
Escaping from slavery near Washington, D.C., Henderson described
wretched housing conditions: "Our
houses were but log huts--the tops partly open--ground floor,--rain would come
through. . . . in rains I have seen her [his old aunt] moving
about from one part of the house to the other, and rolling her bedclothes about
to try to keep dry,--every thing would be dirty and muddy." Booker T. Washington said that as a child he
was born and had lived in "a typical log cabin, about fourteen by sixteen
feet square." It had no glass
windows, a dirt floor, a door that barely clung to its hinges, and numerous
notable holes in the walls. Since his
mother was the cook, the plantation's cooking was done in this
unsanitary cabin, for both whites and blacks!
Olmsted in South Carolina's high country found conditions worse than
what animals in the North suffered:
The negro-cabins, here, were the smallest I had
seen--I thought not more than twelve feet square, inside. . . .
They were built of logs, with no windows--no opening at all, except the
doorway, with a chimney of stick and mud; with no trees about the, no porches,
or shades, of any kind. Except for the
chimney . . . . I should have conjectured that it had been built
for a powder-house, or perhaps an ice-house--never for an animal to sleep in.
Providing scant comfort to the slaves, the local poor
whites' homes were "mere square pens of logs" of little better
quality.81
While
in Virginia, Olmsted passed larger plantations that had "perhaps, a dozen
rude-looking little log-cabins scattered around them [the planters' homes], for
the slaves." In Louisiana he saw a
creole-owned plantation where "the cabins of the negroes upon which were
wretched hovels--small, without windows, and dilapidated." In the frontier conditions of Texas, he
described one planter's slave quarters as being
of the worst description, though as good as local
custom requires. They are but a rough
inclosure of logs, ten feet square, without windows, covered by slabs of hewn
wood four feet long. The great chinks
are stopped with whatever has comes to hand--a wad of cotton here, and a
corn-shuck there.
They gave little protection against the cold. Kemble thought she had found the
worst slave accommodations by far at the Hampton estate on St. Annie's in
Georgia, but later discovered far worse ones nearby: "The negro huts on several of the plantations that we passed
through were the most miserable habitations I ever beheld. . . .
[They were] dirty, desolate, dilapidated dog-kennels." One master "provided" the worst
housing of all for his slaves--none! After getting into trouble with the law in Georgia, he had moved
himself and his slaves to Texas, as aged freedman Ben Simpson remembered: "We never had no quarters. When nighttime come, he locks the chain
around our necks and then locks it round a tree. Boss, our bed were the ground."82 These examples illustrate the general
crudeness of slave housing, since it fell below what most whites in the
contemporaneous North would have found tolerable, even for many living in more
recently settled states such as Illinois or Wisconsin.
Cases of Good Slave Housing
Sometimes
a higher standard of slave housing prevailed on some plantations. One particularly impressive case, pointed
out as such earlier by Olmsted, was a certain rice plantation not too far from
Savannah, Georgia:
Each cabin was a framed building, the walls boarded
and whitewashed on the outside, lathed and plastered within, the roof shingled;
forty-two feet long, twenty-one feet wide, divided into two family tenements,
each twenty-one by twenty-one; each tenement divided into three rooms.
The cabins all had doors that could be locked and
lofts for the children to sleep in.
Each room had a window with a wooden shutter to close it. Overcrowding was avoided, since only five
people on average lived in each of these homes. To use English terminology, each had an "allotment" of
a half-acre garden and an area that served as a combination chicken coop and
sty for pregnant sows. An interviewer
seeking nostalgic reminiscences from freedmen, Orland Armstrong drew attention
to the good housing conditions some slaves enjoyed when visiting a plantation's
ruins: "Some of the old cabins are
only heaps of debris, while others are better preserved. They were built of brick, in the substantial
manner of many of the fine old South Carolina plantation servant [slave]
houses." A good, but somewhat
lower standard than these Olmsted found on a farm in Virginia, which had
well-made and comfortable log cabins, about thirty
feet long by twenty wide, and eight feet tall, with a high loft and shingle
roof. Each divided in the middle, and
having a brick chimney outside the wall at either end, was intended to be
occupied by two families.
They even had windows with glass in the center, an
unlikely sight on the frontier for anyone's dwelling, but not surprising in a
long-settled country. Housing that
reflected frontier conditions--"log huts" many of the slaves lived
in--began to be replaced by "neat boarded cottages," reflecting a
more settled life, on four large adjacent plantations by a "tributary of
the Mississippi." For whites, the
frontier offered a means of getting ahead financially in exchange for the
privations of living in the wilderness.
But for the slaves, pioneer life merely meant having to endure more work
and less comfort, especially in housing, without gaining anything more than
they initially had if they stayed back east toiling on some large planter's
estate. Consequently, for this reason
and others, slaves much more commonly lived in a house where they could count
the stars through the cracks, as Marion Johnson did, "the usual
comfortless log-huts" (Olmsted), not a three-room wood frame duplex.83 Although some slaves enjoyed such
exceptional housing conditions, these were hardly representative for most
living in the South's interior, away from the lowland coastal areas of
Virginia, Georgia, and South Carolina, where (as Kemble's descriptions show)
conditions often were hardly ideal as well.
How Much Better Was the Poor Whites' Housing than the
Slaves'?
The
crude housing many southern whites had perhaps best serves to indicate
that slave housing was not all its apologists might have claimed. Even the master's home might be
unimpressive, especially when he was a small slaveholder and/or lived on the
frontier. After visiting a neighboring
mistress's home on a sea island of Georgia, Kemble said typical farmhouses in
the North were certainly better:
"To be sure, I will say, in excuse for their old mistress, her own
habitation was but a very few degrees less ruinous and disgusting [than her
slaves' homes]. What would one of your
Yankee farmers say to such abodes?"
Similarly, although noting the homes may have signs of a former splendor
or elegance, she observed, using her Englishwoman's eyes to make a comparison
while calling on a mistress's home in a nearby village in Georgia: "As for the residence of this princess,
it was like all the planters' residences that I have seen, and such as a
well-to-do English farmer would certainly not inhabit." Considering she was living in a long-settled
region of the South, this condemnation is particularly noteworthy. Olmsted stayed overnight in one old
settler's home in Texas. It was a room fourteen feet square, which "was
open to the rafters." The sky
could be seen between its shingles. He
actually spent the night in a lean-to between two doors, keeping on all his
clothes in the winter weather. While in
Mississippi, he deliberately decided to spend a night in a poor white family's
cabin seen as typical judging from all the other ones he had passed that
day. Since this family had a horse and
wagon, a fair amount of cotton planted, but no slaves, they likely beat the
poor white average some. Measuring
twenty-eight by twenty-five feet, their log house was open to the roof. It had a door on each of its four sides, a
large fireplace on one side, but no windows.
In northern Alabama, an area where more whites than blacks lived, most
of the houses he passed were "rude log huts, of only one room, and that
unwholesomely crowded. I saw in and
about one of them, not more than fifteen feet square, five grown persons, and
as many children." The conditions
whites in the South experienced have major implications for how the slaves
lived. The poor whites' standard of
housing indicates the basic ceiling on what the enslaved blacks could normally
expect at best. Bad housing conditions
(admittedly, in part a function of a frontier environment) for many whites
indicate most bondsmen likely had nothing better, and normally had something
noticeably worse.84
Fogel and Engerman's Optimistic View of Slave Housing
Fogel
and Engerman describe optimistically the average slave house. Measuring eighteen by twenty feet and being
made of logs or wood, it had one or two rooms.
It likely had a loft for children to sleep in. The floors were "usually planked and raised off the
ground." But is this description
justified? They considerably exaggerate
the size of the slaves' homes, since the free white rural population often
lived in a home of comparable size. The
travelers' accounts that mention the specific size of slave cabins rarely name
a figure this high. After scrounging
through various travelers' accounts, secondary sources, etc., Sutch properly
maintains fifteen by fifteen feet was typical, with sixteen by eighteen
"an occasionally achieved ideal size." The housing Kemble encountered at her husband's rice island
estate was the best of the housing conditions on his two estates. It surpassed other places she visited or
knew of locally. Nevertheless, while
naming a specific size, she described appalling conditions of crowding:
These cabins consist of one room, about twelve feet by
fifteen, with a couple of closets smaller and closer than the state-rooms of a
ship, divided off from the main room and each other by rough wooden partitions,
in which the inhabitants sleep. . . . Two families (sometimes
eight and ten in number) reside in one of these huts, which are mere wooden
frames pinned, as it were, to the earth by a [huge] brick chimney outside.
On the new Polk estate in Mississippi, some eighteen
men, ten women, seven children, and two evidently half-grown boys, thirty-seven
in all, crowded into four rough-hewn houses, built in a mere eighteen
days. As Bassett describes: "The trivial character of the buildings
on the plantation is shown in the fact that a few years later, 1840, all these
buildings were abandoned and others built in what was considered a more healthy
location." As cited above (p. 57),
Olmsted saw slave houses measuring twelve by twelve in South Carolina and ten
by ten in Texas. Genovese maintains,
based on his sources, contrary to Fogel and Engerman's claims above, that
slaveholders even into the 1850s usually did not "provide plank floors or
raised homes . . . although more and more were doing so." According to Blassingame, most slave
autobiographers said they lived in crude one-room cabins which had dirt floors
and lots of cracks in the walls that allowed the winter weather to enter. Although admitting the existence of some
with higher standards, Stampp still maintains:
"The common run of slave cabins were cramped, crudely built,
scantily furnished, unpainted and dirty."
Those that fell beneath this "average" were
"plentiful" as well.85 Fogel and Engerman clearly overstate how good the slaves' housing
conditions usually were.
Genovese's Overly Optimistic Analysis of Slave Housing
Like
Fogel and Engerman, Genovese puts an overly optimistic spin on slave housing,
but here compared to the rest of the world's:
Their [the slaveholders'] satisfaction [with their
slaves' housing] rested on the thought that most of the world's peasants and
workers lived in dirty, dark, overcrowded dwellings and that, by comparison,
their slaves lived decently. . . .
During the nineteenth century such perceptive travelers as Basil Hall,
Harriet Martineau, James Stirling, and Sir Charles Lyell thought the slaves at
least as well housed as the English and Scottish poor, and Olmsted thought the
slaves on the large plantations as well situated as the workmen of New
England. . . . Even
Fanny Kemble thought conditions no worse than among the European
poor. . . . The laboring
poor of France, England, and even the urban Northeast of the United States . . .
lived in crowded hovels little better and often worse than the slave quarters.
Although his point has merit about the conditions of
the southern English farm laborers, or those of the Eurasian masses, peasants and
artisans, it ignores how most slaves were worse off materially than typical
American free laborers. If they had not
been enslaved or discriminated against, the conditions of blacks in the United
States would have been better than those in most of the world because America
was largely a vast wilderness full of raw natural resources awaiting
exploitation by (then) modern technology.
These conditions made for an intrinsically higher standard of living
compared to (say) England, which suffered from the Malthusian effects of rapid
population growth. Furthermore, as
Sutch's reply to Fogel and Engerman over the quality of housing in the North
generally demonstrates, including even New York's slums in the depression year
of 1893, Genovese is too pessimistic about Northeastern urban housing
standards.86
Genovese
also reads too much into his citations of Olmsted and Kemble. Olmsted was not making a general point about
all slaves living on big plantations having housing as good as that of
New England workers when he said this about a sugar plantation in
Louisiana: "The negro houses were
exactly like those I described on the Georgia rice plantation [quoted above, p.
58], except that they were provided with broad galleries in front. They were as neat and well-made externally
as the cottages usually provided by large manufacturing companies in New
England, to be rented to their workmen."
Such good conditions were hardly automatic even on large plantations, as
Kemble's already cited account shows.
On the page Genovese cites of Kemble, she was describing sanitary
conditions and rebutting the (racist) contention that the smell of blacks and
their quarters was intrinsic to their race rather than being due to their
poverty and ignorance of proper habits of cleanliness. She was not discussing so much the intrinsic
size or construction of the house in question, but how the peculiar institution
created "dirty houses, ragged clothes, and foul smells." After comparing between the smells of slaves
and a "low Irishman or woman" and maintaining both resulted from
"the same causes," she said:
The stench in an Irish, Scotch, Italian, or French
hovel are quite as intolerable as any I ever found in our negro houses, and the
filth and vermin which abound about the clothes and persons of the lower
peasantry of any of those countries as abominable as the same conditions in the
black population of the United States.
Although this description likely displays some class
or national bias, clearly she distinguished between the cleanliness and the
intrinsic quality of building construction by saying she was "exhorting
them to spend labor in cleaning and making [their homes] tidy, [yet admitting
she] can not promise them that they shall be repaired and made habitable for
them." She also felt that the
difference between the homes slave servants lived in and their master's house
was much greater than that between where free white servants lived and where
they worked: "In all
establishments whatever, of course some disparity exists between the
accommodation of the drawing-rooms and best bedrooms and the servants' kitchen
and attics; but on a plantation it is no longer a matter of degree." Focusing on their lack of furnishings in
particular, she said the slave servants
had neither table to feed at nor chair to sit down
upon themselves; the 'boys' lay all night on the hearth by the kitchen fire,
and the women upon the usual slave's bed--a frame of rough boards, strewed with
a little moss of trees, with the addition of a tattered and filthy blanket.87
After analyzing his citations of Kemble and Olmsted,
Genovese clearly reconstucts too optimistically how good slave housing was
relative to many free workers. As shown
below, this place is hardly alone where Genovese's work draws conclusions
startlingly similar to not just Fogel and Engerman's generally discredited
work, but the equally discounted Slavery by Stanley Elkins as well, yet Roll,
Jordan, Roll has avoided similar opprobrium and presently reigns as the
leading general work of the field.
The Moral Hazards of Crowded, One-Room Slave Houses
Often
living in one-room cabins or shacks, slave families had to undertake special
measures to help preserve their children's sexual morality. In language reminiscent of the 1867-68
Report on Employment in Agriculture in England that described the hazards of
promiscuously mixing the sexes of different ages together (see p. 67 below),
Olmsted cites similar Victorian reasoning on sexual matters about slaves by a
Presbyterian minister and professor of theology. Although rarely put so bluntly, the basic problem was figuring
out how to shield the children from the sights and sounds of parental
love-making and its resulting negative moral effects. Since slave families had such limited space available--one room
and (perhaps) a loft to place the children being typical--these concerns were
legitimate, but slaveowners usually ignored them in their general quest to
reduce housing expenses. But these
wretched conditions promoted the slave father and mother's inventiveness, so
they found their own solutions to this problem. Some hung up clothes or quilts to create privacy, while others
used scrap wood in order to subdivide a one-room home into something closer to
two. A few resourceful slave parents
even made special trundle beds to ensure at least some sexual privacy. According to Genovese, these measures had at
least some success.88
The poor housing masters and mistresses provided to their slaves clearly
failed to promote the Victorian ideals of sexual purity that they generally
professed.
Slave Housing--Sanitation and Cleanliness
Housing
quality can also be judged by its cleanliness and how much it lived up to the
principles of sanitation. A relatively
spacious or well-built home could still have terrible standards of cleanliness. Especially in rural areas, this aspect of
housing quality more clearly burdens the occupants, not the owners. In other words, the master has no duty to
enforce good housekeeping practices among his bondsmen besides setting up some
basic guidelines to help them keep themselves (i.e., his property) from getting
sick. In the quarters, the slaves
should be cleaning up after themselves, not the master or mistress. After seeing two old slave women living
without "every decency and every comfort," Kemble then visited the
home some of their younger relatives.
That home was "as tidy and comfortable as it could be
made." Since this difference arose
under the same master, it shows the slaves themselves had some level of
responsibility for cleanliness. But
admittedly, the intrinsic burdens of bondage, of working for their owners often
six full days a week, ensured the slaves could only wring limited amounts of
time during a typical work week for housecleaning anyway. Since the master class believed the ideology
of "separate spheres" was inapplicable to field hands, housekeeping
was inevitably neglected because both sexes were driven out into the fields to
work. The depressing scene Kemble
paints of the quarters on one of her husband's estates undoubtedly was found
throughout the antebellum South:
Instead of the order, neatness, and ingenuity which
might convert even these miserable hovels into tolerable residences, there was
the careless, reckless, filthy indolence which even the brutes do not exhibit
in their lairs and nests, and which seemed incapable of applying to the uses of
existence the few miserable means of comfort yet within their reach. Firewood and shavings lay littered about the
floors, while the half-naked children were cowering round two or three
smouldering cinders. The moss with
which the chinks and crannies of their ill-protecting dwellings might have been
stuffed was trailing in the dirt and dust about the ground, while the back door
of the huts . . . was left wide open for the fowls and ducks, which
they are allowed to raise, to travel in and out, increasing the filth of the
cabin by what they brought and left in every direction.
Kemble
herself knew sheer ignorance and lack of education produced these appalling
conditions, a cause which the master or mistress was more responsible for than
the slaves. Having been born and raised
in a deprived environment, the latter could not be expected to know
better. After mentioning how some
slaves were so dirty and smelly she disliked being attended by them at meals,
she denied that smelling bad was intrinsic to the black race, but blamed it on
"ignorance of the laws of health and the habits of decent
cleanliness."89
An archeological discovery at Monticello suggests (but fails to prove
fully) another pest slave housekeeping faced:
Rodents left gnaw marks on the bones found where slaves had lived in or
around, especially in the root cellar of one of their homes. True, some masters wished to improve
conditions. For example, planter Bennet
Barrow once inspected his slave quarters.
Although finding them "generally in good order," he reproved
some of his slaves as "the most careless negros I have." Another time he gave them an evening to
"scoure up their Houses" and "clean up the Quarter
&c." Some slaves themselves
kept their homes fairly clean, at least by their own standards (not the
higher ones a middle class observer such as Kemble judged by).90 Although Fogel and Engerman like to think
otherwise, deep concern by bondsmen or masters about cleanliness was not
typical.91 For good reasons
most slave dwellings were neither especially neat nor orderly places.92 Although the bondsmen shared the blame for
their homes' unsanitary conditions with their owners, factors mostly outside
the slaves' control loomed larger than their own untidiness in spreading
disease and dirt in the quarters, such as the failure of indifferent masters
and mistresses to instruct them on the habits of cleanliness, the long workweek
for both sexes that reduced the time available for housekeeping chores, and the
flaws in building construction that let the elements in.
English Farmworkers' Housing--Quality/Size
In
England, the economic dynamics of building housing for farmworkers differed
sharply from America's when constructing homes for slaves. The poor law, both old and new, gave
the (major) ratepayers of a parish a financial incentive to avoid erecting new
cottages in their parishes, and to pull down those already extant. By reducing how many were eligible for
relief, they lowered their taxes.93 Ideally, the "powers that be" in a given parish wanted
no more workers living in a parish than were employed year around, thus
consistently keeping them off the dole.
In "their" parish they strove to reduce how many could claim a
settlement.94
Since the poor (under the Elizabethan poor law) could have a settlement
in only one parish at a time, and could claim relief only from that one parish,
these laws encouraged the ratepayers to unload "their" poor onto other
parishes to be cared for. In order to
lower the rates, the parish elite could combine to keep out new migrants to
their parish. Ratepayers, normally the
gentry and (large) farmers who rented from the former, created "closed
parishes" when they were few enough in number that they, by coordinating
their efforts, set up a "cartel" that kept out all newcomers without
a settlement in their parish.95 When the ratepayers were too numerous and/or unequal in income to
conspire successfully to keep out the poor without settlements in their
community, an "open parish" resulted. Under the settlement laws, a new migrant to another parish could
be "deported" (removed) to the parish of his origin (where he did
have a settlement legally) when he became chargeable to his new parish.96 Consequently, the ratepayers of open
parishes, which included the better-off artisans, professionals, and tradesmen,
paid through the rates poor relief for the seasonally discharged/underemployed
laborers who worked in nearby closed parishes for at least part of the year
during the spring and/or summer months.97 Although the deeper intricacies of the local elite's machinations
to lower their taxes under the poor law (old and new) has to await
further explanation below (pp. 278-79, 281-85, 287-99), the impact of the poor
laws on the availability and quality of housing is considered here.
Undeniably,
the English farmworkers generally endured miserable conditions in housing. The conditions they suffered were less
excusable than what the slaves faced:
Unlike the harsh frontier conditions many slaves and their masters
suffered, England was hardly a newly settled land. Although recognizing how poor much of English rural housing was,
Rule nevertheless still says:
"Housing is as much a matter of existing stock as of
production." On the other hand,
much of England, especially in the southern arable counties, had a serious wood
shortage, which increased the poor's problems in finding wood for building or
even cooking. Arch contrasted his
father's fortunate situation, who actually owned the home his family
lived in, with conditions commonly found elsewhere in England:
In one English county after another I saw men living
with their families--if living it could be called--in cottages which, if
bigger, were hardly better than the sty they kept their pigs in, when they were
lucky enough to have a young porker fattening on the premises.
While the farmworkers' union grew, he described their
housing: "The cottage
accommodation was a disgrace to civilisation; and this, not only in
Somersetshire, but all over the country.
As many as thirteen people would sleep all huddled up together in one
small cottage bedroom." According
to Somerville, in most counties "the meanest hovels are rented as
high" as two pounds ten shillings per year, while in Dorset the landlords
charged three and four pounds a year without any garden ground for "the
worst of houses" that "the poorest of labourers" occupied. Emma Thompson in 1910 recalled how life was
in Bedfordshire some 80 years earlier:
"I well remember three families living in one house and two
families, and only one fire place. When
I was first married I had one room to live in." In a two-room house (which includes the loft), she had ten
children, seven surviving into adulthood.
In 1797 some cottages were noted as so bad they let in the elements--a
problem hardly unfamiliar to many American slaves. Examined by the Select Committee on the Poor Law Amendment Act
(1838), Mark Crabtree described one typical laborer's cottage as having a dirt
floor, half of a window's diamond squares of glass missing, and an outside wall
which had nearly fallen down. Although
observing specifically of his native area in southern Scotland, Somerville
still generalized to overall British conditions when he said some new cottages
were built of stone and plastered inside, "with a boarding over-head,
instead of the bare roof, which is so common."98 Clearly, England's farmworkers and American
slaves suffered from similar housing problems.
Poor Housing Leads to Sexual Immorality?
Because
housing space was so limited, Anglican clerics feared the poor would be
(literally) de-moralized in their sexual standards of conduct. Overcrowding mounted as, among other
factors, the decline of service lowering marriage ages and the tying of relief
payments to being married promoted increased population growth. The pulling down of cottages to reduce poor
law taxes as the first half of the nineteenth century passed added more
problems, as Rule notes. One vicar, for
Terrington in Norfolk, said most of his parish's cottages had two or three
rooms. Often in the latter case, a
lodger rented one of the three rooms, thus requiring the family to squeeze into
the two remaining rooms. Some homes had
only one room. The vicar focused on one
case in which a father, mother, three sons, and a grown-up daughter shared a
single room. He "fear[ed] that
much immorality, and certainly much want of a sense of decency among the
agricultural labouring classes, are owing to the nature of their homes, and the
want of proper room."99
In the general neighborhood of Farnham, Surrey and Maidstone, Kent,
where the hop harvesting season in September brought in hordes of temporary
migrant workers, Somerville found that bad housing conditions prevailed even before
the temporary workers arrived. The
migrants simply worsened pre-existing crowding still further. As a result, segregating the sexes then
rated as a low priority. "The
undivided state of the larger families acting upon the scantiness of house room
and general poverty, or high rents, often crowds them together in their
sleeping apartments, so as seriously to infringe on the decencies which guard
female morals." Hart, a
professional gentleman of Reigate, was appalled that brothers and sisters lived
in the same room until they moved out as teenagers or adults. But still worse overcrowding appeared
elsewhere: Commonly in Cuckfield,
Sussex, the children of both genders slept not merely in the same room, but the
same bed. Clergyman W. Sankie of
Farnham knew a case in which two sisters and a brother, all over fourteen,
routinely slept in the same bed together.
Since general housing situations approached this nadir, the
laboring classes understandably never acquired "that delicacy and purity
of mind which is the origin and the safeguard of chastity." Similarly, some certainly voiced similar
concerns about packing American slaves into crude one bedroom shacks. But since they were generally regarded as
inferior beings with stronger animalistic desires than whites, masters and
mistresses in the U.S. South more easily rationalized crowded housing
conditions than their English counterparts.
The latter often just simply ignored the poor conditions and the
agricultural workers' correspondingly degraded character. Olmsted encountered a "most intelligent
and distinguished Radical" who said about them: "We are not used to regard that class in forming a judgment
of national character."100 Two surveys, one in 1842 and another in 1864
of 224 cottages in Durham and Northumberland, found most had just one
room. Hence, while one part of the
elite and middle class (justifiably) moralizes about the effects of bad,
crowded housing, another determinedly ignores the need to improve such conditions
altogether to save money, or to find ways to keep the poor permanently
dependent on them.101
How the Artist's Eye Can Be Self-Deceiving When
Evaluating Cottages' Quality
The
physical appearance of farmworkers' cottages can be deceiving, as Rule noted,
because what may appear picturesque to the eye, especially an urban dweller's, could
still be unhealthy or unpleasant to live in.
Arch once said that laborers' cottages with "their outside
trimmings of ivy and climbing roses, were garnished without, but they were
undrained and unclean within."
After stopping to sketch a farmhouse he encountered near Chester,
Olmsted thought the cottages nearby were "very pretty to look
at." All the houses in the hamlet
he was visiting were like the house he chose to draw: timber, whitewashed walls, and thatch roofs. (I do not recall him saying he had sketched
any slave dwelling!) The farmer living
in this house described the cottages nearby
as exceedingly uncomfortable and unhealthy--the
floors, which were of clay, being generally lower than the road and the
surrounding land, and often wet, and always damp, while the roofs and walls
were old and leaky, and full of vermin.
The walls were made of layers of twigs and mud. Thatched roofs had the advantage of being
cheaper and more picturesque than slate or tiles, and of giving more protection
against the heat and cold. Their
disadvantages included breeding vermin and being more apt to catch fire (it was
feared). Olmsted maintained laborers'
cottages usually had walls made of stone, brick and timber, or of clay mixed
with straw, the last being very common.
This method could make for walls of high quality, since even villas and
parsonages used it.102
But since the homes of laborers often were ill-maintained, they became
much worse than the local elite's, even had the same quality of construction
had been put into their walls and roofs, which hardly seems likely.
Again,
Hodge in southern England was significantly worse off than his northern
counterpart, excepting evidently Northumberland. Arch described the former's cottages above. The commissioners on conditions in
agriculture in 1867-8 noted that cottages in Yorkshire were in much better
shape than those in the southern counties.
They were more comfortable, often had gardens attached to them or
allotments, and even "cow gates" for pasturing the family's female
bovine. Still, bad housing conditions
still appeared in the north. After
saying Dorset had the worst houses and the poorest laborers, Somerville
corrected himself some--in Northumberland "the houses were worse than ever
they have been in Dorsetshire"--which means they had to be truly
awful! In well-off Northumberland,
Caird found that some laborers still lived with their cows and other
animals. Both even went out the same
door! The cowhouse was "divided
only by a slight partition wall from the single apartment which serves for
kitchen, living and sleeping room, for all the inmates." Admittedly, he also discovered a newly-built
village where all cottages were of two or four rooms each, having attached
gardens and access to a cowhouse and pasture.103 So even in an area well-known for its
laborers enjoying good material conditions, the cottages were the most
neglected aspect of their material well-being.
How Rentals and the Poor and Settlements Laws Made for
Poor Quality Housing
Necessarily
"freeborn Englishmen" got housing differently than American
slaves. Slaveholders automatically
provided it to their bondsmen, although they likely built under their owners'
direction what they lived in. Except
for unmarried men and women living as farm servants in housing their
master (the farmer) provided them, the laborers had to rent it. (Few could hope to aspire to home ownership,
Arch's family being a rare exception).
As service declined, especially in the southern arable districts as the
eighteenth century waned and the nineteenth opened, more and more farmworkers
had to find and pay for their own housing.
Helping matters none, rents rose in the period from about c. 1790 to
1837, at least in the memory of one farmer/relief officer in Sussex. Although they had a freedom slaves almost
totally missed, to choose where they lived, practical factors besides financial
ones constrained the laborers' free choice in housing. Because a closed parish's larger farmers and
gentry had a vested self-interest in reducing how many could claim poor relief,
they intentionally neglected or even tore down laborers' cottages not
absolutely necessary for their operations.
One witness told he Parliamentary Commissioners for the 1867-68
Report: "He [the landlord] does
not care if they all tumble down."
The inability of laborers to pay the rents to begin with also promoted
intentional neglect, since this made renting cottages simply unprofitable. One owner of several cottages informed the
Rector of Petworth, who told the Parliamentary Committee the economic dynamics
involved: "If cottages brought no
rent, the owners of them would not repair them, and they would by degrees take
them away." Despite their likely
meager carpentry skills and inferior materials, the tenants discovered they
had to repair "their" dwelling, not their landlord. Other legal hurdles impeded attempts to
improve laborers' cottages. In comments
recorded by Somerville, Charles Baring Wall, M.P. for Guildford, Hampshire,
found out that landowners really had no power over cottages held on
life-holds. He had to wait until they
fell in to give him the "opportunity of 'doing what he like with his own,'
. . . to improve the cottages upon them."104 The poor laws encouraged ratepayers to
minimize the amount of poor relief paid, while the settlement laws encouraged
them to drive the poor out of "their" parish so that the legal claims
the poor's settlements created would burden financially some other
parish. As a result, the "freeborn
Englishman" often lacked the liberty to choose which parish he would
settle in, because the rich of many parishes would declare him potentially (or,
after 1795, when actually) chargeable to the parish, and so have him and his
family removed to their parish of origin.
Surprisingly, both American slaves and English agricultural workers
endured restrictions on freedom of movement, for although they were far more
stringent on the former, the latter also suffered more from them than is
commonly realized. Clearly, the laws of
England, because of those on the poor, settlements, and tenure, cost the
laborers much of their freedom and created major incentives for the owners of
laborers' cottages to neglect them.
The Problem of Cottages Being Distant from Work
Many
agricultural workers endured one problem most slaves did not: long walks to work. Because of the landlords and large tenant
farmers's desires to lower their taxes, many were driven out of closed parishes
into open parishes, making many rent homes located uncomfortably far from the
farms they worked at. The Duke of
Grafton in Suffolk owned one farm where two regularly employed laborers walked
four and a half miles one way from Thetford, making for, as Caird calculated,
nine miles a day, fifty-four a week. In
Lincolnshire, he found some farmers lent their men donkeys to ride on since
walking six or seven miles one way was too exhausting! The commissioners of the 1867-68 Report on
Employment in Agriculture found cottages were often built too far from where
the laborers worked, even in Yorkshire where better conditions normally
prevailed. These long distances laid
the foundations for the infamous gang system, which mainly operated in the
swampy clay soil fens districts of the Eastern Midlands and East Anglia. Under this system, a gang master gathered
together groups of workers, especially children, to work on some farm a
considerable distance from where they lived.
If these laborers had been farm servants, living with their masters (the
farmers) or in cottages on or near the farms where they worked, such measures never
would have been necessary. Living so
far from work was largely the fault of the poor and settlement laws creating
the open and closed parish system, which heavily burdened the laborers. As Caird observed:
It is the commonest thing possible to find
agricultural labourers lodged at such a distance from their regular place of
employment that they have to walk an hour out in the morning, and an hour home
in the evening,--from forty to fifty miles a week. . . . Two hours a day is a sixth part of a man's
daily labour, and this enormous tax he is compelled to pay in labour, which is
his only capital.105
So as the slaves had to endure long walks to visit
family members, including husbands and wives "living 'broad," the
English agricultural workers had to withstand lengthy walks to arrive at
work. The subordinate class in both
cases had to go a distance to do something their betters usually had close at hand.
The Aristocracy's Paternalism in Providing Housing,
and Its Limits
As
the nineteenth century passed its midpoint, a noticeable number of large
landowners began to improve cottages on their lands, even though bad conditions
still generally prevailed elsewhere.
For some English aristocrats, paternalism actually took on some
practical reality in this area. Surely knowing
a good return on investment through the rent the laborers paid was a pipe
dream, they still built new cottages anyway.
If the laborers' wages were nine shillings or fourteen per week, they
had serious trouble in being able to pay more than one shilling six pence to
two shillings a week in rent. Indeed,
the parish of Petworth in Sussex routinely paid at least some of its paupers'
rent until the New Poor Law was passed.
A semi-reasonable maximum rent was two shillings six pence to two
shillings nine pence a week, although in Surrey it ranged upwards of three
shillings and three shillings six pence.
Laborers often struggled mightily to pay even (say) one-seventh of their
income in rent. If they paid two
shillings a week, their annual rent would be five pounds four shillings. If a cottage cost roughly £100 to £140 to
build, depending on local building materials and supplies, the return on
investment (ROI) would hover around 4.5 percent annually when ignoring all
repair costs. Some let them at 2.5
percent a year, but this involves self-sacrifice. So long as farmworkers' wages were low, and what rent they could
pay was equally depressed, strict profitability considerations discouraged
building further cottages, over and above the poor law's own negative
incentives on the construction and maintenance of cottages.106
Despite
the incentives against building cottages, a number of aristocrats led the way
in improving rural housing conditions.
Many small tradesmen, artisans, and speculators acted differently. They built cottages in open parishes and
charged excessively high rents because closed parishes denied sufficient
housing for all the laborers they employed year around. As farmworkers were driven into these
tradesmen's areas, they drove up the demand for (and costs of) housing. In contrast, the self-sacrificing
aristocrats in this regard included the Duke of Wellington in Berkshire, who
rebuilt or improved his laborers' cottages, giving each one about a quarter
acre for a garden. He charged a mere
one shilling a week rent for both cottage and garden. Caird regarded the Duke of Bedford's cottages as "very
handsome," which had many conveniences as well as gardens attached, and
let out at fairly low rents. (Some complained, however, about their rooms'
small size). In 1830, according to the
Steward at Woburn, the laborers on the Duke of Bedford's estates there paid
just one shilling a week rent, while elsewhere others charged at least two
shillings a week for two rooms, "miserable places, [with] no
gardens." Lord Beverley rented one
and a half acres of excellent pasture land, one and a half acres of
"mowing-ground for winter food," and a house for just seven pounds
per year to his laborers in high-wage Yorkshire. The Duke of Northumberland spent freely to make improvements that
would help all the laborers on his huge estates. The 1867-68 Report said the Earl of Northumberland had improved
or built 931 cottages for his laborers.
Similarly, the village of Ford, built by the Marquis of Waterford,
included houses with two or four rooms, gardens, close-by outhouses, water
pipes, and use of a common cowhouse and pasture, let at just three or four
pounds a year, depending on size. The
Duke of Devonshire in Derbyshire built for his laborers the village of Edensor,
whose cottages had pasture access and rather elaborate architecture. George Culley discovered that the landlords
owned the best housing in Bedfordshire.
In all but three cases, it was near or at their seats of residence. Somerville found Lord Spencer in Northampton
was building impressive new dwellings for his laborers, although "the old
ones . . . were equal and rather superior to the ordinary class
of labourers' houses." Some
cottages stood in groups of three, with the smaller one having just two or
three "apartments" being placed between the larger ones. Some even had two rooms upstairs and two below. Potato gardens were placed in back, flower
gardens in front. Here even fancy
Gothic architecture greeted the passerby's eyes. A bakehouse and washing-house was provided for each four
houses. They also could rent allotments
at low rates.107
By building better and/or providing cheaper housing, the upper class
showed their rhetoric about noblesse oblige was not entirely empty.
Despite
the altruistic picture reported above, Lord Egremont of Sussex revealed some of
the aristocracy's other motives behind renting their cottages so cheaply yet
semi-contentedly. He told the rector of
Petworth, Thomas Sockett, that he got no rent for his cottages, and, to begin
with, did not rent any above three pounds per year even with a good
garden. He said this matter-of-factly,
without grievance. He, like other
landlords, did not mind getting little or nothing in rent because, under the
New Poor Law, "They save it in diminution of the
rate. . . . He stated, that the fact was that the poor men could
not now pay the rent." So what the
aristocracy may have lost from low (or zero!) rents, lower taxes more than made
up for, or they considered it a downwards adjustment for the low wages their
laborers earned. Furthermore, the
aristocracy tended to build improved cottages only near their seats, so as
(perhaps) to avoid literally looking at poverty in the face. These houses might have pretty, overly
ornate facades, but have little additional comfort inside. Although exaggerating some, Somerville said,
after having traveled extensively in England, that such high quality houses
"are found only in some pet village near a nobleman's park, or in the park
itself, and only there because they are ornamental to the rich man's
residence." Although the English
rural elite undeniably exploited the laborers, as the enclosure movement and
the low wages the laborers received demonstrate, still at least some
aristocrats sincerely made efforts at providing housing paternalistically. But their efforts must be seen in the
context of the low wages and/or reduced poor rates paid after the 1834 Poor Law
Amendment Act, which often meant they were handing back a slice of the loaf that
they had previously grabbed from the laborers.
These exertions by aristocrats at improving cottages failed to touch the
lives of most farmworkers since, "the majority of [England's] rural
inhabitants [still] liv[ed] in damp and squalor," as Rule correctly
observes.108
Little Difference for Slaves and Farmworkers in the
Quality of Their Housing
Probably
the overall quality of housing for the average slave or farmworker was about
the same. Although in both cases, large
landowners may have been somewhat altruistic, since they built nice houses or
cottages on some large plantations or estates, only a minority of the slaves or
laborers benefited from these efforts.
Dirt floors and non-glazed or broken glass windows were standard for
both groups. Walls often had holes or
were otherwise decripit in both cases.
Both slaves and farmworkers usually would have lacked a ceiling
overhead; a gaze upwards would bring into view the rafters and beams holding up
the roof. The bondsmen more likely
lived in a home made nearly exclusively of wood, with (perhaps) some mud daubed
in to fill the nooks and crannies or to help fireproof the chimney, compared to
their contemporaneous rural field laborers in England. In England, walls made of mud/clay mixed
with sticks or straw were common, thus nearly inverting the ratio of the two
materials compared to America, clearly corresponding to their differing relative
scarcity between the two countries.
Probably a thatched roof, being cooler in summer, warmer in winter, and
protecting better against the elements, was superior to what the slaves (or
many poor whites) normally had in America, where stories of being able to see
through the roof (or walls, for that matter) appear. In both cases, since the slaves and the laborers (normally) did
not own the place they lived, they suffered from what others were willing to
give them. Although the farmworkers
supposedly had to pay rent, and had the freedom to move, because of the effects
of the settlement laws and closed parishes, not to mention low wages and the
enclosure acts helping to breed wage dependence, they often had to accept what
was located near their jobs. Competition
in the housing market in England was rendered even more imperfect because the
governmental restrictions on labor mobility (already an instrinsically less
mobile commodity than others) made workers even less able to move. Clearly, the bulk of both the bondsmen and
laborers lived in rundown, decrepit housing of low quality and few amenities,
even if a few fortunate souls benefited from paternalistic planters and
aristocrats.
Agricultural Workers--Sanitation/Cleanliness
Sanitation
for the England's housing during the industrial revolution was notoriously
bad. How could a reader forget Engels'
portrait of Manchester's odious slums and filthy, meandering streets in The
Condition of the Working Class in England?
In Victorian England, the appalling death rates produced by poor
sanitation practices spawned a thriving public health movement among the middle
class which aimed at cleaning up the hazards resulting from the then brave new
world of modern urban industrial life.
It must be realized, even about such pits of despair as Liverpool's
cellar dwellings, that this problem was ultimately rooted in the concentration
of houses packed together in rapidly growing large cities without any changes
from practices that fit much better small villages or sparsely populated rural
areas. As Rule noted, the houses of the
cities and towns were built of better materials, such as brick or stone, but,
"It was not so much their individual deficiencies, but the collective
environmental horror which they presented which shocked
contemporaries." In previous
centuries, the death rates of medieval cities and towns in Europe were so high
they gradually devoured their inhabitants, which made their population's
natural rate of increase actually negative.
If people then build still larger agglomerations of buildings, but fail
to change the sewage and garbage disposal systems, only public health disaster
can possibly result. Although rural
areas' inhabitants enjoyed better health than city dwellers, that outcome did
not come from the former having superior sanitation practices. Rather, because the population density was
lower, the old, traditional methods took a notably lower toll in the
countryside than within England's industrial cities. Even the contrast between villages and outlying scattered houses
was jarring, as Jeffries saw:
The cottages in the open fields are comparatively
pleasant to visit, the sweet fresh air carries away effluvia. Those that are so curiously crowded together
in the village are sinks of foul smell, and may be of worse--places where, if
fever comes, it takes hold and quits not.
As Engels observed, relatively little damage might
come from making a dung heap in the country, since it is more exposed to the
open air. But when a similar pile
builds up in a city's alley or dead end, the very same practice is much more
dangerous to human health.109 So although the countryside was healthier
than the early industrial cities, the difference came from the concentration of
large amounts of housing with barely changed medieval sanitation measures in
the latter, such as open sewers along the sides of the streets, not superior
practices that systematically ensured cleanliness in the former.
Unlike
the towns by the 1870s and later, many villages in England had little or no
sanitary arrangements. As Joseph Arch
put it: "I must not name villages
[with bad sanitary arrangements]; any one who travels must observe the bad
sanitary condition of the rural districts." Although in an area of England where the laborers were relatively
well-paid and fed, Caird found miserable arrangements for sanitation in the
village of Wark, Northumberland:
Wretched houses piled here and there without
order--filth of every kind scattered about or heaped up against the walls--horses,
cows, and pigs lodged under the same roof with their owners, and entering by
the same door--in many cases a pig-sty beneath the only window of the dwelling.110
Unlike Olmsted's aforementioned experience (p. 68),
the laborers' cottages might not be even picturesque, let alone provide
sanitary conditions for their occupants.
The
housekeeping of Hodge's wife may have been perfectly fine, but the area around
her cottage could still stink badly.
(Unlike for the slaves, a strong sexual division of labor generally
prevailed among the farmworkers, except during harvest and in the north, as explained
below--pp. 200-210). Jeffries explains
why, by contrasting the stench emanating from the laborers' cottages to the
scent of the surrounding fields:
The odour which arises from the cottages is peculiarly offensive. It is not that they are dirty inside . . . it is from ou