Southern Slavery

Sources

New Arrivals . The South encompassed distinct regions determined by the climate, soil, and types of crop that could be grown and exported. Heightening these differences in the Revolutionary era was the huge influx of African-born slaves after mid century. In many regions these new arrivals were received in various ways by both whites and native-born blacks, or Creoles.

The Chesapeake . In the mid 1700s the largest slaveholding region was the Chesapeake, the colonies of Virginia and Maryland, where tobacco was a valuable cash crop. Slaves worked in gangs on tobacco plantations under white overseers. In many counties of Virginia, blacks outnumbered whites and statewide were only slightly in the minority. In 1776 more than one-half of the blacks in America lived in Maryland and Virginia. The slave population in the Chesapeake grew rapidly in the 1760s and 1770s, fueled by imports, but more important, by natural increase. American-born slaves had established their own mode of accommodation to the planters and to colonial culture. Slaves generally had their own garden plots on the plantations and had informal arrangements whereby members of slave families were kept together or at least in close proximity. New arrivals from Africa were a minority in this region and tended to assimilate into creole cultural and social life. The great increase in the slave population, however, had a negative impact on free blacks in the Chesapeake region. They became increasingly a minority of the black population, and changes in the law tended to treat all blacks as slaves. Many moved to Northern cities for work and community life.

Revolutionary Upheaval. The Revolution brought great changes to the Chesapeake, especially in Virginia, where the British invasion of the coastal, or Tidewater, region caused planters to move large numbers of slaves inland to the Piedmont, or hill country. The disarray caused by Gen. Charles Cornwallis’s invasion allowed many Tidewater slaves to escape, either fleeing north or serving in the Patriot army or in Lord John Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment. In the seaport towns of Virginia and Maryland slaves heard of the movement for abolition that was taking place in the North and were inspired to take action on behalf of their own freedom.

Tobacco. The British blockade stopped the tobacco trade for several years. It had something of a revival in the 1780s, but tobacco was never as lucrative as it was in the prewar years. In the nineteenth century slaves would be moved south and west, and cotton would become “king” of the export trade.

The Coastal Lowlands. Along the coast from North Carolina to Georgia planters took up the cultivation of rice, indigo, and cotton. As early as 1720 blacks outnumbered whites two to one in South Carolina. The surge of the African slave trade in the 1750s produced great changes in the slave population of the coastal lowlands. The new arrivals were shipped in disproportionately high numbers to this region and on the rice plantations made up the vast majority of the workforce. The imported slaves were primarily male and had appallingly high death rates, being unaccustomed to the brutal conditions of plantation slavery and having no resistance to New World diseases.

Rice Slaves. As harsh as the conditions were on the Carolina and Georgia plantations, the phenomenon of absentee planters and the task system of labor allowed for some degree of independent labor and society among low-country slaves. While tobacco and cotton cultivation was carried out under gang-labor conditions with white drivers, rice agriculture in South Carolina and Georgia often involved only loose supervision of slaves due to the distaste of whites for the steamy climate of the coast and the slaves’ skill at producing this crop on their own. Many of the slaves imported for rice cultivation came from the southwestern coast of Africa, what is today Angola, and had raised this crop prior to being enslaved. Many of their religious and social customs survived and blended with American customs. They retained some of their own language and spoke a dialect called Gullah. The cohesiveness of slave society in South Carolina left that region vulnerable to periodic slave revolts, the largest and most famous of which occurred in 1739, in which thirty whites were killed. Another revolt in 1775 left four whites dead. The proximity of slaves in South Carolina and Georgia to regions unsettled by whites allowed for the possibility of escape either to Indian communities or to form their own rebel or “maroon” groups that remained at large in the swamps and forests, raiding plantations and farms for food.

Creoles. Creole, or American-born, slaves in this period gravitated away from the plantations toward the cities, where they were in demand as servants, laborers, and artisans. Their facility with the English language and colonial society brought them closer to their white masters and created a class division between Creoles and lowland plantation slaves. A small group of Creoles of Savannah, Charleston, and other low-country cities attained freedom and wealth, their unusual intimacy with the planter class having produced mulatto offspring, who were accorded special rights and privileges. Occasional racial intermixing in the low-country cities contributed to the Creoles’ separation from plantation slaves through the general “lightening” of the Creole’s complexion.

Living Conditions. Throughout the South slaves were often poorly fed, housed, and clothed. They were valuable enough as property that whites did not want to jeopardize their survival but nonetheless allowed them only a minimum level of subsistence. Slave food consisted of an unending diet of corn bread, corn mush, sweet potatoes, and root vegetables. Minimal quantities of meat, nearly always fat bacon, were allowed, usually during harvest time. Slaves were often allowed to cultivate their own vegetable gardens, but this was considered a privilege rather than a right, and slaves had to negotiate for plots of land and time off, usually on Saturdays, to work this land. The Revolution provided an excellent opportunity for obtaining private gardens, for which the slaves promised not to desert to the British cause (or to the Patriots if their masters were Loyalists).

Sources

Ira Berlin, “Time, Space and the Evolution of Afro-American Society on British Mainland North America,” American Historical Review, 85 (1980): 44-78;

Philip S. Foner, History of Black Americans: Volume I, From Africa to the Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1975);

Sidney Kaplan, The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution, 1770-1800 (New York: New York Graphic Society, 1973);

Jessie C. Smith and Carrell P. Horton, eds., Historical Statistics of Black America (Detroit: Gale Research, 1995).