The Big House

The house slave—one who was relegated to working in the big house (sometimes referred to as the great house), the master's and mistress's home—often enjoyed an easier and more comfortable existence when compared to their field hand counterpart. House slaves typically toiled as cooks, servers, butlers, carriage drivers, maids, laundresses, seamstresses, mammies, nurses, wet nurses, and even companions, who, in some cases, provided valued emotional support for the mistress and her children. In general, slaveholders provided for their house servants more substantial clothing, larger and more varied meals, better medical attention, more adequate housing, greater freedom and decision-making powers, and, not uncommonly, rudimentary educations, including Christian education, than they did for the slave population at large. And, not insignificantly, slaves in the big house could usually take comfort in the knowledge that they were less likely to be sold off the plantation and thus separated from their families. House servants were often valued employees whom the master and mistress did not want out of the big house.

Slaves who worked in the big house typically benefited from an elevated status within the slave community. House servants, according to Frederick Douglass, made up "a sort of black aristocracy" (1968 [1855], p. 9). Some of those bondmen not uncommonly became leaders within the slave community, some of them assumed high-profile roles as preachers, and all, by virtue of their positions, became conduits between their masters' white world and their own black world. In particular, house slaves relayed important information to the rest of the slave community, both useful instruction and salacious gossip. They, because of their proximity to white conversations in the big house, were able to warn fellow slaves about impending slave auctions and imminent slave punishments, as well as to transmit other salient information garnered from their exposure to white conversation. Slaves, by virtue of such transmission, were kept abreast of political activity, local and national, that affected them. Initial awareness of such political milestones as Nat Turner's Rebellion (1831), the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), and others often came to the slave population via these conduits.

Despite some slaves respecting the social position of the big house servants, many others resented their elevated status and privileges, especially in instances where the black house staff had fully internalized the values of their masters and mistresses. Ellen Betts, one former field hand, recalled: "All the niggers have to stoop to Aunt Rachel [the cook in the big house] jes' lak dey curtsy to Missy" (Palmer 1998, p. 160). Lucy Thurston, another ex-field hand, reported that sometimes the house servants "get mighty upidy 'cause they served the Marster an' his family …" (Palmer 1998, p. 148). Finally, oft-cited ex-bondman Henry Bibb asserted that "the distinction among slaves is as marked as the classes of society are in any aristocratic community; some refusing to associate with others whom they deem beneath them in point of character, color, conditions, or the superior importance of the respective masters" (1968 [1849], p. 33).

Because they lived and worked in close proximity with one another, house servants and their owners tended to form more complex relationships than did field hands and owners. Several documented cases reveal that slaveholders often thought of house slaves as part of their own family, although they certainly did not remotely consider them their equals. For example, despite vehement and continual avowals that house servants were their inferiors, slaveholders celebrated the birth of their children and mourned the death of their favorite domestics who had served them in the big house. An even more extreme example, slaveholding families who had suffered the deaths of biological children brought carefully handpicked slave children to live in the big house as surrogates for their deceased sons and daughters. Still, in other instances, black house children and their white masters' offspring formed bonds with one another and even played together until puberty when it was considered inappropriate for young persons of different races to fraternize. Such interaction underscores at least some sense of humanity that some white slaveholders exhibited toward chattel whom they perceived as their racial inferiors. On one level, some plantation families came to know some of their enslaved domestics as persons—and not objects—and mutual bonds of affection did evolve among them. Nevertheless, status and racial differentials were never blurred, and each group always knew its place.

Although house slaves had more perks and privileges than field hands, one should not underestimate the negatives of slave life in the big house. At first glance, house servant work appeared to be easier than that of the field hand; however, in some ways it was not. For example, slaves who habitually worked in the plantation house were constantly and often uncomfortably accessible to their masters and mistresses, and could thus be called upon for service at any time—day or night. Additionally, house servants—unlike the field hands—typically did not receive Sundays off and were usually obliged to perform their daily duties as well as to attend church services with the white family. Some house slaves, citing negatives of big house life, complained about their isolation from the rest of the slave community as a result of working in, and sometimes living at, the master's home. Another complaint often voiced by house servants was their lack of privacy; field hands, by virtue of geographical separation and very different types of social interaction, were afforded far more independent lives than their brothers and sisters who operated daily in the master's world. Nevertheless, the dichotomy that is usually drawn between house slave and field slave is somewhat false because the occupational division of the two groups was not often all that clear-cut. Such was particularly the case on farms and smaller plantations.

Despite some evidence to the contrary, the majority of slaves in the Cotton Belt during the antebellum era did not enjoy much occupational mobility. In this region at that time, most bondmen and bondwomen performed the same jobs for the duration of their working lives, and children were more likely than not to inherit their parents' jobs. Ex-bondman Michael Johnson recalled that whether a slave would become a field hand, a house servant, or a skilled tradesman was more or less predictable at birth (Palmer 1998).

An undetermined number of house slaves—especially females—were the victims, both occasional and frequent, of white male-inflicted sexual abuse and violence. Such individuals had no power to resist those unwanted advances. Ex-slave Harriet Jacobs recounted: "My master met me at every turn, reminding me that I belonged to him, and swearing by heaven and earth that he would compel me to submit to him" (1861, p. 45). This difficult dynamic was further exacerbated by angry and jealous white plantation women whose male family members engaged in such behavior; they, in turn, punished—in both direct and indirect ways—those black victims of the white master population. Although there were some slaves who worked in the big house and enjoyed meaningful relationships with their white owners, many others—especially those who were the mistress's sexual competitors—experienced lives probably far more severe than those of the typical field hand.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bibb, Henry. Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave [1849]. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1968.

Blassingame, John W. The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972.

Douglass, Frederick. My Bondage and My Freedom [1855]. New York: Arno Press, 1968.

Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Jacobs, Harriet A. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself. Boston: Published for the Author, 1861.

Palmer, Colin A. Passageways: An Interpretive History of Black America, vol. 1: 1619-1863. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1998.

Schwartz, Marie Jenkins. Born in Bondage: Growing Up Enslaved in the Antebellum South. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.

                                  Katherine E. Rohrer