The Sick House

Most plantations had a building that served as a hospital for sick slaves, commonly referred to as the sick house. The nurses were usually elderly slaves (male or female) whose charge it was to look after those too ill to work. The building itself might look no different from any other structure on slave row, as traveler Frederick Olmsted (1822–1903) observed:

The cottages were framed buildings, boarded on the outside, with shingle roofs and brick chimneys; they stood fifty feet apart, with gardens and pig-yards, enclosed by palings, between them. At one, which was evidently the "sick house," or hospital, there were several negroes of both sexes, wrapped in blankets, and reclining on the doorsteps or on the ground, basking in the sunshine. Some of them looked ill, but all were chatting and laughing as I rode up to make an inquiry (Olmsted 1861–1862, p. 233).

Olmsted—or, perhaps, the overseer or planter attached to the property—might have taken the slaves' chatting and laughing as a sign that they were not really too sick to work, after all, despite the fact that some of them looked ill. In fact, one of the most common forms of passive resistance was feigning illness, with some slaves spitting out their medicines to prevent getting too well too quickly, and some slave women feigning pregnancy in order to lighten their workload. Another contemporary writer, John Roles, described the system in effect in 1864 to decide who truly belonged in the sick house:

When a slave is sick, he applies to the overseer, who examines his pulse and tongue, and if inflammatory symptoms appear, sends him to the sick-house, to the care of an old slave, who gives him such medicine as the overseer prescribes. But if no visible symptoms of disease can be detected, he turns a deaf ear to all his complaints, curses and sometimes flogs him for playing possum to deceive him, and drives him out to his hard toil, weeping and groaning, perhaps with real disease and suffering (Roles 1864, p. 7).

Of course, sometimes the overseer's snap judgments backfired. One overseer told Olmsted of a case in which he was certain a slave was only feigning sickness, and forced him into the fields (after a beating)—where he died two days later. "He was a good eight hundred dollar nigger," the overseer lamented, "and it was a lesson to me about taming possums, that I ain't agoing to forget in a hurry" (Olmsted 1861–1862, p. 120).

Those too sick to travel were transported to the sick house in a rude cart or handbarrow. "Its tender mercies must be terrible indeed for the sick," Fanny Kemble (1809–1893) wrote, after riding briefly in one, "for I who am sound could hardly abide them" (Kemble 1863, p. 283). Ex-slave Henry Watson (1848) noted that the same cart was used to take away the bodies of slaves who died in the sick house, often without a funeral.

The sorts of illnesses that led slaves to the sick house are demonstrated by a series of letters in 1851 and 1852 from South Carolina overseer K. Washington Skinner to the owners of the rice plantation where he worked. (Sickness rates on this particular plantation were abnormally high, as it was situated near an unhealthy swamp.)

The woman Jane is yet sick. I fear she will never get well. Hector turned in the Sick House … I have never had such a desperate case of Diarrhrea … Cudjue died very suddenly on Tuesday … He lay up one day and died the same night … the health of the people is not good. I have had a good many cases of fever … as well as some of [the] other complaints. On Monday last Cotta and Sarey received a stroke of the sun … many of the other negroes staggered about considerably … The children keep unusually healthy—but I fear they will be sick in the Autumn, and many of them sick unto death (Young 1993, p. 690).

Few plantation suffered the ills of the one described above—at least all at once. For slaves, though, access to the sick house (with its attendant rest and care) sometimes meant the difference between life and death.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kemble, Fanny. Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839. London: Harper, 1863.

Olmsted, Frederick Law. The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller's Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States, vol. 1. New York: Mason Brothers, 1861–1862.

Roles, John. Inside Views of Slavery on Southern Plantation. New York: J.A. Gray & Green, 1864.

Watson, Henry. Narrative of Henry Watson: A Fugitive Slave. Boston: B. Marsh, 1848.

Young, Jeffrey R. "Ideology and Death on a Savannah River Rice Plantation, 1833–1867: Paternalism amidst 'a Good Supply of Disease and Pain.'" The Journal of Southern History 59, no. 4 (1993): 673-706.

                                          Troy D. Smith