Pleasure (Sweet Suffering: Slaves of the Northern Corporate Dominion)
Contents:
However, despite its undeniable transcendence, the parochial act of eating was away of the historians' spotlight whose main focus was the political history. Only from the second half of twenty century, the emergence of economic and cultural history reoriented the interest of historians to specific aspects of human life as feeding, which gives us a chance of understanding the nature of slavery from a novelty approach. The study of food consumption patterns of slave populations is one of the most challenging topics in the historiography about slavery in the New World.
For a long time, it was taken for granted that captives were maltreated and poorly fed by their masters in almost every place of America. This belief was backed by abolitionist literature whose anti-slavery discourses emphasized the extremely poor living conditions of captives to justify the legal halt of slavery. On basis of this literary evidence, the historical community tended to accept as a fact the idea that slaves actually lived on the edge of malnutrition.
- The self-published autobiography of a freed slave..
- Slavery - Wikiquote?
- A Doubtful Sound Saga.
- Navigation menu;
In , the economic historians Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman published a very controversial book entitled Time on the Cross that challenged most of the former scholarly about slavery, in special the widespread belief on the "malnutrition of captives". Their argument was highly provocative: Even more, they hypothesize that "[slave] diet exceeded modern recommended daily levels of the chief nutrients".
Beyond the political implications of their study, the Fogel and Engerman's book not only reopened a controversial issue on the American history, but also posed new methodological questions that greatly enriched the academic debate and aid to promote new research projects that are shifting the common ideas about nutrition of slaves in The United States.
Servicios Personalizados
The issue of slave diet has also been object of study in other slavery societies of the Americas. In the case of Brazil, there is a vast historiography related to captives' food consumption mostly done for local researchers. The topic of slave nutrition attracted a great deal of interest from historians seduced by the Marxist ideas of exploitation and dominion relationships between the Sixties and Eighties. And although historical attention has receded significantly in recent years, there is still space for research to be done in this area.
In this regard, the current article explores the state of the art about slave nutrition in three regions of the Americas: The United States, the Caribbean, and Brazil. More than a simplistic account of historical findings, this paper analyzes the methodological issues that historians face when dealing with problematic data about feeding patterns of slave population as well as the obstacles to tackle a comparative study of slave nutrition in a continental level.
Other question discussed here is the parameters to measure what an adequate feeding is, since the specific demand of nutrients in human beings greatly vary in function to age, sex, and daily activity performed. Finally, the article examines the dietary regimen of expectant mothers and children to seek probable responses to the high rates of infant mortality among slave populations. Quantity and quality of slave diet in The United States.
At the beginning, the intellectual debate on slave nourishment was plagued of moral and political considerations about American slavery society. Not surprisingly, former researchers tackled the issue from a subjective point of view: Such question divided the academia in two opposite sides aligned to divergent political agendas. Thus, for the opponents of slavery system it was clear that slaves lived in a permanent state of hunger due to the poor food allowance offered by their masters. In order to support their claims, they published several testimonies that described the slaveowners' immoral practice of depriving food for their captives.
One of the most famous testimonies in this regard is that of the anti-slavery activist and former slave Frederick Douglass who relates his personal experience in dramatic terms: Not to give a slave enough to eat, is regarded as the most aggravated development of meanness even among the slaveholders. The rule is, no matter how coarse the food, only let there be enough of it. This is the theory; and in the part of Maryland from which I came, it is the general practice -though there are many exceptions. Master Thomas gave us enough of neither coarse nor fine food.
There were four slaves of us in the kitchen -my sister Eliza, my aunt Priscilla, Henny, and myself; and we were allowed less than a half of a bushel of corn-meal per week, and very little else, either in the shape of meat or vegetables. It was not enough for us to subsist upon.
Read Olaudah Equiano’s Autobiography: The First Widely-Read Narrative of a Freed Slave
We were therefore reduced to the wretched necessity of living at the expense of our neighbours. This we did by begging and stealing, whichever came handy in the time of need, the one being considered as legitimate as the other. A great many times have we, poor creatures, been nearly perishing with hunger, when food, in abundance lay moldering in the safe and smoke-house, and our pious mistress was aware of the fact; and yet that mistress and her husband would kneel every morning, and pray that God would bless them in basket and store!
A similar autobiographical story was recounted by the ex-slave Charles Ball who refers the customary foodways of captives in Maryland: As I was always very obedient, and ready to execute all his orders [from his master], I did not receive much whipping, but suffered greatly for want of sufficient and proper food. My master allowed his slaves a peck of corn, each, per week, throughout the year; and this we had to grind into meal in a hand-mill for ourselves.
We had a tolerable supply of meat for a short time, about the month of December, when he [the master] killed his hogs. After that season we had meat once a week, unless bacon became scarce, which very often happened, in which case we had no meat at all. In Antebellum America, these stories were widely publicized by abolitionist activists to prove how slave-owners neglected the feeding of their slaves. On the other side, the advocates of slavery system alleged that most slaveholders were benevolent masters concerned about their slaves' welfare. The most representative author of this conservative point of view was Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, who pursued to demonstrate that slavery was a progressive social institution well suited to the Southern character.
By mid-twenty century, the controversy acquired a more scientific tone when historians began to analyze the slave diet from a quantitative approach. New pieces of evidence would demonstrate that most captives did not experience crude hunger sensation, but severe pictures of specific dietary deficiencies. In other words, slaves probably were supplied with a sufficient food allowance to satisfy their appetite, but such ration was far of being balanced in nutritional terms. Thus, the question of slave nourishment was not an issue of quantity but a problem of quality and variety.
According to different sources, the typical diet of a male working slave consisted on 3V2 pounds of salt pork and one peck of corn meal per week, 9 supplemented with some vegetables and fruits. In words of Eugene Genovese, the existence of "specific hungers, dangerous deficiencies, and [an] [ If a deficient diet potentially increases the number of sick people and labor absenteeism, then, why planters did not supply a more balanced food ration to their slaves?
The answer likely lies on economic motifs. Since the costs of slave living expenses represented the most important share of plantation budget, planters had a strong incentive, in the short run, to cut expenses in feeding by means of standardization of slave diet which entailed to choose a very restricted range of staple foods. The choice for pork and corn was dictated by practical reasons: Kenneth Stampp rejected this economic explanation and rather suggests that masters did not provide an adequate diet to their slaves because of ignorance before avarice, since they probably were not aware of the advances in dietetic science.
Engerman's Time on the Cross broke this scholarly consensus on the issue of nutritional deficiencies in slave feeding, criticizing the idea of a "monotonous diet" as a historical invention based on a wrong reading of the instructions of the masters to their overseers. In order to prove their point, they conducted an exhaustive research to find out what staple foods comprised the typical slave diet.
Their conclusion is that the regular allowance for captives was diversified since it included products such as "beef, mutton, chickens, milk, turnips, peas, squashes, sweet potatoes, apples, plums, oranges, pumpkins, peaches, salt, sugar, molasses, fish, coffee, and whiskey". The Fogel and Engerman's argument, though provocative, relies on indirect evidence based on the Parker-Gallman sample extracted from the Agricultural Census of and processed with a statistical method known as "residual". The premise is that most of the foodstuffs produced in the plantations were consumed by people and animals living in the estates.
The procedure is straightforward: Since the rest of food was not marketable outside plantations, it is arguable that the "residual product" was devoted to slave feeding. The first criticism came from the economist Richard Sutch, who questioned two important pieces of evidence: Sutch's criticism can be summarized in three major points: Sutch argues that the figure of white population only includes the residents of planters' houses, while the rest of whites living in separated residences such as overseers did not enter in the statistic.
In , Robert Fogel wrote a reply which further amplifies some points of his book. Likewise, Fogel found that slaves did not fully rely on the weekly ration provided by their masters, since they could obtain food by other means. Crawford, who suggests that slaves supplemented their formal daily ration by means of opportunistic strategies such as cultivate garden plots, hunt, fish, beg, or steal food.
Table 2 shows the nutritional content of the diet revised by Richard Sutch. Despite its undeniable attractiveness, data on slave diet only provides quantitative information about daily food intake, but it does not render specific evidence about physical conditions of captives. Therefore, scholars have sought more accurate indexes to measure these parameters such as height and body mass index.
Margo and Richard H. Steckel worked with the data of coastwise manifests which offer rich information on age, sex and height of slaves in America Antebellum. By means of an exhaustive analysis of slave physical development, they came to a surprising finding: However, height index still is not a fully reliable proof of good feeding, since results may be biased by several factors such as physical activity, region of origin, migrant status, birth cohort, and genetics. In order to answer this question, John Kolmos conducted a survey to compare the heights of American and European populations on the first half of nineteenth century.
Surprisingly, he found that while free people became shorter, the chattel slaves became higher at the same time. For Kolmos, this paradox -known in Europe as the "early-industrial-growth puzzle" and in America as the "Antebellum puzzle"- has an economic explanation. The early industrialization led to a massive rural migration to the new industrial urban areas. Rapid population growth and explosive urbanization increased the demand for food that traditional agriculture could not meet due to that it lagged behind in matter of technology and productivity.
As food prices steadily rose, most urban worker families had to reduce or even to halt the consumption of certain products such as meat and milk, which are significant sources of calcium and proteins for children during their formative, developing years.
- Into the Back of the Begone (Potential Series Book 2).
- !
- Todo para el asesino (HQN) (Spanish Edition).
- The Interesting Narrative: The autobiography of freed slave Olaudah Equiano..
- !
Consequently, the average stature of free population tended to drop in the long-run. Conversely, planters were willing to offer a greater food allowance to their slaves in order to increase their productivity as agricultural workers in times of good prices for agrarian commodities. It may explain the steady increase of slave stature during the first half of nineteenth century. Other studies demonstrated that malnutrition did not impair all slaves equally, but primarily expectant mothers and children.
Steckel found that the infant mortality rate among slave population in North America reached an astonishing figure of children per thousand at the first year of life, which even may be greater if stillbirths are counted.
Navigation menu
Steckel speculates that the high ratio of mortality among newborn and infant slaves was basically caused by overworking of pregnant slave women, since excessive physical work put a woman at high risk of having a dangerous pregnancy and lactation period. A specific consequence was the remarkable increase in the number of cases of a mortal disorder known as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. For Steckel, the precarious living conditions of expectant women and children have an economic explication: This crude "cost-benefit" analysis led to the planters to neglect the specific care for mothers and children, since they were not productive investments in the short-run.
Coelho and Robert A. McGuire questioned the Steckel's argument because of its excessive reliance on economic rationality of planters.
The adult people exposed to such diseases generally did not die, but suffered typical debilitating illnesses such as anorexia, anemia and chronic malnutrition. In the case of expectant mothers, the consequences were devastating not only for their own health but also for the fetus. It is paradoxical that despite the tremendous obstacles to reproduction of captives in Southern plantations, the overall slave population grew to such a fast pace to the point of tripling its number between and Antebellum.
In order to explain this puzzle, some authors have put forward the controversial idea that the Upper South which comprised the states of North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Kentucky, and West Virginia deliberately concentrated in slave breeding to get "marketable human merchandise" to sell in the states of Lower South where the slave labor demand was quite high. Sutch added that some slaveholders preferred to export male slave and retain women in fertile age.
The fact that some plantations remained with a majority of fertile teenagers and children would indicate that they were stud farms for slave breeding. Michael Tadman objected this thesis due to two serious inconsistencies: It is possible that the disproportionate number of women in relation to men in a few cases were explained by the importation of women for domestic service or the residence of slave husbands in neighborhood plantations. Second, the male bias in the exporting reports may express the intense traffic of young slave men for the cane plantations in Louisiana where unitary prices for male slaves were remarkably high, rather than the slaveowners' desire of retaining women for reproduction.
Was it resulting of better care by slaveholders, or sanitary and cultural improvements in the care of expectant mothers and newborns? It is expected that further research will answer this striking issue. The nutrition of Caribbean slave population. Despite sharing the same status of forced workers, Caribbean slaves showed remarkable disparities regarding to their US counterparts in matter of nutrition.
A first divergence is related to the place of origin, by mid nineteenth century, almost the total of captives in The United States born there; while a significant part of Caribbean slaves were Western African newcomers in a large part of the Spanish dominions. The scattered evidence in such matter suggests that Western Africans largely relied on poor vegetarian diet consisted on taro, yam, millet, rice, bananas, cassava and corn. It seems likewise that consumption of food from animal origin such as meat and milk was rare due to the biological obstacles to raising cattle 27 and the intolerance to lactose in many African populations.
As a result of this poor dietary regime, Western African populations lived permanently under threat of famine. Their situation got worse during Atlantic passage because of awful sanitary conditions and the extremely poor daily ration consisted on boiled rice and salted fish.
Not surprisingly, most African slaves showed clear signs of chronic malnutrition upon their arrival to Caribbean islands. Once in the Caribbean, African born captives came to occupy the lowest strata in the colonial social ladder, which was mirrored in the nutritional differences with regard to their creole counterparts. Using an index of stature, B. Higman found a remarkable trend in slave populations: The data from Cuba and Trinidad backed this hypothesis, but the equation is slightly different in the case of Guyana.
David Eltis notes that this gap in the stature of black populations to both sides of Atlantic is observable even today. Conversely to the situation of American captives, the African population sometimes experienced periods of severe food shortage that eventually led to episodes of starvation. On the other hand, the average intake of key amino acids and vitamins was substantially lower in Africa than in any American territory which also contributes to explain the increased height trend in creole slave populations.
Despite the tropical isolated nature of Caribbean islands was not very appropriate for the production of food, Caribbean slaves were offered with a similar daily ration than their US counterparts. The economic historian Kenneth Kiple reconstructed the Caribbean slave diet on base of several sources e. The typical daily ration comprised a portion of animal protein beef or fish , a portion of cereal corn or rice , and tropical vegetable supplements taro, yam, bananas, and plantains.
This feeding pattern is clearly noticeable in British colonies where, in words of the English medical doctor Pinckard , "the food of the Negroes is very simple and but little varied; breakfast, dinner, and supper being similar throughout the year. It consists mostly of Guinea corn, with a small bit of salt meat or salt fish. The table 4 shows the nutritional estimation of a typical daily slave diet in the Caribbean region.
Did this standardized diet meet the nutritional demands of Caribbean slaves? Based on the mean nutritional requirements for an adult male worker, Kipple analyzed the specific dietary values of a typical daily slave ration, coming to the following results: The lack of vitamin A was responsible for the high rate of night blindness among some Caribbean slave populations, and for the inability to digest certain proteins of animal origin. On the other hand, the chronic shortage of vitamin B1 led to an increasing number of cases of a debilitating disease known as beriberi.
Handler and Robert S. Corruccini also found physical traces of feeding disorders related to specific nutritional deficiencies in the slave population of Barbados. By means of a careful examination of dental structure of a sample of deceased Barbadian slaves, they determine the existence of a high rate of growth-stoppage pathologies whose origin might have been linked to an erratic pattern of feeding.
Indeed the discovery of a widespread number of teeth abnormalities such as hypercementosis, hypoplasia, and bilateral dental asymmetry 34 led them to hypothesize that slaves might have alternated periods of plenty feeding with other ones dominated by hunger.
Handler and Corruccini presume that the approximated age of metabolic crisis due to deficient feeding occurred between the ages of three and four, which is roughly a year after infant weaning when children had to eat the same food provided to their parents. Despite slaveholders tended to impose a rigid labor discipline in Caribbean cane plantations, they facilitated time off for captives to get supplementary food sources.
Thus, most planters routinely granted their slaves small plots to raise poultry, small livestock or crops as a means to cut living expenses. The captives exchanged or sold a part of that they produced in their plots, or stole from plantations within the informal markets of the islands. Although those practices were only observable in Martinique and Barbados, they could have been widespread on all Caribbean regions where food represented the major share of plantations' budget.
Although many captives lived on the edge of malnutrition, this condition primary impaired Caribbean infants due to their fragile physical constitution. In his study about biological features of Caribbean slave populations, Kenneth Kiple provides an array of evidence in relation to infant diseases linked to deficient dietary regime. He refers the case of a rare illness known as "jawfall", "trismus", or "locked jaw" in British Islands; "mocezuelo" in Puerto Rico; and "tetanus neonatorum" in Cuba that caused the major number of deceases among newborn and whose primary symptom was an intense involuntary muscular movement for which it was typically diagnosed as tetanus.
Kiple disputes this medical verdict on basis of the particular etiology of such disorder and the nutritional background of former women slaves during pregnancy and lactation. He rather suggests that uncontrollable muscular activity is a classical symptom of extreme shortage of calcium in feeding which could not be supplied for maternal milk due to that enslave mothers also suffered this nutritional deficient. Thus, if a slave baby survived to the "jawfall" disease, he still could get sick of three different forms of beriberi before his first year of life.
The first type of beriberi was a cardiac form characterized by vomiting, loss of appetite, convulsions, and cardiac failure, that normally attacked infants between the first and fourth month of life. If you would like to authenticate using a different subscribed institution that supports Shibboleth authentication or have your own login and password to Project MUSE, click 'Authenticate'. View freely available titles: Book titles OR Journal titles.
After the ships were watered, we returned to our old station of cruizing off Toulon, for the purpose of intercepting a fleet of French men of war that lay there. I do not remember what those methods were, except that as to poisoning: Their women were not so modest as ours, for they ate, and drank, and slept, with their men. However, despite its undeniable transcendence, the parochial act of eating was away of the historians' spotlight whose main focus was the political history. Wikimedia Commons has media related to: In fact, the study of slave feeding is perhaps one of the most productive fields for the interdisciplinary work, since it gathers efforts from several specialists in different sciences such as Anthropology, Archeology, Medicine, and Economy.
Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide. Forged from a partnership between a university press and a library, Project MUSE is a trusted part of the academic and scholarly community it serves.
Built on the Johns Hopkins University Campus. This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website.
Without cookies your experience may not be seamless. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Rent from DeepDyve Recommend. Project MUSE Mission Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide. Contact Contact Us Help.