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  • From: Clansgian AT wmconnect.com
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Homestead] Follow the Drinking Gourd
  • Date: Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:42:23 EDT


> A good read on slavery, which
> allows that under some systems like "the task system", Southern slavery was
> less onerous than that popularly portrayed is "South Carolina A History" by
> Walter Edgar.
>

A movie I saw not too long back, don't even recall what it was, had Opra
Winfry in it if memory serves ... had a scene intended to show the dreary and
overborn life of the Southern slave. In a small stand of corn haulms we
found a
large wagon with a team of heavy horses, four or five slaves working to cut
the spent corn stalks and load the wagon, and two mounted armed guards
keeping a
close watch on them.

Now I know movie makers are allowed poetic license. Fine. But this is utter
nonsense, yet what is in most people's mind when they contemplate what day to
day life in the South must have been. Nobody would go to the expense of a
wagon and team and two idle "guards" to take in some corn haulms of very
litte
value. But thus the fiction is painted.

Records of daily life of the old South show that supervisors met with the
slaves once a week, often less often, and outlined what needed to be done and
then left them alone. In the case of the indigo and rice plantations on the
sea
islands (SC and GA), often no one lived on the island but slaves and their
contact with the owners was only a few times a year.

In Thomas Jefferson's gardening and farm journals, he records the goings on
of his "hands" as he invariably called them. They had a quota of work, in
exchange for which they were provided with rations, clothes, housing,
blankets,
etc. When their quota was fulfilled, they were paid in cash for any work
done
beyond that.

This apparently was the most common arrangement. While many slaves were
freed upon the death of their owners, the most common arrangement was for the
slave to enter into an agreement of indenturement with the owner where some
of
the slaves surplus earnings went into escrow for a fixed number of years
after
which the slave was deemed to have earned manumission.

Now here is a curious thing, says I. In most cases an antebellum slave had
the opportunity to fulfill a quota of work and be on his own devices for the
remainder of his time. How many cubicle dwellers today can do that? Then,
if
the slave had a goat or cow (and many did), he could sell milk and cheese
without interference from anyone. Who can do that today?

Gene asked if the antebellum Southerners knew that slavery was immoral. How
many of you know that the employer/employee slave-wagery we practice today is
immoral? It's not (now or then) a strict question of morality. It's that
stewed and steeped in an economic way of life, people see no alternatives.

I have escaped though an undergroud railroad of my own making away from a
form of slavery just as onerous as was practiced 150 years ago. It meets
with my
contemporaries and peers as a bit horrifying, an aberation from the order of
things. A bid to escape slavery was viewed much the same way back then.

Homesteading - Follow the Drinking Gourd. </HTML>




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