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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> 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>