Table of Contents

OAH Magazine of History
Volume 15, No 4
Summer 2001

Copyright ©
Organization of American Historians

Family Life in the Slave Quarters: Survival Strategies

Marie Jenkins Schwartz

Historians also have been reluctant to visit the slave quarters, with the result that teachers and students frequently have spent more time thinking about how slavery looked from the vantage of the Big House (slave owners) than from the quarters cabins (enslaved people). The civil rights movement associated with the 1950s and 1960s encouraged historians to explore the past lives of African Americans, including those who experienced enslavement. At first the scholarship focused on how slaves were treated by owners, but more recently historians have been asking what enslaved men, women, and children did when their owners were not around. This shift in focus—from the Big House to the slave quarters—has enabled historians to uncover a web of social relationships that helped African Americans survive bondage. One idea that has emerged from this recent scholarship has been that, despite the constant threat of separation and the necessity of submitting to slave owners, slave families—supported by the larger slave community—devised strategies that enhanced the lives of members and helped them endure bondage.

Antebellum southern slaves lived in family units. The one- or two-room cabins located in the slave quarters usually housed one family each, although more than one family occasionally occupied one shelter. Here in the small, cramped indoor spaces, in the yards surrounding each cabin, and in the unpaved streets, slave families tried to fashion a private life for themselves that allowed each member to be more than a slave. They courted and married, bore babies and raised children, all actions that imparted meaning to their lives. In 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, about half of all slaves were younger than age sixteen; nearly one-third were under the age of ten. Rather than to act solely in the role of slave, men, women, and children defined themselves as mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles—human beings who experienced life within families despite hardships difficult for modern people to imagine.

Slaveholders thought of the men, women, and children they held in bondage as property. Masters and mistresses considered the slave’s most important relationship to be that maintained with an owner. They worried that children reared to respect other authority figures, such as parents, might question the legitimacy of the southern social order, which granted slaveholders sweeping power over the people they held in bondage. Consequently, owners planned activities and established rules intended to minimize the importance of a slave’s family life and to emphasize the owner’s place as the head of the plantation. Many slaveholders went so far as to refer to their slaves as members of their own families. Of course, they did not treat slaves as equal to their own children or other kin, but speaking of slaves as part of the family helped to justify (in the minds of slaveholders, if not slaves) the owner’s power to interfere in the slave’s private life. Owners considered it their prerogative to determine what slaves did both day and night, including deciding such mundane matters as what they ate, how they dressed, and when they went to bed.

Slaves did not share their owners’ thinking. They, particularly parents, worried about owner interference in their private lives. Slavery could never be made acceptable to the enslaved people, but experiences within families as husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters, and extended kin allowed them to experience life in human terms. Just as important, families helped to shield people in bondage—particularly children—from some of slavery’s worst features. Families engaged in a variety of economic activities that improved the material conditions under which each member lived. For example, some cultivated food for their own consumption. They raised chickens and ate the eggs; grew rice, corn, and vegetables; kept bees and harvested the honey; and hunted and trapped small animals, which were cleaned and cooked for the table.

Slave families placed special importance on having a source of food that was not controlled by owners. Slaveholders provided slave families with “rations,” or weekly food allotments, which they considered sufficient for keeping slaves healthy enough to perform the heavy labor demanded of them. From the slave’s perspective, however, the rations were insufficient. For one thing, they tended to be monotonous and of a poor quality. Rations regularly consisted of some type of fatty, salted meat, corn meal, and potatoes. More important, they could be withdrawn if the slaveholder decided to punish the slave family for some infraction of plantation rules. For example, if a slave ran away or could not or would not work as the owner specified, the slaveholder could withhold some of the rations from the family or from all the slaves living in the quarters. The owner hoped that this would prompt the recalcitrant slave to return to the plantation or to work harder or better so as to prevent relatives and friends from suffering. The practice helped slaveholders maintain discipline on the plantation, but it also encouraged slave family members to work together to ensure that they would have food and other necessities of life if an owner withheld them.

All members of a family pitched in to ensure that no one suffered from the want of food. For parents, this meant that work continued well into the night after they had left their owners’ fields or other work sites. Fathers gathered fuel on the way back to the cabin for use in cooking, while mothers hurried home to check on any young children left in the quarters during the adult work day and to begin meal preparations. After supper, mother and father customarily cooperated to cultivate a small garden with the help of children. Even very young boys and girls could help, if only by holding pine torches so that the adults and older children could see to plant or pull weeds. After gardening, or instead of gardening, fathers and sons might hunt or fish. At times, mothers and daughters joined in fishing.

Young children contributed substantially to the family diet. Adults generally worked for their owners in the field or at another work site from early morning until late evening. At busy times of year, such as during harvest, they might remain there into the night. During such times, families could secure additional food only with the help of those family members who were too young, too old, or too infirm to carry out the heavy work demanded during periods of peak activity. Although children often had chores to perform for their owners during the day, they seldom worked as long as adults. This left time for subsistence activities: feeding chickens and gathering eggs, tending rabbit traps, beating rice with a mortar and pestle, helping to cook, and performing a host of other chores (1). When parents arrived home from the field, they could check to ensure that the work had been done as they had directed and mete out punishment or praise accordingly.

Most of these economic activities met with owner approval, but others displeased masters and mistresses. When no one was watching, children sometimes appropriated items without first securing an owner’s permission. Boys and girls, who often spent time in their owner’s homes as wait staff, cook’s helpers, or nursemaids to the planter’s children, returned home with pockets full of salt or whatever else was at hand. Little Henry Baker’s mistress found the practice so widespread that she banned the construction of pockets in boys’ breeches to make it more difficult to conceal items. Young Tom Morris surreptitiously gathered eggs for his mother to cook. Ben Horry and his father secretly obtained so much rice that they sold some in the local black market (2).

Parents did not question closely where food came from when it was presented by children, in part because they reasoned that slaves were not committing theft when they took from owners. Southern law defined slaves as chattel, or moveable property, and slaves recognized the absurdity of defining theft as the consumption of an owner’s property by the owner’s property. Enslaved parents taught sons and daughters that owners were the real thieves because they stole people, which no one had the right to do. Slaveholders bought, traded, and sold slaves whenever they needed cash or believed they had too much or too little labor to suit their needs, which created turmoil within the slave quarters. Former Virginia slave Ishrael Massie, interviewed decades after slavery ended, recalled that servants who waited on the owning family in the Big House sometimes learned in advance the names of the slaves planned for sale. They would visit the quarters bearing the bad news. Ishrael’s sister Sadie was sold and taken so far away that he never heard from her again. Jennie Patterson experienced a similar fate. She said later that she could not remember many details of the transaction because she “was scared to death” (3). Those families who avoided separation worried about the possibility, and decades later people who recalled those days still referred to them as a sad parting time.

Parents were outraged at this situation, which prompted them to share their assessment of their owner’s behavior with sons and daughters. They were determined that their children would not grow up thinking that slavery was morally acceptable, especially the practice of selling family members apart from one another. Therefore, they limited their definition of theft to what owners did to slaves or to the taking of property belonging to another slave, not an owner. They called the practice of appropriating the owner’s property “taking” rather than “theft.” The slaves’ definition allowed children to assist the family by gathering goods belonging to an owner without undermining a strong sense of morality within the quarters.

Slaves not only consumed food taken or cultivated, they also sold or traded it, along with other goods and services, and used any cash they obtained to better their living conditions. Rice planter James R. Sparkman, who owned a large number of slaves and observed firsthand many of their economic activities, explained that most of the money slaves made went to purchase “comforts and presents to their families,” which included&emdash;in addition to food and clothing&emdash;household or personal items such as mosquito nets, buckets, sieves, and pocket knives. Mistress Fanny Kemble Butler, whose husband owned cotton and rice plantations in Georgia, recorded in her diary some of the ways slaves accumulated small amounts of cash. They trapped and sold fowls found in abundance in the region. They also trapped animals and sold the furs. Other slaves earned cash by clearing paths and driveways and making buckets, barrels, and boots for sale (4). All of this they did at night or on Sundays, when slaves usually had time for themselves.

The economic activities of slave families sometimes extended well into the night. Many women spun thread for cloth to be used in the construction of clothing or blankets made of cotton, wool, or flax after supper and occasionally after everyone else had gone to bed. Small children helped by picking seeds from cotton or by performing other chores so that their mothers could devote time to spinning and sewing. Fathers, together with children, helped to gather fibers for the fabric by picking cotton, cutting flax, sheering sheep, or collecting the wool left on briars when sheep passed by. Fathers also fashioned moccasins or other footwear out of animal hides or cloth. Women saved small scraps of material from worn-out clothes and blankets, which they pieced together into quilts that became bedding for young children.

As they did with food, owners distributed clothing and blankets to slaves, but slaves considered the quantity and quality inadequate, especially for growing children. Planters customarily gave out shoes only to slaves old enough to work in the fields; younger children had to do without unless their parents could provide them. Owners distributed blankets each year to slaves, but younger children frequently had to share until they were old enough to work as adults. Each working hand received on average four suits of clothing per year, but young children had to make do with one or two. Again, family economic activities enabled slave parents to supplement the supplies doled out by owners, but this became harder as the children grew.

Most owners provided children, boys and girls alike, with one-piece garments called a shirt-tail in the case of boys and a shift in the case of girls. As children grew taller, the shirt or shift provided less coverage. Planters hoped that the situation would at some point force parents to admit that their sons and daughters were old enough to work at adult tasks. Once they undertook such duties, children would receive clothing and food equal to that of an adult worker, which would relieve families of the responsibility of providing some of these items.

Children became capable of field work at about the age of ten or twelve, just about the time a child’s rations proved inadequate for appeasing the youth’s appetite and the youth became desirous of greater modesty in dress. Under southern laws, slaveholders had the right to force children into the field to work whenever they wished. If children did not comply, they could be whipped or punished in some other way for not following an owner’s orders. For practical reasons, owners did not wish to proceed in this manner. For one thing, children (and their parents) did not always respond to harsh treatment the way an owner intended. They might run away, retaliate by breaking tools or destroying crops, or become too upset or resentful to work efficiently. Stories circulated throughout the South about slaves who burned barns or, worse, harmed members of their owners’ families after their owners had behaved especially cruelly toward children or other slaves. Instead of physically forcing youngsters to begin adult work, most slaveholders waited for parents and children to seek the increased food and clothing that growing bodies required.

Slave parents must have thought long and hard about whether to withhold their children from their owners’ fields or to send them there. Because they worked such long hours for their owners, adults had little time to secure food and clothing for children on their own. On the other hand, children were important to the family economy, since they gardened, trapped animals, fished, and took care of other household chores during the parents’ absence.

The Jemison family of Alabama apparently wanted to withhold the labor of their son Perry from his master as long as possible (5). Perry lived with his mother, father, two brothers, and two sisters in a double-log cabin in Alabama. His grandparents lived on the same plantation. By pooling their resources, the family was able to keep Perry from working in the fields beyond the age when most children began doing so. Perry had only one garment, a shirt-tail. He did not get a regular food allotment from his owner, so he shared those given to his mother and grandmother. He also ate other foods obtained by the slave family, including raccoon, possum, rabbit, fish, and vegetables. He most likely slept at night under one of the “very respectable quilts” his mother sewed from bits of cloth she managed to accumulate.

Perry was interviewed by government agents in the 1930s, long after slavery had ended. Based on the brief account he gave of his life and a knowledge of plantation practices, it is possible to speculate about why his family wished to keep him out of the field. First, slaves worked hard; on Perry’s plantation they worked from before daylight until after dark for as many as seven days each week, which left little time for adults to carry out the hunting, fishing, and gardening that provided slaves with a measure of independence from the owners. Perry may have been responsible for carrying out many of these chores. In addition, some of the work required of slaves was dangerous, particularly for young children. Perry had been seriously injured by his father’s scythe when he was a young boy, and his family may have wished to spare him from further harm.

The work of older children such as Perry was especially important to the welfare of slave families, in part because owners established rules for adults intended to ensure that they were rested enough to work hard during the day. Slaveholders knew that if workers stayed up late hunting or spinning thread they would not work efficiently the following morning. Consequently, they set bedtimes for adults and sometimes went so far as to lock them in their cabins at night. Because of such practices, slaves sometimes found it easier to assign daily economic chores to children rather than to leave them for adults to carry out at night.

Slaveholders also tried to restrict family economic activities by specifying what they could and could not do: which crops slaves could cultivate, when they could fish, and where they could hunt, for example. Of course, when slaveholders tried to establish regular bedtimes for adult slaves, or set rules about when and where slaves could fish or garden, they found them difficult to enforce. Slaveholders did not want to stay awake all night policing the slave quarters, so slaves might simply wait until their owners had gone to bed before starting out on hunts or butchering and cooking the animals they killed. Night time gave slave families opportunities for privacy.

Slave families did not spend all their private time working. They gathered together at night or on Sundays (if they had the day to themselves). Leisure activities often involved more than one generation, and many a child was held spellbound by scary stories told in the dark or was entertained with songs and musical instruments. Parents also tried to make work fun for children by incorporating enjoyable activities. Stories, songs, and riddles livened up the lives of children who worked into the night helping parents complete such chores as picking seeds from cotton or spinning thread from the fiber.

Many of the tales told by adults on such occasions served didactic purposes; that is, they imparted lessons that adults wanted children to learn. Stories about small, weak animals outwitting larger, stronger ones reminded everyone that slaves might at times use their wits to improve their lives, despite their owner’s superior power. In some stories, the larger animals got the better of the smaller ones, a reminder to children and adults alike that enslaved people had always to be on guard against the capriciousness of owners.

The prevalence of clandestine activities in the cabin and quarters meant that enslaved children had to be circumspect with regard to what they saw and heard in the quarters. Engaging in secret activities posed special problems for families with young children. Little children are notorious tattletales, and parents had to cope with the possibility that they would blurt out information about forbidden activities in front of owners. One little girl even told her owner of a plot by slaves to escape his plantation (6)!

To avoid the situation, slaves often commenced clandestine activities after the youngest children went to bed, and older sons and daughters were taught to keep their voices down in the quarters and to exercise discretion in what they said around owners. Those children who did not learn this lesson from verbal instruction learned it the hard way, as did one Virginia girl who happened upon adults preparing to eat a stolen lamb. She found herself subject to a whipping by one of the participants in the feast, who explained: “Now what you see, you don’t see, and what you hear, you don’t hear.” He meant that she should never discuss the incident; the whipping forewarned her of what lay in store if she did (7). All children had to learn that some activities were to be kept “in their sleeves,” a phrase meaning to keep a secret within the family or among slaves in the quarter. Learning such lessons was a part of growing up for slave children (8).

The situation of slave children was complicated by the expectation of slaveholders that children should maintain loyalty and obedience toward the owning family rather than toward their families of origin. Whereas mothers and fathers expected children to contribute to the welfare of the slave family and to mind their parents and not divulge secrets to owners, slaveholders expected children to perform work that benefitted owners and to report irregularities in plantation routines to them. This created a dilemma for the slave child who at an early age needed to develop an understanding of the complex relationships that existed on the plantation (9).

Slaveholders employed rewards as well as punishments in an effort to ensure that slave children directed their loyalty and love toward owners rather than parents. These mostly came in the form of treats, such as food or special privileges. Owners hoped these indulgences would win the children over. Enslaved parents seldom had special food or toys to share with their children, and they found it necessary to keep children busy at chores and to teach them harsh lessons about how to survive in a slave society. In the contest for the children’s love and loyalty, parents nevertheless had advantages. Slaveholders rarely carried out tasks of child rearing directly, which left children under the supervision of slaves. In the quarters, boys and girls absorbed critiques of slavery from the viewpoint of those who experienced it firsthand.

Children enjoyed whatever treats owners provided, to be sure. On occasion, individual children accepted such indulgences as proof that an owner cared for them at least as much as did parents. Abbey Mishow never lived in the slave quarters. Her mother died when Abbey was a baby, and her mistress took her into the Big House, where she was raised “just like a pet.” Abbey accompanied her owning family on sojourns from home and dressed in clothing that set her apart from the plantation’s other enslaved children. As an adult, Mishow maintained that she never missed her mother because her mistress treated her well. But the motherless Mishow was more an exception than the rule. Most children understood even from a young age the difference between being a member of the owner’s family and being an owner’s slave. Genia Woodberry, like Abbey, lived in her owner’s home as a young girl, and by her own account her mistress treated her well. But she missed her mother (though she was not allowed to show it), especially at night when she rocked her owner’s baby to sleep. She never accepted her mistress as a surrogate. Former slave Annie Burton understood that black children&emdash;even those who lived in the Big House&emdash;were not true members of owner families: the owner’s children “had dainties and we had crusts” (10).

Indulgences by owners counted for something: all slaves hoped for owners who provided them. However, treats or privileges could never compensate for the cruelties of enslavement. All too soon, children reached an age at which they recognized that for the enslaved, treats were rare, punishments harsh, and family separations possible.

If children did not experience harsh conditions firsthand, they witnessed or heard about them. When Oliver Bell saw his mother beaten because she had violated plantation rules, he began to cry. “Go get that boy a biscuit,” the mistress commanded. It quieted the boy temporarily, but Bell’s bitter memory of the whipping lasted a lifetime. Children listening in the cabin or quarters to accounts of slavery’s atrocities shared the story teller’s outrage that enslavement left people vulnerable to such treatment (11).

Like little Oliver, other children understood enslavement as a cruelty inflicted upon members of one race by another. As they grew to adulthood, enslaved boys and girls learned difficult lessons about how to behave to keep themselves, their relatives, and other slaves out of trouble and to foster their own survival as well as that of an African American people. Most learned life’s important lessons as part of a family, the black family. Owners might convince themselves that a plantation comprised one family, black and white, but the experiences of the enslaved people taught them otherwise. The plantation comprised different families, white and black, whose experiences were intertwined but not joined.

The study of enslaved families offers students opportunities to evaluate historical events and circumstances from a particular perspective, to compare how family life has varied over time and from one social group to another, and to analyze what functions families serve for their members. This essay tries to view family experiences from the perspective of the enslaved rather than that of the enslaver. Even young children can understand the difference. The concept of different definitions of morality taught within the Big House (slavery is morally acceptable) and slave cabin (slavery is immoral) is likely to prompt lively classroom discussions, particularly among older teens who will appreciate the complex ways in which children learn concepts of morality. Families of slaves were often truncated, either because family members had been sold or because husbands and wives belonged to different owners and lived on separate slaveholdings (a common occurrence in the upper South), yet slave families functioned to make lives more bearable for the men, women, and children trapped in bondage. Students can compare and contrast the economic activities of enslaved family members (particularly those of children) with those of modern people. Finally, both younger and older students will benefit from thinking about how the family lives of enslaved children differed from their own or from other social groups discussed in this issue of the OAH Magazine of History. One question sure to provoke student interest is whether slave children can be said to have had a childhood.

1. George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, 41 vols. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972-1979), cited hereafter by series and volume number. On children’s work, see Series 1, Vol. 2, Pt. 1, pp. 309-10; Vol. 3, Pt. 3, p. 10; and Pt. 4, pp. 67-68; Frances Anne Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), 312.

2. Benjamin Drew, A North-Side View of Slavery (New York: Johnson Reprint, 1968), 358-59; “Henry Baker,” in Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies, ed. John W. Blassingame (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 657; Rawick, ed., Supplement, Series 2, Vol. 5, Pt. 4, p. 1885; Series 2, Vol. 11, pp. 208-9; Supplement, Series I, Vol. 9, Pt. 4, p. 1582; Charles L. Perdue Jr., Thomas E. Barden, and Robert K. Phillips, eds., Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976), 227; and Rawick, ed., Series 1, Vol. 2, Pt. 2, pp. 299-300.

3. Perdue, Barden, and Phillips, eds., Weevils in the Wheat, 211, 219.

4. “Inclosure,” James R. Sparkman to Benjamin Allston, 10 March 1858, in The South Carolina Rice Planter as Revealed in the Papers of Robert F. W. Allston, ed. J. H. Easterby (Savannah: Beehive, 1978), 350; Kemble, Journal of a Residence, 58, 62, 73, 83-84, 90, 146, 217, 313, 317-18, 323. Evidence of slave economic activities is found throughout the Rawick series. Other sources include narratives by former slaves and slaveholders, including Charles Ball, Fifty Years in Chains; or, The Life of an American Slave (Indianapolis: Asher, 18[37]); D. E. Huger Smith, A Charlestonian’s Recollections, 1846-1913 (Charleston: Carolina Art Association, 1950); and Perdue, Barden, and Phillips, eds., Weevils in the Wheat, 210.

5. Rawick, ed., Series 2, Vol. 16, Pt 12, pp. 50-53.

6. Rawick, ed., Supplement, Series 2, Vol. 9, Pt. 8, p. 3875.

7. Gladys-Marie Fry, Night Riders in Black Folk History (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), 53.

8. For examples, see Rawick, ed., Supplement, Series 1, Vol. 10, Pt. 5, pp. 2007-8; Supplement, Series 1, Vol. 7, pp. 95-96; Supplement, Series 2, Vol. 11, Pt. 7, p. 163. See also Perdue, Barden, and Phillips, eds., Weevils in the Wheat, 98.

9. Rawick, ed., Supplement, Series 2, Vol. 5, pp. 1485-86. See also Supplement, Series 2, Vol. 12, pp. 190-92.

10. Rawick, ed., Series 1, Vol. 3, p. 197-98; Pt. 4, pp. 80, 200; Supplement, Series 2, Vol. 5, Pt. 4, pp. 1826-31; and Annie Burton, “Memories of Childhood’s Slavery Days,” in Six Women’s Slave Narratives, ed. Henry Gates Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 37.

11. Oliver Bell, “That Tree Was My Nurse,” in Toting the Lead Row: Ruby Pickens Tartt, Alabama Folklorist, ed. Virginia Pounds Brown and Laurella Owens (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1981), 135. See also Rawick, ed., Series 2, Vol. 8, Pt. 1, p. 282.

Marie Jenkins Schwartz is an associate professor of history at the University of Rhode Island, Kingston. Her recent book Born in Bondage: Growing Up Enslaved in the Antebellum South (2000) explores more completely the experiences of enslaved families.