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The variables surrounding the lives of slaves and how slave culture developed depended heavily upon the requirements of the staple crops as well as upon the environment and the physical nature of the land. According to Ira Berlin and Philip Morgan (1996:3) the staple crops “shaped the nature of the work force, the organization of production, and the division of labor . These, in turn, rested upon the geography, the demographic balance of slave and free and black and white, the size of the slaveholding units, the character of technology, and the management techniques prevalent at different times and in different places.” Not only did environment and natural resources affect slaves’ working conditions, it affected their ability to carry on, without modi¤cation, traditions in food, architecture, and material culture. The totality of the slave experience in a particular area was affected by a web of variables that patterned their lives. Naval stores—tar, pitch, and turpentine—brought a group of South Carolina settlers to the Lower Cape Fear (Figure 5.1) in the 1720s. The vast pine forests were a crop ready to be harvested and would bring enormous immediate ¤nancial returns. These planters, many of whom brought slaves with them from the rice-growing Goose Creek area in Berkeley County, near Charleston, knew that they could operate a pine plantation with little up-front capital. While it took at least thirty slaves and an overseer for the operation of a rice plantation, a pine plantation could operate with only a handful of slaves (Clifton 1973). One planter remarked that it could be “carried on with little capital, on lands too poor for cultivation and is, therefore, well suited to persons of small means” (Anonymous 1855). Using archaeological data from different regions of North and South Carolina, this chapter illustrates how environmental and economic circumstances affected the lives of slaves. I discuss what is historically known 5 A Pattern of Living: A View of the African American Slave Experience in the Pine Forests of the Lower Cape Fear Natalie P. Adams about how the naval stores industry affected the slaves’ work pattern and how that shaped their living conditions. Data from the Samuel Neale plantation are used to archaeologically verify these historical accounts. This information is also compared with data from elsewhere in the Carolinas to show how the environment and economy affected the slaves’ material culture—speci¤cally, how it could have prohibited them from manufacturFigure 5.1. The 1733 Moseley map showing the Lower Cape Fear area (courtesy North Carolina Division of Archives and History). 66 / Natalie P. Adams ing colonoware on a large scale and how it may have increased reliance on domestic redwares. The Work Pattern for Naval Stores Like the rice plantations of South Carolina, North Carolina pine plantations operated under the task labor system. Tasking allowed slaves to work intensively to complete their daily work in order to appropriate a portion of the day for themselves (Morgan 1988). This worked well since the work required that slaves spread out in all directions in the forest (Outland 1996:43–44). The task system, along with the nature of the work on pine plantations, made it impractical for planters to closely oversee the work. James Avirett (1901:70) of Onslow County noted that “the laborers, and notably the chippers, are employed in large, wooded tracts of country, out of the range of anything like close oversight and must be stimulated to their best work, as well by premiums for best crops as by so regulating their work that a portion of each week is their own to do as they please with.” The year-round scheduling of activities revolved around the needs of the crops. During the winter months when the pine sap did not run, trees could be boxed, which entailed cutting cavities into the pine trees about one foot above the base. Boxing did not require full-time attention and could be performed along with other plantation activities. Fredrick Law Olmsted noted that one slave could box seventy-¤ve to one hundred trees a day (Olmsted 1968). About mid-March, the sap would begin to ®ow into the boxes, from which it was then transferred to barrels. The ®ow peaked in July and August and then tapered off at the beginning of November (Outland 1996:34). In the late eighteenth century, German traveler Johann Schoepf noted that “one man can readily care for 3000 boxes, and that number is generally assigned to one...

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