The Quarters and the Fields: Slave Families in the Non-Cotton South

4. Family-Based Internal Economies

4 Family-Based Internal Economies Enslaved people’s extreme dependence on their masters for shelter, clothing , and food—all of which were provided in standardized rations, regardless of how much individual slaves actually produced—theoretically placed them outside the realm of the daily struggle that characterizes free labor. In their own time, however, slaves did utilize a number of strategies to supplement their rations, acquire material luxuries, and make their lives more comfortable. Engaging in what scholars have often termed “independent production,” slaves often developed limited, in some cases even extensive, family-based economies during their free time. Activities such as cultivating family garden plots, hunting, fishing, or voluntarily hiring out their labor in exchange for cash may not have constituted a struggle for physical survival, but they did provide slave families with opportunities to work together as economic units and enjoy the fruits of their own labor, thereby strengthening family ties and enriching the family diet. Some historians have argued that such economies also allowed slaves to carve for themselves a “niche of autonomy,” which nourished their desire for independence and even stimulated “proto-peasant” behavior—as slaves, like peasants, made their own decisions about what and how much to produce, and how to dispose of their marketable products.1 Proto-peasant behavior may have been widespread in the Caribbean, where slave economies were highly developed, but in the American South enslaved people’s formal work (their work for the master) and informal work (their work for themselves) do not appear to have been two separate work systems. The term “internal production” is perhaps more accurate than “independent production” in describing enslaved people’s private economic activities, since these economies clearly did not develop outside of the institution of slavery, or despite it, but rather within its very walls and as part and parcel of its structure. As this chapter shows, family-based Family-Based Internal Economies / 89 internal economies were inextricably interwoven with the broader demands of slave-based agriculture and especially with such factors as work patterns and master-sponsored labor incentives, giving slaveholders the ultimate say—both directly and indirectly—in slave families’ opportunities to acquire small luxuries.2 How did the demands for cultivating local cash crops and the nature of regional agriculture affect the development of family-based internal economies among the various slave populations? And what does this tell us about the “autonomy” of such economies? The answers to these questions are further examined in this chapter. Arrested Development: Fairfax County, Virginia When Edward Dicey, a British journalist, passed through Fairfax County soon after the outbreak of the Civil War, he found the enslaved population there living under what appeared to be abject poverty. In his journal he jotted down that local bondspeople were “miserably clothed, footsore and weary.” Encountering a group of runaways, he and his men offered them some white bread, upon which one of the fugitives remarked, “Massa never gave us food like that.” Dicey later recalled, “Anything more helpless or wretched . . . I never saw.” Material conditions for slaves in northern Virginia may have left much to be desired in the first place, but the situation was doubtless exacerbated by an underdevelopment of family-based internal economies. Working from sunup to sundown, men and women in bondage had little time off during which they could try to supplement their rations or acquire small luxuries by cultivating family garden plots, hunting , fishing, or voluntarily hiring out their labor in exchange for cash. Not only were enslaved people’s standard work patterns detrimental to families’ material conditions in Fairfax County, however, but the general economic decline in local agriculture dealt them an additional blow by saddling the diminishing slave population with even heavier workloads, limiting opportunities to develop highly skilled trades, and convincing slaveowners to curb internal production, often at the cost of traditional privileges to work for themselves in their free time.3 Opportunities for local slaves to voluntarily hire out their labor in exchange for cash were severely circumscribed. A majority of the skilled artisans in the region—those in the best position to hire out their services in their free time—lived not on farms but in towns such as Alexandria, Fairfax , or Centreville. In the countryside, where most enslaved people lived, 90 / Part II. The Balancing Act: Work and Families only some of the larger slaveholdings contained craftsmen who were able to occasionally profit from their...