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

1. Three Slave Societies of the Non-Cotton South

1 Three Slave Societies of the Non-Cotton South What kinds of staple crops dominated slave-based agriculture in northern Virginia, lowcountry South Carolina, and southern Louisiana? To what extent was the cultivation of these crops profitable? Did the various communities in which slave families lived experience economic decline, stability , or rapid growth in the antebellum period? The answers to these simple queries are crucial for rethinking our understanding of slave families’ experiences . Throughout the rural South it was the land upon which enslaved people worked, and which had been worked by their forebears, that most strongly influenced the terms of their bondage and the nature of their social lives. A general discussion of the evolution of slave-based economies in the three regions chosen for this study is therefore a necessary starting point for examining the effects of regional agriculture on slave families. When analyzing the trajectory and rate of development of these economies , it is useful to apply the concepts “slave societies” and “societies with slaves.” Virtually every region of the South constituted at some point in its history a thoroughly entrenched slave society, characterized by an agricultural sector in which, in the words of Ira Berlin, “slavery stood at the center of economic production, and the master-slave relationship provided the model for all social relations.” In societies with slaves, by contrast, slave labor was marginal to the local economy, constituting but “one form of labor among many.” Economies are dynamic by nature, however, and in the nineteenth century not all regions were developing in the same direction or at the same rate. Different crops, cultivated under different circumstances, were susceptible to different trends and different degrees of success within the broader southern economy. These variations in turn resulted in different kinds of boundaries and opportunities for slave families, as will become clear throughout this book.1 14 / Part I. Rethinking the Experiences of Slave Families This chapter outlines the nature of slave-based agriculture in nineteenthcentury Fairfax County, Virginia; Georgetown District, South Carolina; and St. James Parish, Louisiana, respectively. Providing a brief overview of the introduction and development of the staple crops cultivated in each of the three regions, this chapter sets the stage for a more in-depth study of the relationship between regional agriculture and slave family life by exploring the workings of the local economies upon which their fates depended. Down (and Out) on the Farm: Fairfax County, Virginia Few slaveholding regions in nineteenth-century America struggled to stay afloat as much as did the Upper South, and contemporary discussions concerning the future of bondage in local agriculture there were largely characterized by widespread pessimism. In the rejected draft of an address to the Virginia State Agricultural Society in 1852, for example, one disillusioned farmer spoke for his class when he lamented that while the “southern states stand foremost in agricultural labor,” he and his fellow Virginians should find “no cause for self-gratulation.” Typical of the statewide trend— but atypical for the South as a whole—slave-based agriculture in Fairfax County suffered significant decline during the antebellum period, causing a once thriving tobacco-based slave society to devolve steadily in the direction of a wheat-based society with slaves.2 Initial developments in colonial northern Virginia certainly seemed to point toward a promising future, however. Bordering the Potomac River to the north and southeast, Fairfax County emerged in the early eighteenth century as a tidewater plantation society, both culturally and economically bound to the thriving Chesapeake region that encompassed the easternmost sections of Virginia and Maryland. In the Chesapeake, tobacco was king. The source of spectacular wealth for many enterprising planters—both in Fairfax and elsewhere along the tributaries of the Chesapeake Bay—the weed was planted as quickly as the forests could be cleared. “Like water for irrigation in a dry country,” as historian Frederick Gutheim put it, “tobacco alone made land [along the Potomac] valuable.”3 Following the lead of their counterparts in other tidewater counties, Fairfax planters quickly turned to the slave trade to meet their insatiable demand for labor; between 1732 and 1772 dozens of merchant vessels arriving from the “Coast of Africa,” Barbados, Antigua, and other slave-trading hubs, delivered large groups of Africans to toil on the expanding tobacco plantations. By the time Fairfax officially received county status in 1742, Three Slave Societies of the Non-Cotton South / 15 approximately 29 percent of...