6 - Labor, diet, and punishment

Summary

To expect the Slaves in general, worn down as very many of them are, by daily, and, in crop time, by nightly labor, to support themselves, by working on Sundays, in their own grounds; – to trust to the desultory, heartless exertions of such beings, to avert famine!, is, to say the least of it, extremely impolitic … Certainly the admission of foreign provisions, in consequence of tempest, drought, or other unavoidable calamities, should be no precedent to the planters to depend on a resource of which they often felt the inadequacy, even before there was any restraint on the American trades.

William Dickson, 1814

Our task in this chapter is to investigate in some detail the nature of the plantation labor system in its agricultural and industrial aspects and on a seasonal basis, and to describe and analyze the systems of supplying the workers with food and the adequacy of their diets. Furthermore, we investigate the nature and frequency of slave punishments and show how they were related to other forms of treatment.

Cane hole digging and night work

Writers on slavery differed about how long and hard the blacks worked. Philip Gibbes, an absentee planter of Barbados who sought to reform slavery, believed that the cultivation of sugarcane, from the insertion of the plants in the earth to the packing of the sugar in the cask, was a continuous process of hard labor.