My Brother Slaves

Friendship, Masculinity, and Resistance in the Antebellum South

Sergio A. Lussana

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780813166957
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Trapped in a world of brutal physical punishment and unremitting, back-breaking labor, Frederick Douglass mused that it was the friendships he shared with other enslaved men that carried him through his darkest days.

In this pioneering study, Sergio A. Lussana offers the first in-depth investigation of the social dynamics between enslaved men and examines how individuals living under the conditions of bondage negotiated masculine identities. He demonstrates that African American men worked to create their own culture through a range of recreational pursuits similar to those enjoyed by their white counterparts, such as drinking, gambling, fighting, and hunting. Underscoring the enslaved men's relationships, however, were the sex-segregated work gangs on the plantations, which further reinforced their social bonds.

Lussana also addresses male resistance to slavery by shifting attention from the visible, organized world of slave rebellion to the private realms of enslaved men's lives. He reveals how these men developed an oppositional community in defiance of the regulations of the slaveholder and shows that their efforts were intrinsically linked to forms of resistance on a larger scale. The trust inherent in these private relationships was essential in driving conversations about revolution.

My Brother Slaves fills a vital gap in our contemporary understanding of southern history and of the effects that the South's peculiar institution had on social structures and gender expression. Employing detailed research that draws on autobiographies of and interviews with former slaves, Lussana's work artfully testifies to the importance of social relationships between enslaved men and the degree to which these fraternal bonds encouraged them to resist.

1

Enslaved Men and Work

This chapter examines the everyday work spaces of enslaved men across the antebellum South. Enslaved men spent most of their day in the field, laboring in backbreaking conditions from sunup to sundown. Many—particularly those on large plantations—worked alongside other men in sex-segregated gangs, in which men usually plowed while women hoed. Together, these men lived intensive lives: they performed demanding labor for the owner and shared meals, commiserated together, and sang work songs. This chapter explores how the slaveholder organized gang labor and how the system shaped the lives of enslaved men across the antebellum South. It surveys the practices employed by planters on the sugar plantations of Louisiana; the tobacco, corn, and wheat fields of Virginia and North Carolina; the cotton plantations of the Southwest and Deep South; and the rice plantations of the Lowcountry. Enslaved men also toiled together in the homosocial spaces of southern industry. The involvement of enslaved people in southern industry is a subject generally neglected by historians, which is unfortunate because, typically, it was predominantly men who worked in this sector. In difficult conditions, enslaved men worked in factories, ironworks, mining, as well as the lumber and naval stores industries. They constructed the South’s infrastructure. Life was particularly hard: many were separated from their families and members of the opposite sex for most of the year as they labored in dangerous conditions. To survive, these men relied on and trusted one another; the bonds between them were strong. The chapter also analyzes the skilled work performed by enslaved men. Across the South, men undertook most of the skilled work available to enslaved people. Together, they took pride in their work and passed on their prized skills to younger men, creating an intergenerational male network. Working in homosocial spaces—whether on plantations, in industry, or in skilled work—enslaved men developed their own masculine work culture: “a way of doing things and a way of assigning values that flowed from the perspective that they had on Southern plantation life.”¹ The homosocial world of enslaved men, for many, was born in the workplace. It was here, performing labor for their owners, that many enslaved men learned to cooperate and trust and depend on one another.

Plantation Work

Plantation slavery flourished throughout the South. Slaves labored on the lucrative cotton plantations of the Black Belt, which stretched from Georgia through Alabama and Mississippi to Louisiana and by the 1850s extended to Texas. In the swampy coastal regions of South Carolina and Georgia, large rice and indigo plantations prospered. Sugar production dominated the parishes of southern Louisiana, while tobacco plantations covered Virginia’s central and southern Piedmont and parts of North Carolina. Other staples—corn and wheat—grew throughout the South, the latter becoming an important cash crop in parts of Virginia and North Carolina. Some parts of the South, however—the great Appalachian heartland that stretched from western Virginia down to northeastern Alabama—were generally inhospitable to large plantation–scale slavery.

Slaves comprised 33 percent of the total southern population. Slave populations were high in the lower South. In 1860, black majorities in South Carolina and Mississippi comprised 57.2 percent and 55.2 percent of the respective state populations. Slave populations were 43.7 percent in Georgia, 44 percent in Florida, 45.1 percent in Alabama, and 46.9 percent in Louisiana. In contrast, the states of the upper South had considerably lower slave populations. About one third of Virginia and North Carolina’s population were enslaved, and a quarter in Tennessee and a fifth in Kentucky. Slaves accounted for 12.7 percent of the population in Maryland and a tiny 1.6 percent of inhabitants in Delaware. According to the 1850 census, the total slave population for the antebellum South was 3,204,313. Although many slaves worked in mixed farming, most of the enslaved labor force cultivated the great staple crops of the antebellum South. The census of 1850 estimates that out of the 2.5 million slaves working in agriculture, 1.815 million were engaged in cotton production, 350,000 in tobacco, 150,000 in sugar, 125,000 in rice, and 60,000 in hemp.²

Slaveholders employed two distinct labor practices in the antebellum South: the task system and the gang system. Under the task system, each slave was assigned a specific job for the day or week. After completing their assigned work, slaves were “free” to do as they pleased; usually, they returned home and tended small garden plots, performed housework, or went hunting. The task system was utilized extensively in the Lowcountry rice and Sea Island cotton regions of South Carolina and Georgia.³ Planters usually allotted tasks based on age and physical ability; they categorized individual men and women as quarter-, half-, three-quarter-, or full-task hands. On a visit to a large Lowcountry rice plantation, Frederick Law Olmsted observed the system firsthand:

The field-hands are all divided into four classes, according to their physical capacities. The children beginning as “quarter-hands,” advancing to “half-hands,” and then to “three-quarter-hands;” and, finally, when mature, and able-bodied, healthy, and strong, to “full hands.” As they decline in strength, from age, sickness, or other cause, they retrograde in the scale, and proportionally less labor is required of them. Many, of naturally weak frame, never are put among the full hands. Finally, the aged are left out at the annual classification, and no more regular field-work is required of them, although they are generally provided with some light, sedentary occupation.⁴

Although under the task system the enslaved were treated as individuals and assigned individual work tasks, many continued to work in groups; the stronger and faster slaves helped the slower and weaker ones with work, allowing them to keep up with the group. As slave owner James Sparkman remarked in an 1858 letter, “it is customary (and never objected to) for the more active and industrious hand to assist those who are slower and more tardy in finishing their daily tasks.”⁵

Under the gang system, slaveholders divided their workforce into groups under the supervision of a driver or leader and compelled them to work the entire day. Thus, the enslaved were not afforded the measure of independence available to those working under the task system. The gang system was commonly used on the tobacco plantations of the upper South, on most cotton plantations, and on the sugar plantations of southern Louisiana. As with the task system, planters rated the enslaved workforce as quarter hands, half hands, three-quarter hands, and full hands.⁶

Under both systems, owners of large plantations divided their workforces into sex-segregated gangs. On small holdings, however, there were simply not enough workers to permit planters to divide their workforce in this way. One WPA respondent, formerly enslaved on a small farm holding eight slaves in White County, Tennessee, claimed that “the women would plow, hoe corn, just like the men would.”⁷ Phoebe Lyons, enslaved in Lincoln County, Georgia, recalled that on her plantation “dey wuz’nt many slaves.” Accordingly, her mother “had to wuk en de fiel’ en plow jus’ like er man, en de res’ us chilluns big nuff ter pull weeds er swing er hoe, wuz out en er fiel’ wukin,’ fum daylight till too dark ter see.”⁸ Enslaved in a small community in Buena Vista, Alabama, Adaline Montgomery remarked her mother’s master had only two slaves: one manservant and her mother. As a result, her mother “had to go out an’ work jes’ like a man, cut logs an’ split rails.”⁹ Another former slave who worked on a small holding in West Virginia claimed her master “worked men or women slaves just alike.”¹⁰

Historians estimate slaveholders needed upward of fourteen working hands before gangs could be organized.¹¹ In 1860, planters possessing more than twenty slaves owned 48 percent of all enslaved people.¹² Thus, almost half the slave population lived on plantations where it was possible to assign work by gender; the larger the plantation, the more likely that work was divided into sex-segregated gangs. In 1860, a quarter of the enslaved population lived on large plantations holding more than fifty slaves. The sugar plantations located along the banks of the lower Mississippi River and the coastal Lowcountry rice plantations of South Carolina and Georgia were the largest slaveholdings in the South.¹³ In gangs, men undertook the more physically challenging task of plowing while women hoed.¹⁴ Slave owners were, of course, interested foremost in making a return on their investment. Accordingly, they did not hesitate to dissolve these sex-segregated gangs in response to specific labor requirements. For instance, during the busy harvesttime in the cotton fields, every hand was needed; hence it was not unusual for men and women to labor side by side picking cotton. Nevertheless, owners maintained that separating their workforce was advantageous: it prevented enslaved people from interacting and flirting and thus disrupting the work routine. Furthermore, men were prevented from helping women with quotas or protecting them from punishments.¹⁵

Large sugar plantations dominated the landscape of southern Louisiana. In Ascension Parish, half of all the enslaved population lived on plantations holding 175 or more slaves.¹⁶ Unlike planters who grew cotton, tobacco, or rice, sugar planters imported far more male than female slaves in the domestic slave trade; 85 percent of all slaves who were sold to sugar plantations were male. Working on a sugar plantation was extremely physical; therefore, owners preferred a male workforce. Women were relatively scarce, and on some plantations, the ratio of enslaved men to women stood at almost three to one. According to historian Richard Follett, “the region mirrored the slave gulags of the Caribbean, where nineteenth-century sugar planters demonstrated a similar preference for males as agricultural workers.” As a result, Louisiana’s slave population suffered a natural decrease of about 13 percent per decade.¹⁷

Given the gender ratio in Louisiana, many enslaved men would have faced difficulties in finding female partners; it is plausible that they attached more significance to homosocial relationships. Men, after all, worked from sunup to sundown in sex-segregated gangs on the large sugar plantations of Louisiana. The plow gang was distinctly male—comprising the strongest men. The hoe gangs included both men and women; however, men and women frequently worked in separate hoe gangs.¹⁸ After a trip to the sugar plantations of Louisiana, William Russell Howard commented: “Three gangs of negroes were at work: one gang of men, with twenty mules and ploughs, was engaged in running through the furrows between the canes, cutting up the weeds, and clearing away the grass…. Another gang consisted of forty men, who were hoeing out the grass in Indian corn. The third gang, of thirty-six women, were engaged in hoeing out cane.”¹⁹ Owners of large sugar plantations in Louisiana frequently organized their workforces according to gender for a variety of tasks. Franklin A. Hudson, owner of the Blythewood Plantation on Bayou Goula, Iberville Parish, often detailed the division of labor in his plantation diary. The following entries were typical: “7 men ditching in Road ditch x Women cutting hay”; “Men cutting down trees on Congress land—women cutting corn stalks”; and “women gang taking grass from plant cane, men cutting wood.”²⁰ Hudson commonly ordered gangs of enslaved men to undertake the more physically demanding work: digging ditches, cutting down and hauling wood. Work gangs of women cut sugar cane, hay, corn stalks, and cleaned the ditches and drains.²¹ Sixty miles north of New Orleans, situated on the banks of the Mississippi, was the St. James Sugar Refinery, owned by one of the antebellum South’s wealthiest planters: Valcour Aime. As on Hudson’s plantation, the enslaved workforce was di...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Enslaved Men and Work
• 2. Enslaved Men and Leisure
• 3. Beyond the Plantation
• 4. Friendship, Resistance, and Runaways
• 5. Enslaved Men, the Grapevine Telegraph, and the Underground Railroad
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index