they could work during their short periods of time off, usually part
of a Sunday, to raise vegetables and, perhaps, chickens or even pigs. A
few slaves, particularly in the tobacco area of the Chesapeake, managed
to acquire more, but, at least in the southern colonies, they were a tiny
minority.
Regarding the slaves, particularly the field hands, as virtually animals,
owners usually provided them with neither plates nor eating utensils;
rather, the slaves ate from a shared wooden tub. Frederick Douglass
remembered his childhood on a farm in Maryland. Although he wrote well
after the Revolution, conditions then were essentially the same as in the
pre-Revolutionary period; I cite him because he was one of the few to give
a graphic description of what must have been the experience of thousands
of blacks in America generation after generation. When dinner was called,
he wrote, a cornmeal mush was poured onto large wooden trays; then the
little children “like so many pigs would come, and literally devour the
mush—some with oyster shells, some with pieces of shingles, and none
with spoons.”
Clothing was as scanty as food. Adult slaves often went virtually naked,
and children almost always. Notices of rewards for runaways might describe
the slave as wearing “only an Arse-Cloth,” or having “nothing on but an old
rag about his middle,” or having “nothing on but a piece of check linen about
her middle,” or “a Clout round his Loins.” Such clothing as was available
was almost entirely locally made, often by the slaves themselves, from “Negro
cloth,” described as cotton “calicoes, nankeens, osnaburgs, tows, linsey-
woolseys, cassimeres, ducks, kerseys, and Kentucky jeans.” Most of these
terms will mean nothing to modern, affluent, free readers, but all the fabrics
were thin and offered little protection against cold. Moreover, they were usu-
ally in short supply. Frederick Douglass notes,
I suffered much from hunger, but much more from cold. In hottest sum-
mer and coldest winter, I was kept almost naked—no shoes, no stockings,
no jacket, no trousers, nothing on but a coarse tow linen shirt, reaching
only to my knees. I had no bed. I must have perished with cold, but that,
the coldest nights, I used to steal a bag which was used for carrying corn
to the mill. I would crawl into this bag, and there sleep on the cold,172 THE BIRTH OF AMERICA