Historical Overview: Revolutionary War to the Civil War: Feeding the Slaves

The amount and types of food that masters allotted to slaves differed from that which slaves prepared and ate. Their owners were concerned with providing only enough nourishment to enable slaves to work as much as possible. The mainstays of the slave diet were pork and corn, both of which were plentiful in the South. The typical ration, set in the eighteenth century, was a peck of corn per slave per week. This was varied locally with broken rice, sweet potatoes in season, and other starches. The diet of pork and corn allowed the adult slave to consume approximately 4,500 calories per day. While this amount seems excessive in a modern diet, surviving photographs of African Americans, who were, with little exception, slim, suggest that this intake was necessary to sustain them as they worked “from sun-up to sun-down.” The typical diet was both monotonous and not especially healthful, because pork and corn, while providing protein and carbohydrates, lack many vitamins. To vary their food choices (and to a lesser extent to provide more nutrition), slaves hunted, fished, trapped, stole, and grew their own foods whenever possible. This was allowed by some masters, since it was less expensive to give slaves the freedom (and sometimes the arms) to provide for themselves. Other masters, especially as plantations evolved and became larger, thought that it was inefficient to have slaves working to feed themselves and so provided a better ration, or delegated certain slaves to cook in the fields or in communal kitchens for the children. When and where they could, slaves added okra, cabbage, squash, peas, and rice, as well as grouse, squirrels, raccoons, possums, fish, alligators, turtles, and groundhogs. Some of these foods were regarded by the masters as farm pests or beneath notice, while others were actually sold to masters or on the open market, providing slaves with a cash income. This was more prevalent in the early part of this period than in the later years of slavery. Fathers took pride in teaching their sons to obtain their own food, thereby providing the opportunity to assume some of the familial responsibilities that were frequently denied to adult male slaves.