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CHAPTER 14 From Cradle to Grave 1783 to 1863

Cotton's reign exacted an inestimable human price with its dependence on the free labor of slaves, many of whom spent their entire lives in bondage and were physically abused. Without this forced toil-often carried out from sunrise to sunset with only the briefest respites-plantation owners likely would never have been so successful.

But owning slaves was by no means restricted to wealthy planters with thousands of acres. Even farmers with much less land were attracted to slavery and the dollars cotton could bring. Steadily, from 1810 to 1850, more and more farmers entered into slave holding in the four counties comprising the Russell Reservoir area, a situation repeated throughout the South.

Statistics, however, cannot explain what it meant to be a slave. For that, historians turned to observers' accounts from the period and reminiscences of former slaves and their offspring. Many of the statements, particularly about conditions in Elbert and Hart Counties in Georgia, were collected in the Federal Writer's Project of the Works Progress Administration between 1936 and 1938. While the descriptions reflect individual experience, they also provide impressions about a way of life imposed on thousands of others.

Benny Dillard's recollections about his mother were the only ones to trace all the way back to a slave's capture in Africa. He told how his mother's years of servitude began with a boat journey that took more than six months to reach the United States. Only about 16 years old at the time, she lost not only her freedom, but also her identity. A slave trader in Virginia gave her the single name of Nancy before she was transported to Georgia.

Charlie Hudson recalled watching wagon trains carrying slaves as they passed through the area on their way from Virginia. Born a slave in 1858, Hudson further described an involuntary separation from his parents that was common for slaves. His mother lived on one Elbert County plantation and his father lived on another.

Work began for most slaves by age seven when they started to tote water to workers in the fields and pick up stones in the way of plows. Until then, children wore little clothing, only an old guano or corn meal bag or tow linen shirt and nothing else. By age 10 or 12, children stopped performing the lighter tasks and assumed adult work, although their output wasn't expected to be as great. Planters measured how much work a slave could do against the productivity of a healthy male hand, and children might be considered "quarter hands" under this gauge.

Slaves were grouped into three categories-field hands, house servants, and skilled craftsmen, such as blacksmiths, masons, and carpenters. Overlapping responsibilities were not uncommon, however, depending on the slaveowner's needs. The lowest rung was field hand and comprised the majority. Field hands included men, women, and children who worked side by side.

A field hand's duties depended on the seasons, and revolved around planting, cultivating, and harvesting crops. Farmers with only a few slaves often worked along with them in the fields, while wealthier planters tended to organize labor into gangs with an overseer or slave driver in control. The over-seer's responsibility was to force maximum effort out of everyone. Demanding that a field hand pick 300 pounds of cotton in a single day was not unusual, and any who failed were subject to lashing with a whip on many plantations and farms.

In fact, cruelty and physical punishment were common for any number of infractions, according to Austin Steward, a slave for 22 years: "I must first say that it is not true that slaveowners are respected for kindness to their slaves. The more tyrannical a master is, the more will he be favorably regarded by his neighboring planters; and from the day that he acquires the reputation of a kind and indulgent master, he is looked upon with suspicion, and sometimes hatred, and his slaves are watched more closely than before."

Field hands weren't the only ones subject to abuse. Steward recalled house servants suffering at the hands of the mistress, whom he described as a "great scold" : "... continually finding fault with some of the servants, and frequently punishing the young slaves herself, by striking them over the head with a heavy iron key, until the blood ran; or else whipping them with a cowhide, which she always kept by her side.... The older servants she would cause to be punished by having them severely whipped by a man, which she never failed to do for every trifling fault."

While conditions varied for slaves, depending on their owners' dispositions, harsh punishment was widely accepted. James Edward Calhoun revealed in a letter soon after he moved to Millwood his own tactics for slave control: "Day before yesterday, one of the negroes lodged complaint against Abbeville William, who took himself off, apprehensive of a flogging. Have a good lookout kept for the rascal, & if you can catch him give him, in the first place, as soon as he can be tied, 100 lashes & then have him put in jail."

Calhoun continued by advising that the slave should then be sold for $700 or $650, "always cash in hand." However, he also reserved the option of punishing the slave himself, "as an example."

Slaves depended on masters for even the most basic needs-food, clothing, and shelter. Adequately meeting those requirements to protect his investment was in the slaveholder's best interest. But he also had a competing objective of keeping costs low. Most resolved the conflict by providing the least subsistence possible, housing slaves in flimsy structures the servants were forced to build for themselves, clothing them in the cheapest fabrics slave women were often required to sew, and feeding them small amounts of the poorest food which was rationed by the day or week.

Most Southern slave dwellings, including those in the reservoir boundaries, were small. These houses consisted of single or double rooms built of logs, which were commonly available on the plantation because trees needed to be cleared to make way for fields. Also, log houses required the least effort to build, which was important because field labor therefore wasn't lost for long. Some plantation owners also wanted to keep slave housing insubstantial because they planned eventually to move slaves to other cabins, close to newlycleared fields.

Frederick Law Olmsted, designer of Central Park in New York City, traveled through the South in 1853 and 1854, and wrote about slave cabins he saw in South Carolina: "It was a very large plantation, and all the buildings were substantial and commodious, except the negro-cabins, which were the smallest I had seen-I thought not more than twelve feet square interiorly. They stood in two rows, with a wide street between them. They were built of logs, with no windows-no opening at all, except the doorway, with no trees about them, or porches, or shades of any kind."

Carrie Hudson, a slave on Joseph (Squire) Rucker's plantation in Elbert County, explained that slave children usually slept on floor pallets. Adults used a bed made of poles nailed into the wall and floor. The bed was fitted with crosswise planks and a coarse cloth tick filled with wheat straw for the mattress.

The content, quality, and preparation of meals differed from place to place. Sometimes older workers, no longer useful in the fields, were designated to do communal cooking. Slaves elsewhere were fed similarly in groups, but were individually responsible for preparing their own evening meals, which they cooked in mud and stick fireplaces that also provided heat in their cabins. Fatty salt pork and corn meal were the normal food. Occasionally slaves supplemented their regular stipend with game they hunted and fresh vegetables some were allowed to grow after their workdays ended.

Charlie Hudson fared a little better, possibly because his mother was the master's cook and had access to other food, including milk and butter. Among his better memories was opossum she baked with butter. Hudson also ate a dish first devised by the Indians, lye hominy from corn.

But Austin Steward remembered leaner times: "The slaves on our plantation were provided with very little meat. In addition to the peck of corn or meal, they were allowed a little salt and a few herrings. If they wished for more, they were obliged to earn it by over-work. They were permitted to cultivate small gardens, and were thereby enabled to provide themselves with trifling conveniences. But these gardens were only allowed to some of the more industrious."

Meals during field chores were often prepared by slave cooks, then carried out to the workers so there was little disruption of their labor. Despite their strenuous work, the food field hands were served was meager, remembered Steward: "All the field hands were required to give into the hands of the cook a certain portion of their weekly allowance, either in dough or meal, which was prepared in the following manner. The cook made a hot fire and rolled up each person's portion in some cabbage leaves, when they could be obtained, and placed it in a hole in the ashes, carefully covered with the same, where it remained until done. Bread baked in this way is very sweet and good. But then cabbage leaves could not always be obtained. When this was the case, the bread was little better than a mixture of dough and ashes, which was not very palatable."

Their clothes were often equally substandard and quickly showed the effects of their wearers' toil. Olmsted described how women field hands were dressed. "...coarse gray gowns, generally very much burned and dirty; which, for greater convenience of working in the mud, were reefed up with a cord drawn tightly about the body, a little above the hips-the spare amount of skirt bagging out between this and the waist proper. On their legs were loose leggins or pieces of blanket or bagging wrapped about, and lashed with thongs; and they wore very heavy shoes. Most of them had handkerchiefs, only, tied around their heads; some wore men's caps, or old slouched hats, and several were bareheaded."

A year's allotment of ready-made clothing for men and materials for women to make their own were detailed by a South Carolina planter: "Each man gets in the fall two shirts of cotton drilling, a pair of woolen pants and a woolen jacket. In the spring, two shirts of cotton shirting and two pr. of cotton pants.... Each woman gets in the fall six yds. of woolen cloth, six yds. of cotton drilling and needle, skein of thread and one-half dozen buttons. In the spring six yds. of cotton shirting and six yds. of cotton cloth similar to that for men's pants, needle, thread, and buttons. Each worker gets a stout pr. of shoes each fall, and a heavy blanket every third year."

As their title implied, slaves existed solely to do the work of masters, but for luckier ones there were moments of pleasure derived from the company of other slaves and during the festivities some slaveholders occasionally allowed. Most field hands worked six days a week with Sundays off for rest and religious services generally encouraged by masters.

Carrie Hudson recalled when slaves returned from the fields at night how they wanted only to rest. But Saturday nights were special because they were permitted to dance and play the banjo. Christmas, however, was the treasured time for children because, ... there would be plenty of fresh meat, and there was heaps of good chickens, turkeys, cake, candies, and just everything good."

Slaves celebrated the holiday by visiting one another's cabins, but when New Year's Day arrived they returned to work. Other pleasurable activities Carrie Hudson recounted were corn shuckings and cotton picking by torch light on fall nights, after which slaves were permitted to dance and eat well. Log rollings were her favorite, however, and again were marked by music, food, and also whiskey in kegs. Her master organized and provisioned those events, and gave a prize to the hand who picked the most cotton.

In cold months, when there was less field work, slaves sometimes were allowed to arrange for themselves quilting parties with sewing, food, and drink.

While these few indulgences may have eased their lot somewhat, the fact remained that slaves were prisoners in a labor camp. Most were rarely allowed to leave their masters' land, but if they were granted permission they were often required to carry passes attesting to their owners' intentions allowing them to go. These permits could be demanded by groups of White enforcers, called the "Patrol", that existed throughout the South. The Patrol tried to prevent slave escape and rebellion, and punished those caught with whippings and hangings.

Slaves eventually outnumbered Whites, who compensated for the difference by any method of subjugation they considered useful. As Austin Steward explained: "No slave could possibly escape being punished-I care not how attentive they might be, nor how industrious-punished they must be, and punished they certainly were."

Slave supervision was integral to the way buildings were arranged on plantations. Merle Prunty described this arrangement as "nucleated", meaning most buildings were grouped together. The planter's residence, slave cabins arranged in rows along short roads, and service buildings, such as barns and sheds, were all clustered close to each other. Based on a Georgia rice plantation near the coast, this picture of plantation life applied to some landholdings in the Russell area, but there were also deviations dictated by the differences in raising rice and cotton.

Researcher Marlessa Gray designated two more settlement patterns in the reservoir area besides the nucleated one. The semi-nucleated form resembled the nucleated, but buildings were further apart. The conglomerate pattern divided buildings into several clusters, grouped by activities. Sometimes these individual clusters were a considerable distance apart.

Researchers found the conglomerate pattern the most representative of the region's large plantations because of cotton's rapid exhaustion of the soil. On a regular basis, new fields had to be cleared and planted, and these fields were sometimes not contiguous to the original settlement. As a result, more service buildings, and sometimes slave and overseer dwellings, were built in satellite communities close to the new fields. Occasionally, even the planter's residence was shifted closer to new fields to let him supervise more easily. In contrast, rice fields, kept fertile by frequent immersion in nutrient-rich water, were continuously reused, as were nearby buildings.

The shift to a conglomerate pattern usually occurred on plantations after three to five years when the soil was depleted and new fields were needed. James Edward Calhoun made such a change when he gradually expanded his Midway Plantation holdings, then established slaves and an overseer on his new plantation, called Millwood. Ultimately, he moved to the new location himself.

But owners of fewer slaves and smaller plantations, as well as farmers, couldn't always afford to buy more land and workers. Their settlements tended to follow nucleated or semi-nucleated patterns.

Historian Linda Worthy also distinguished another difference between planters and farmers. Planters-those with 20 or more slaves-were concerned with controlling many slaves and that often determined where they placed buildings. Farmers were more likely to arrange structures according to whether chores associated with them concerned the house or the field. Chores, and therefore the buildings associated with them, were also traditionally identified with women or men. For example, household jobs usually performed by women included tending chickens and preparing food, so the chicken house and smokehouse were put close to the residence. Men, on the other hand, usually performed the field tasks of caring for the ox and mule, and storing cotton and corn. Consequently, buildings for those functions-the barn, cotton shed, and corn crib-were farther from the house and closer to the fields.

As for local architecture, there were few of the columned mansions many associate with the South. The great majority lived in simple wood houses, including many land-rich planters such as Calhoun. Even though many antebellum dwellings were gone by the time researchers arrived, enough remained to confirm the accuracy of the observations of an anonymous writer in 1859.

The writer noted a "uniformity of design" in all country houses in Georgia and South Carolina, and divided them into four categories: "...The little log cabin, with a single room and a clay chimney. This represents the lowest class. Two log pens (rooms), and two back shed rooms, with a passage through the center and piazza in front; clay chimney at each end of the house. This is the second in the ascending scale. Two story house, built of pine boards, with four rooms in the body of the house, and two shed rooms behind; brick chimney at each end, piazza in front, and passage through the center. This is the third class-men who are getting 'well-to-do in the world.'

"Large two story double house, eight rooms, chimney running up through the roof, giving a fireplace to each room; piazza or portico in front, and passage through the center. This completes the series, and here we find the lordly planter, with all the appointments of comfortable and stylish living."

The dwelling in the Russell Reservoir area closest to the popular conception of elegant antebellum homes was the William Allen House on the Beverly Plantation. Located in Elbert County, this sizable two-story structure, with front columns and double chimneys, was identified by an architectural historian as plantation plain style. The characteristics of this design, popular in the South in the early 1800's, were frame construction, two stories, gable roofs, and exterior end chimneys. Two rooms of unequal size were located on both floors, and there were additional shed rooms in the rear and a porch across the front.

Usually unpainted and raised on a rock foundation, a plantation plain style house had plastered interior walls or flush siding with chair rails. The houses incorporated much hand-crafted woodwork, which would soon largely die out as a craft in America because of the industrial revolution. Such a residence effectively separated the wealthy planter from outsiders through boundaries created by its porches, hallways, and distinctions between private and public rooms. Archeologist J. W. Joseph noted that these barriers were useful to protect the planter from the uncertain intentions of diverse callers and to demonstrate his wealth and high social standing.

On the other end of the economic scale were poor Whites who often occupied log shelters little better, if at all, than those lived in by slaves. Often only one or two rooms, these dwellings offered none of the isolated retreats that a planter might have in his home. As Frederick Law Olmsted observed: "The logs are usually hewn but little; and, of course, as they are laid up, there will be wide interstices between them-which are increased by subsequent shrinking. These, very commonly, are not 'chinked', or filled up in any way; nor is the wall lined on the inside...." In other words, the walls and roof sometimes barely kept out the rain.

Farmers, who were in between the richest and poorest categories, rarely included barriers to outsiders in their homes, either. As Joseph explained: "Farmers were likely to have interacted with other farmers, and with the few slaves they might own. If slaveowners, then they probably worked together with their slaves in the field and were familiar with one another. Farmers had no reason to build houses which excluded them from the outside world, because the outside world was not a threat."

The Caldwell-Hutchison House was a typical residence for such farmers, who often did not work from building plans, but merely extended their houses as needed. The house began as only one room of hewn logs joined with half dovetailed notching. As the family grew, two rooms were added, with a dogtrot or breezeway in between to cool the place in hot weather. Eventually, the residents added a second story. Another dwelling, the Alexander-Cleveland house, began as two stories with frame construction and mortise-and-tenon joints. It was later enlarged to include a rear single-storied kitchen. The house style is considered Carolina I because of the rear addition and a single-story front porch.

All three examples from the area, the Alexander-Cleveland, Caldwell-Hutchison, and William Allen houses, were occupied long after the Civil War. In fact, a brother and sister, Bandon and Katherine Hutchison, resided in their family home until they were relocated to make way for the Richard B. Russell Dam and Lake. So, even though area people mostly favored simple constructions, they often built their homes to last, and last they did, in some cases for well over 100 years.

Chapter 15: Fortunes Won and Lost

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