Posts Tagged ‘Task System’

Slave Life On Southern Plantations

Saturday, October 17th, 2009
Slaves' Tobacco on Wessyngton Plantation 1846

Slaves' Tobacco on Wessyngton Plantation 1846

Enslaved African Americans on Wessyngton Plantation worked under a task system.  The plantation owner assigned a task to each individual.  Once the task was completed the slave was free to work on his own crops of tobacco if he chose to do so.  The owner usually assigned tasks that would take the entire day to complete.  However, some of the fastest workers were able to complete the assigned tasks and work for themselves.  The slaves were not required to work on Sunday and were off half days on Saturdays.  Many of the slaves used this time to cultivate their own crops.  The task system required less supervision by overseers than gang labor and gave slaves more control of their time.

 The owner kept a list of how much tobacco each person raised and paid them after the crops were sold in New Orleans.  The slaves used the money from the sale of the crops to purchase various items not provided by the plantation owner.  The document above lists the names of men on Wessyngton Plantation in 1846 who raised their own crops and the items they purchased for their families.

Slave Women on Southern Plantations

Friday, October 9th, 2009
Slave Women Processing Pork on Wessyngton Plantation

Slave Women Processing Pork on Wessyngton Plantation

Enslaved African American women performed various task on southern plantations and farms.  Women on Wessyngton Plantation were not required to do any hard labor in the fields as the men did; however, they were an important part of other operations on the plantation.  Women did light work in the gardens, they knitted and sewed for the slave community and their owners, worked the looms, and did the spinning and weaving.  They were responsible for cooking, cleaning, washing, ironing, making cheese, preserves, and soap. No mother with a young baby was expected to do any outside work until her baby was two years old.  There was a nursery on the plantation were children were cared for by elderly women too old to work.  Women were a vital part of the pork processing industry on the plantation as seen in the photo above.  Each week the women on the plantation would assemble at the plantation smokehouse (building in background of photo) and would be allotted bacon, meal, flour, sugar, and coffee based on the number of individuals in their families.  Hundreds of hogs were killed at each year at Wessyngton to feed the enslaved population and the Washington family.  Wessyngton had a reputation for producing  its famous Washington Hams which could be found on the menus of the finest restaurants as far south as New Orleans and as far north as Philadelphia.