D. The System of Task Work, 18541

In an effort to stimulate the slave to exert himself, many planters resorted to the system of task work. By this system a task was assigned to each slave to be finished within a certain time, with the understanding that any time the slave might have after the task was finished, was his own to spend on his own plot of ground. Mr. Olmsted, the best-known writer on conditions in the south just prior to the outbreak of the Civil War, described this system as follows:

After passing through tool-rooms, corn-rooms, mule-stables, storerooms, and a large garden, in which vegetables to be distributed among the negroes, as well as for the family, are grown, we walked to the rice-land. It is divided by embankments into fields of about twenty acres each, but varying somewhat in size, according to the course of the river. The arrangements are such that each field may be flooded independently of the rest, and they are subdivided by open ditches into rectangular plats of a quarter acre each. We first proceeded to where twenty or thirty women and girls were engaged in raking together, in heaps and winrows, the stubble and rubbish left on the field after the last crop, and burning it. The main object of this operation is to kill all the seeds of weeds, or of rice, on the ground. Ordinarily it is done by tasks a certain number of the small divisions of the field being given to each hand to burn in a day; but owing to a more than usual amount of rain having fallen lately, and some other causes, making the work harder in some places than others, the women were now working by the day, under the direction of a "driver," a negro man, who walked about among them, taking care that they left nothing unburned. Mr. X. inspected the ground they had gone over, to see whether the driver had done his duty. It had been sufficiently well burned, but, not more than quarter as much ground had been gone over, he said, as was usually burned in task-work, and he thought they had been very lazy, and reprimanded them for it. The driver made some little apology, but the women offered no reply, keeping steadily, and it seemed sullenly, on at their work.

In the next field, twenty men, or boys, for none of them looked as if they were full-grown, were plowing, each with a single mule, and a light, New-York-made plow. The soil was very friable, the plowing easy, and the mules proceeded at a smart pace; the furrows were straight, regular, and well turned. Their task was nominally an acre and a quarter a day; somewhat less actually, as the measure

1 A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States. By Frederick Law Olmsted (New York, 1859), 430-2.

includes the space occupied by the ditches, which are two to three feet wide, running around each quarter of an acre. The plowing gang was superintended by a driver who was provided with a watch; and while we were looking at them he called out that it was twelve o'clock. The mules were immediately taken from the plows, and the plow-boys mounting them, leapt the ditches, and cantered off to the stables, to feed them. One or two were ordered to take their plows to the blacksmith, for repairs.

The plowmen got their dinner at this time: those not using horses do not usually dine till they have finished their tasks; but this, I believe, is optional with them. They commence work at sunrise, and at about eight o'clock have breakfast brought to them in the field, each hand having left a bucket with the cook for that purpose. All who are working in connection leave their work together, and gather in a social company about a fire, where they generally spend about half an hour at breakfast time. The provisions furnished them consist mainly of meal, rice and vegetables, with salt and molasses, and occasionally bacon, fish, and coffee. The allowance is a peck of meal, or an equivalent quantity of rice per week, to each working hand, old or young, besides small stores. Mr. X. says that he has lately given a less amount of meat than is now usual on plantations, having observed that the general health of the negroes is not as good as formerly, when no meat at all was customarily given them. The general impression among planters is, that the negroes work much better for being supplied with three or four pounds of bacon a week.

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 proportionately 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. I saw one old woman picking "tailings" of rice out of a heap of chaff, an occupation at which she was literally not earning her salt. Mr. X. told me she was a native African, having been brought when a girl from the Guinea coast. She spoke almost unintelligibly; but after some other conversation, in which I had not been

able to understand a word she said, he jokingly proposed to send her back to Africa. She expressed her preference to remain where she was, very emphatically. "Why?" She did not answer readily, but being pressed, threw up her palsied hands, and said furiously, "I lubs 'ou mas'r, oh, I lubs 'ou. I don't want to go 'way from 'ou."

The field hands, are nearly always worked in gangs, the strength of a gang varying according to the work that engages it; usually it numbers twenty or more, and is directed by a driver. As on most large plantations, whether of rice or cotton, in Eastern Georgia and South Carolina, nearly all ordinary and regular work is performed by tasks; that is to say, each hand has his labor for the day marked out before him, and can take his own time to do it in. For instance, in making drains in light, clean meadow land, each man or woman of the full hands is required to dig one thousand cubic feet; in swampland that is being prepared for rice culture, where there are not many stumps, the task for a ditcher is five hundred feet: while in a very strong cypress swamp, only two hundred feet is required; in hoeing rice, a certain number of rows, equal to one-half or two-thirds of an acre, according to the condition of the land; in sowing rice (strewing in drills), two acres; in reaping rice (if it stands well), three-quarters of an acre; or, sometimes a gang will be required to reap, tie in sheaves, and carry to the stack-yard the produce of a certain area, commonly equal to one-fourth the number of acres that there are hands working together. Hoeing cotton, corn, or potatoes; one half to one acre. Threshing; five to six hundred sheaves. In plowing rice-land (light, clean, mellow soil) with a yoke of oxen, one acre a day, including the ground lost in and near the drains the oxen being changed at noon. A cooper, also, for instance, is required to make barrels. at the rate of eighteen a week. Drawing staves; 500 a day. Hoop poles; 120. Squaring timber; 100 ft. Laying worm-fence; 50 panels per hand. Post and rail do., posts set 2 to 3 ft. deep, 9 ft. apart, nine or ten panels per hand. In getting fuel from the woods, (pine, to be cut and split,) one cord is the task for a day. In "mauling rails," the taskman selecting the trees (pine) that he judges will split easiest, one hundred a day, ends not sharpened.

These are the tasks for first class able-bodied men, they are lessened by one quarter for three quarter hands, and proportionately for the lighter classes. In alloting the tasks, the drivers are expected to put the weaker hands, where (if there is any choice in the appearance of the ground, as where certain rows in hoeing corn would be less weedy than others), they will be favoured. . . .

IV. THE INTERNAL SLAVE TRADE

The Movement of Slaves toward the South, 1840-18601

There has been a great deal of discussion about the magnitude of the internal slave trade during the years preceding the Civil War. Some have contended that slaves were bred in the border states for the markets of the lower-south. Others have denied that such was the case. There is no doubt, however, that many slaves were raised in Virginia and Kentucky and then sent to the gulf regions. In the absence of definite statistics on the subject, the extent of this trade can never be definitely known. The following is merely a well-founded opinion:

It is this, the profit developed by trading in slaves, and this alone, which has enabled slavery in the older slave states of North America to survive the consequences of its own ravages. In Maryland and Virginia, perhaps also in the Carolinas and Georgia, free institutions would long since have taken the place of slavery, were it not that just as the crisis of the system had arrived, the domestic slave trade opened a door of escape from a position which had become untenable. The conjuncture was peculiar, and would doubtless by Southern theologians be called providential. The progress of devastation had reached the point at which slave cultivation could no longer sustain itself the contingency predicted by Roanoke, when, instead of the slave running away from his master, the master should run away from his slave. A considerable emigration of planters had actually taken place, and the deserted fields were already receiving a new race of settlers from the regions of freedom. The long night of slavery seemed to be passing away, and the dawn of a brighter day to have arrived, when suddenly the auspicious movement was arrested. A vast extension of the territory of the United States, opening new soils to Southern enterprise, exactly coincided with the prohibition of the external slave trade, and both fell in with the crisis in the older states. The result was a sudden and remarkable rise in the price of slaves. The problem of the planter's position was at once solved, and the domestic slave trade commenced. Slavery had robbed Virginia of the best riches of her soil, but she still had a noble climate a climate which would fit her admirably for being the breeding place of the South. A division of labour between the old and the new states took place. In the former the soil was extensively exhausted, but the climate was salubrious; in the latter the climate was unfavorable to human life spent in severe toil, but the soil was teeming with riches. The old states, therefore, undertook the part

1 The Slave Power. By J. E. Cairnes (London and Cambridge, 1863), 124–31.

of breeding and rearing slaves till they attained to physical vigour, and the new that of using up in the development of their virgin resources the physical vigour which had been thus obtained.

The charge of breeding slaves for the market is one which the citizens of Virginia, more especially when resident in Europe, are apt indignantly to deny; and, in a certain sense, the denial may not be wholly destitute of foundation. It is perhaps true that in no particular instance is a slave brought into the world for the purpose, distinctly conceived beforehand, of being sold to the South. Nevertheless it is absolutely certain that the whole business of raising slaves in the Border states is carried on with reference to their price, and that the price of slaves in the Border states is determined by the demand for them in the Southern markets. "Nowhere," said Henry Clay, "in the farming portion of the United States would slave labour be generally employed, if the proprietors were not tempted to raise slaves by the high price of the Southern markets which keeps it up in their own." Of the truth of this remark an illustration was afforded in 1829, when a law having been passed by the state legislature of Louisiana interposing obstacles to the introduction of slaves into that state, within two hours after this was known the price of slaves on the breeding grounds of the North fell 25 per cent. Again, at a later epoch, when the efforts of the Border slaveholders to establish slavery in California had failed, what was the comment on this failure made by a candidate for the governorship of Virginia, then on an electioneering tour through the state? that, but for this, the price of an ablebodied negro would have risen to 5,000 dollars — in other words, that the closing of the Californian mines to slave labour represented a loss to that state of 4,000 dollars per head on every first class Virginian slave. Such is the aspect under which the extension of the domain of slavery is regarded in Virginia - a point of view somewhat hard to reconcile with the air of injured virtue assumed by the 'Old Dominion' in its repudiation of the internal slave trade.

Indeed it would be futile to deny nor is it denied by the more outspoken of the Southern politicians that the markets of the South form the main support of slavery in the older Slave States. Of the extent to which the trade is carried, and the important interests depending on it, some notion may be formed from its effects on the census. For the purpose of exhibiting these I shall compare the population returns of the three principal Border states,— Virginia, Maryland and Kentucky, with those of three working states in the extreme south-west,- Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana.