Slave quarters in the United States

Plantation slavery had regional variations dependent on which cash crop was grown, most commonly cotton, hemp, indigo, rice, sugar, or tobacco.[3] Sugar work was exceptionally dangerous—the sugar district of Louisiana was the only region of the United States that saw consistent population declines, despite constant imports of new slaves.[4][3] The cotton plantations used the grueling gang system.[3] Some plantations used the task system, which permitted slightly more leisure time and thus development of domestic life amongst the enslaved.[3] As a rule, personal freedom for slaves was restricted to what could be achieved in the slave quarters from sundown to sunup.[5]

On some farms, slave houses were part of a larger, centrally located community group. For example, at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, Mulberry Row was an area of the property where slave dwellings were built alongside a smokehouse, dairy, wash house, joinery, nailery/smithy, and a house where free stoneworkers lived during construction. After the stoneworkers left, the stoneworkers' house was used for textile production.[6] Harriet Beecher Stowe quoted Rev. Westgate in A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853) about his impression of slave quarters, and he explained that construction materials depended on location and age of the site: "On old plantations the negro quarters are of frame and clapboards, seldom affording a comfortable shelter from wind or rain; their size varies from eight by ten, to ten by twelve feet, and six or eight feet high; sometimes there is a hole cut for a window, but I never saw a sash, or glass, in any. In the new country, and in the woods, the quarters are generally built of logs, of similar dimensions."[7]

Field cabins were isolated and somewhat remote but offered agricultural workers close proximity to crop fields.[2] Few field cabins survive as they were generally "left to rot" after the last residents departed.[2][8]

Rural slave quarters were usually one or two-room cabins occupied by a family unit.[5] The individual rooms were called pens; houses were single-pen or double-pen.[9][3] Some two-room cabins were duplexes hosting two families separated by a wall, each with their own entrance.[9] Saddlebag plan houses had two units that were "separated by a central chimney".[8] Dogtrot houses or open-passage houses had a breezeway between the two living spaces.[10] Cabins with one room and a loft above were known as one up and one down.[11]

A former slave cabin near Eufaula, Barbour County, Alabama, still in use as a residence and photographed c. 1936 for the Slave Narratives project of the Works Progress Administration

On average, slave quarters were log cabins with dirt floors, clay chimneys, wood-shingle roofs, and one unglazed window.[9][3] Windows lacking glass would have been covered with shutters or curtains. Slave houses built in the 19th century were more likely to have plank floors and be raised on piers.[2] Typical 19th-century quarters were around 200 square feet in area.[2] Some slave dwellings in the United States were wood-frame or masonry buildings; slave quarters at two sites in South Carolina were found to have African-styled, clay-walled, wattle-and-daub construction that was common in the Caribbean slave housing but extremely rare in North America.[12] Brick was an uncommon building material, but some slave quarters were constructed from field stone;[3] for example, local limestone was used in Maryland.[11] Contemporary documentarians report that former slave houses often have low ceilings, little natural light, and feel "stuffy".[13] The home of the slave owner on the plantation or farm was typically called the big house.[5] Slave quarters were usually located near the big house but subsidiary in size and quality of construction, and subject to surveillance, inspection and regulation. In some cases the slave owner lived off-site but an overseer's house was built near the slave quarters.[9]

Bedding was usually either straw on the floor or a straw-filled tick with a thin blanket.[14] Bedframes were uncommon; where they existed, they were constructed with cord.[13] Bureaus, tables, and chairs were uncommon.[14] Possessions of cultural significance included homemade musical instruments such as drums and fiddles fashioned from dried gourds.[14] Household goods in slave quarters were minimal but might have included work tools, iron cookware, pewter spoons,[15] and locally made pottery (colonoware).[14]

Former slave quarters at Jefferson Davis' plantation Brierfield in Mississippi, drawn by A.R. Waud, etching published 1866 in Harper's Weekly

The slave quarters often developed independent systems for food and cloth production. Enslaved adults on a plantation were provided with specific food rations and clothing allotments but these were typically inadequate, so the slave quarters were a place where preparations were made for hunting, trapping, and fishing,[12] where chickens were kept, and where kitchen gardens were tended.[5] In some cases, with an eye to time efficiency and maximizing profit, there was a central kitchen that provided all meals.[4][3] Despite the fact that marriages of enslaved people were generally illegal, slave quarters were the site of weddings[16] and were the "cradle of the black family",[3] as babies were born and families raised there.[4]

Many slave quarters also hosted burial grounds for the dead.[17] Burials in slave cemeteries were often poorly marked even when in active use (carved stone grave markers would have been impossibly expensive), and over the decades and centuries essentially disappeared into the landscape even when they were not actively erased.[18][19] As one reporter wrote upon visiting the ruins of Prospect Hill in Mississippi: "No one yet knows where the slaves are buried, their wooden markers long since having crumbled into dust."[20]