>>21759007
Each man was allowed one acre of ground to raise his own little crop, which, if well cultivated, would produce nine hundred pounds of tobacco. We used his horse and plow, and worked our crop as well as we did his in the daytime, and when ready for market, he sold our crop with his, giving each one his share. This was our money, to be spent for whatever we wanted aside from that given by him (1895, p. 84).
Slaves aimed to add variety to their diets and wealth to their households though the cultivation of foodstuffs and staple crops. As with other activities associated with the internal economy, however, such practice held ambivalent meaning, by both promoting opportunities for wealth and independence and simultaneously attaching slaves more firmly to the plantations.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ball, Charles. Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, a Black Man, Who Lived Forty Years in Maryland, South Carolina, and Georgia, as a Slave under Various Masters, and Was One Year in the Navy with Commodore Barney, during the Late War. New York: John S. Taylor, 1853.
Ball, Charles. Fifty Years in Chains; or, The Life of an American Slave. New York: H. Dayton, 1859.
Bruce, Henry Clay. The New Man: Twenty-Nine Years a Slave, Twenty-Nine Years a Free Man. York, PA: P. Anstadt, 1895.
Macaulay, Zachary. Negro Slavery, or, A View of Some of the More Prominent Features of That State of Society: As It Exists in the United States of America and in the Colonies of the West Indies, Especially in Jamaica. London: Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Dominions, 1824.
Olmsted, Frederick Law. The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller's Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States: Based upon Three Former Volumes of Journeys and Investigations by the Same Author. New York: Mason Brothers, 1861–1862.
Riland, John. Memoirs of a West-India Planter. London: Hamilton, Adams, 1827.
Kathleen Hilliard