The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus

by American Anti-Slavery Society

"The slaves have two meals a day. They breakfast at from ten to eleven, A.M., and eat their supper at from six to nine or ten at night, as the season and crops may be."

The preceding testimony establishes the following points.

1st. That the slaves are allowed, in general, no meat. This appears from the fact, that in the only slave states which regulate the slaves' rations by law, (North Carolina and Louisiana,) the legal ration contains no meat. Besides, the late Hon. R.J. Turnbull, one of the largest planters in South Carolina, says expressly, "meat, when given, is only by the way of indulgence or favor." It is shown also by the direct testimony recorded above, of slaveholders and others, in all parts of the slaveholding south and west, that the general allowance on plantations is corn or meal and salt merely. To this there are doubtless many exceptions, but they are only exceptions; the number of slaveholders who furnish meat for their field-hands, is small, in comparison with the number of those who do not. The house slaves, that is, the cooks, chambermaids, waiters, &c., generally get some meat every day; the remainder bits and bones of their masters' tables. But that the great body of the slaves, those that compose the field gangs, whose labor and exposure, and consequent exhaustion, are vastly greater than those of house slaves, toiling as they do from day light till dark, in the fogs of the early morning, under the scorchings of mid-day, and amid the damps of evening, are in general provided with no meat, is abundantly established by the preceding testimony.

Now we do not say that meat is necessary to sustain men under hard and long continued labor, nor that it is not. This is not a treatise on dietetics; but it is a notorious fact, that the medical faculty in this country, with very few exceptions, do most strenuously insist that it is necessary; and that working men in all parts of the country do believe that meat is indispensable to sustain them, even those who work within doors, and only ten hours a day, every one knows. Further, it is notorious, that the slaveholders themselves believe the daily use of meat to be absolutely necessary to the comfort, not merely of those who labor, but of those who are idle, as is proved by the fact of meat being a part of the daily ration of food provided for convicts in the prisons, in every one of the slave states, except in those rare cases where meat is expressly prohibited, and the convict is, by way of extra punishment confined to bread and water; he is occasionally, and for a little time only, confined to bread and water; that is, to the ordinary diet of slaves, with this difference in favor of the convict, his bread is made for him, whereas the slave is forced to pound or grind his own corn and make his own bread, when exhausted with toil.

The preceding testimony shows also, that vegetables form generally no part of the slaves' allowance. The sole food of the majority is corn: at every meal—from day to day—from week to week—from month to month, corn. In South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, the sweet potato is, to a considerable extent, substituted for corn during a part of the year.

2d. The preceding testimony proves conclusively, that the quantity of food generally allowed to a full-grown field-hand, is a peck of corn a week, or a fraction over a quart and a gill of corn a day. The legal ration of North Carolina is less—in Louisiana it is more. Of the slaveholders and other witnesses, who give the fore-going testimony, the reader will perceive that no one testifies to a larger allowance of corn than a peck for a week; though a number testify, that within the circle of their knowledge, seven quarts was the usual allowance. Frequently a small quantity of meat is added; but this, as has already been shown, is not the general rule for field-hands. We may add, also, that in the season of "pumpkins," "cimblins," "cabbages," "greens," &c., the slaves on small plantations are, to some extent, furnished with those articles.

Now, without entering upon the vexed question of how much food is necessary to sustain the human system, under severe toil and exposure, and without giving the opinions of physiologists as to the insufficiency or sufficiency of the slaves' allowance, we affirm that all civilized nations have, in all ages, and in the most emphatic manner, declared, that eight quarts of corn a week, (the usual allowance of our slaves,) is utterly insufficient to sustain the human body, under such toil and exposure as that to which the slaves are subjected.

To show this fully, it will be necessary to make some estimates, and present some statistics. And first, the northern reader must bear in mind, that the corn furnished to the slaves at the south, is almost invariably the white gourd seed corn, and that a quart of this kind of corn weighs five or six ounces less than a quart of "flint corn," the kind generally raised in the northern and eastern states; consequently a peck of the corn generally given to the slaves, would be only equivalent to a fraction more than six quarts and a pint of the corn commonly raised in the New England States, New York, New Jersey, &c. Now, what would be said of the northern capitalist, who should allow his laborers but six quarts and five gills of corn for a week's provisions?

Further, it appears in evidence, that the corn given to the slaves is often defective. This, the reader will recollect, is the voluntary testimony of Thomas Clay, Esq., the Georgia planter, whose testimony is given above. When this is the case, the amount of actual nutriment contained in a peck of the "gourd seed," may not be more than in five, or four, or even three quarts of "flint corn."

As a quart of southern corn weighs at least five ounces less than a quart of northern corn, it requires little arithmetic to perceive, that the daily allowance of the slave fed upon that kind of corn, would contain about one third of a pound less nutriment than though his daily ration were the same quantity of northern corn, which would amount, in a year, to more than a hundred and twenty pounds of human sustenance! which would furnish the slave with his full allowance of a peck of corn a week for two months! It is unnecessary to add, that this difference in the weight of the two kinds of corn, is an item too important to be overlooked. As one quart of the southern corn weighs one pound and eleven-sixteenths of a pound, it follows that it would be about one pound and six-eighths of a pound. We now solicit the attention of the reader to the following unanimous testimony, of the civilized world, to the utter insufficiency of this amount of food to sustain human beings under labor. This testimony is to be found in the laws of all civilized nations, which regulate the rations of soldiers and sailors, disbursements made by governments for the support of citizens in times of public calamity, the allowance to convicts in prisons, &c. We will begin with the United States.