Thomas Clay, Esq., a slave-holder of Georgia, and a most benevolent man, and who interested himself very successfully in endeavoring to promote the improvement of the negroes, in his address before the Georgia Presbytery, 1833, says of their food, “The quantity allowed by custom is a peck of corn a week.”
The Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser, May 30, 1788, says, “A single peck of corn, or the same measure of rice, is the ordinary provision for a hard-working slave, to which a small quantity of meat is occasionally, though rarely, added.”
Captain William Ladd, of Minot, Maine, formerly a slave-holder in Florida, says, “The usual allowance of food was a quart of corn a day to a full-task hand, with a modicum of salt; kind masters allowed a peck of corn a week.”
The law of North Carolina provides that the master shall give his slave a quart of corn a day, which is less than a peck a week by one quart.—Haywood’s Manual, 525; Slavery as It Is, p. 29. The master, therefore, who gave a peck a week would feel that he was going beyond the law, and giving a quart for generosity.
This condition of things will appear far more probable in the section of country where the scene of the story is laid. It is in the south-western states, where no provision is raised on the plantations, but the supply for the slaves is all purchased from the more northern states.
Let the reader now imagine the various temptations which might occur to retrench the allowance of the slaves, under these circumstances;—scarcity of money, financial embarrassment, high price of provisions, and various causes of the kind, bring a great influence upon the master or overseer.
At the time when it was discussed whether the State of Missouri should be admitted as a slave state, the measure, like all measures for the advancement of this horrible system, was advocated on the good old plea of humanity to the negroes; thus Mr. Alexander Smyth, in his speech on the slavery question, Jan. 21, 1820, says:
By confining the slaves to the Southern States, where crops are raised for exportation, and bread and meat are purchased, you doom them to scarcity and hunger. It is proposed to hem in the blacks where they are ILL FED.
Slavery as It Is, p. 28.
This is a simple recognition of the state of things we have adverted to. To the same purport, Mr. Asa A. Stone, a theological student, who resided near Natchez, Miss., in 1834–5, says: