Slave Quarters (1840s)

Gullah-Geechee is a creole culture that emerged among enslaved African Americans in the coastal Southeastern United States. Modern material expressions of this culture include a distinctive settlement type, the family compound, consisting of loosely clustered residences and outbuildings. The arrangement of these settlements resembles colonial slave quarters but differs from antebellum “slave rows.” Gullah-Geechee family compounds existed by the mid-20th century, but their origin, time depth, and evolution from linear quarters are unclear. Archaeological study of the Wilson–Miller plantation slave quarter near Savannah, occupied over most of the 19th Century, indicated that the Gullah-Geechee residential compound appeared soon after Emancipation. The study also suggested that communal outdoor space was important in maintaining cultural practices that were expressed in both colonial and post-Emancipation settlement patterns.

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I Do Not Buy My Freedom Because I Am Not a Fool

The People of the River ◽

10.5149/northcarolina/9781469643243.003.0004 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 51-73

Author(s):

Oscar de la Torre

Keyword(s):

Negative Impact ◽

Community Formation ◽

Late Nineteenth Century ◽

Agricultural Work ◽

Equatorial Africa ◽

Commercial Networks ◽

Late Nineteenth ◽

Rubber Boom ◽

Slave Quarters ◽

The One

The first part of the chapter analyzes the different paths by which slaves acquired environmental knowledge: importing skills and strategies from equatorial Africa, acquiring knowledge when doing agricultural work in plantations and farms, and maintaining interethnic contacts with Indians. As they learned the ways of local peasants, the enslaved gradually built entire parallel economies with vigorous ties to the expanding network of commercial houses that existed in late nineteenth-century Amazonia. Instead of using the term “internal economy of slavery,” I conceptualize them as an economy that ran parallel to that of their masters, given the size and complexity of the commercial networks in which the slaves participated. The chapter also describes the process of community formation inside the slave quarters at the time of Amazonia’s rubber boom, which had both a positive and negative impact on the prospects of Amazonia’s black slaves. On the one hand, it made it possible for them to expand their parallel economy. On the other hand, that slaves could carry out such a broad scope of activities meant that the slaveowners could adapt to the changes of the era. In Amazonia slavery was just like rubber: flexible and adaptable to multiple conditions – hence its durability.

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Introduction

10.5149/northcarolina/9781469660677.003.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 1-28

Author(s):

Libra R. Hilde

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

White Men ◽

African American Families ◽

Public And Private ◽

Black Fathers ◽

Recent Scholarship ◽

The Family ◽

Slave Quarters ◽

Patriarchal Power ◽

American Families

The introduction presents an overview of the literature on the family and masculinity within slavery, arguing that in order to appreciate the adaptability and multiplicity of enslaved families, scholars should focus on how kin units functioned rather than on the form of households. To fully understand fatherhood within slavery, it is critical to recognize multilocal kin networks and to assess the contributions of non-resident, but engaged fathers. This book builds on recent scholarship that posits multiple masculinities in enslaved communities and explores the masculine hierarchy of slavery. In the Old South, masculinity took on a public and private dichotomy with public expressions of manhood available only to white men. Enslaved men could at times exhibit masculinity privately and within the bounds of the plantation and slave quarters. One consistent ideal of manhood in African American communities was that of caretaker. The introduction refutes misperceptions of African American families and missing Black fathers, arguing that because enslaved and postwar freedmen lacked access to recognized patriarchal power, their hidden caretaking behavior has long been obscured.

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A. J. Davis’s Belmead

Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians ◽

10.1525/jsah.2012.71.2.145 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 71 (2) ◽

pp. 145-167

Author(s):

Daniel Bluestone

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Architectural History ◽

Agricultural Practices ◽

Agricultural System ◽

Cultural Meaning ◽

James River ◽

Gothic Revival ◽

Classical Architecture ◽

Chattel Slavery ◽

Slave Quarters

In 1845 Philip St. George Cocke commissioned Alexander Jackson Davis to design a Gothic revival villa for Belmead. In doing so he radically departed from the tradition of Palladian and classical architecture that had characterized elite Virginia plantations since the mid-eighteenth century. In A. J. Davis’s Belmead: Picturesque Aesthetics in the Land of Slavery, Daniel Bluestone argues that a Davis design resonated differently on the banks of the James River than on the banks of the Hudson. The appeal of Davis’s design lay in its sensitivity to the reciprocity between buildings and landscape, highlighting Cocke’s advocacy of greater stewardship of the land in the place of generations of ruinous agricultural practices. Beyond his villa and his land, Cocke commissioned Davis to design Belmead’s slave quarters. This was an attempt to harmonize himself with his slaves and the nation with an agricultural system based upon chattel slavery rather than yeomen farmers. This essay encourages us to look beyond the universals that often frame architectural history discussions of picturesque aesthetics to situate picturesque designs more precisely within a place-centered context of client vision and socio-cultural meaning.

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