Cotton and Slavery The Hermitage - Andrew Jackson House, Nashville Tennessee
Eli Whitney sometimes is blamed in part for the "fireball in the night" that was the plantation system of slavery in the American South. Whitney's design for the cotton gin gave the South a staple crop, but agriculturists already had adopted slavery with increasing exclusivity beginning in the third quarter of the seventeenth century. As a result, slaves cultivated tobacco and grain in the Chesapeake, rice in the Carolina Low Country, sugar in southern Louisiana, and cotton from South Carolina to Texas. Of these products, tobacco, sugar, and cotton shared similar work routines. Generally the plantation master organized his field hands into "gangs" that toiled under the supervision of an overseer or a driver. In the cotton fields, slaves' daily regimen included hoeing the soil (about a half-acre a day) or picking the tufts (about ninety pounds a day) by hand. They also packed the cotton down with their feet. During the harvest, an adult field hand was pushed to collect five bales of cotton a day (at a bale an acre) but the amount planted usually exceeded what a slave could do; masters hoped to muster superhuman efforts from their slaves as the seeds ripened. They did so with varying degrees of success.
The slave culture of tobacco was exported from the Chesapeake to the backcountry where it was adopted for cotton. It too was seasonal, requiring intensive care throughout all phases of cultivation. Like tobacco, cotton agriculture was driven by the economy. Slaves offered the planters a relatively cheap, stable, and portable labor force. The latter quality was particularly important because, as tobacco did, cotton depleted the soil of its nutrients and so the fields had a limited life-span. This generated an urgency in land acquisition felt by many coming into the backcountry around the end of the eighteenth century. For the slaves, though, being movable held the threat of separation from families and friends within the slave community either through sale or a partial relocation of a planter's work force. In 1866, for example, Gracy, who was the personal "servant" of Sarah Jackson (the wife of Andrew Jackson, Jr.), had to ask for news of her son Augustus. Gracy remained at The Hermitage with her mistress, but her son had gone with Andrew Jackson, III, while he assessed what was left of the family's Mississippi River holdings after the war.
The slaves of southern cotton plantations performed menial agricultural tasks, often without the benefit of up-to-date tools or technology, and for their efforts, they received varying degrees of treatment that at the worst was inhumane and at best, paternalistic. Their material life was not so different from that of the poor whites, however, the slaves never had the opportunity to control their destiny. For example, in 1861 Samuel Jackson attempted to gain possession of a plantation in Louisiana that his father, Andrew Jackson, Jr., bought. Samuel Jackson experienced difficulty because the previous owner had not moved his slaves off the premises; Jackson occupied the overseer's house but the Jackson family's slaves had no shelter. The only distinction made between the poor white dwelling, which was the overseer's house, and the slave quarters came down to who was in them and who decided where the others were to go. It was an intangible difference of the freedom to choose, but one that was signified by the material culture available on the newly acquired plantation.
Similar material conditions were present in the hills of northern Alabama as well as in parts of Tennessee in the 1850s. Frederick Law Olmsted saw many "rude log huts for dwellings" that were only one room inside. These measured roughly fifteen feet square and so were "unwholesomely" crowded by the number of people who lived inside of them. It was at these cabins that Olmsted was "loathe to ask for lodging." In another setting within the cotton district, Olmsted encountered a neat house surrounded by a cluster of old cabins, that served as kitchen, smokehouse, and slave quarters. Of the latter, Olmsted wrote that:
Around these cabins were a pigsty and poultry coup as well as home-carded cotton set on boards and placed in the sun to bleach. Such surroundings completed the landscape of the South, when they are considered alongside the large plantation operations such as that run for Andrew Jackson at The Hermitage. Although less common than the "monotony of huts" recorded by Olmsted, the extensive farmsteads with mansions and neatly arranged quarters predominate twentieth-century perceptions of the antebellum era countryside.
Around these cabins were a pigsty and poultry coup as well as home-carded cotton set on boards and placed in the sun to bleach. Such surroundings completed the landscape of the South, when they are considered alongside the large plantation operations such as that run for Andrew Jackson at The Hermitage. Although less common than the "monotony of huts" recorded by Olmsted, the extensive farmsteads with mansions and neatly arranged quarters predominate twentieth-century perceptions of the antebellum era countryside.
By the early nineteenth-century, the majority of slaves lived in groups, generally in family units as they did at The Hermitage. They occupied log cabins, about sixteen feet square overall, and each was heated by a chimney. These dwellings typically were organized into streets. A visitor to The Hermitage in 1828 recalled that the Negro cottages ranged in a long row along the west side of a road that ran northward from the mansion. Each cottage was built like the others: of materials found on the estate, all white washed, and all accompanied by a garden. At the north end, spinners and weavers lived. These cottages, occupied by those in the sewing industry, probably were located close to the spring and the horse-powered cotton gin. These features also were placed by the visitor to the north of the house. Although not extant at The Hermitage, the street-like arrangement of slave quarters was common; in Mississippi, in fact, the Jackson's plantation had a row of quarters.
At The Hermitage, known slave housing included a cluster of log cabins (the East and West Cabins) and brick buildings (the South Cabin) used together as a slave quarter on the site of the First Hermitage as well as a group of brick duplexes forming the field quarter; a three-unit structure, dubbed the Triplex, also made of bricks; Alfred's Cabin; and a yard cabin in close proximity to the house. This loose placement in the landscape, that is, not aligned symmetrically in a row, suggests that the location of slave housing corresponded to the work assignment. The demise of mono-culture (tobacco) at the end of the seventeenth century meant that harvest schedules varied and so work responsibilities necessarily fluctuated. Moreover, the seasonal changes in each group of agricultural laborers' task as well as soil exhaustion and crop rotation made surveillance of all the slaves, all the time, difficult. No longer could they all be watched at once. At The Hermitage, the Jackson slaves raised cotton, corn, and wheat in addition to fruit.
In response to the changes in economic demand and plantation routine, property owners improved the living conditions of the slaves, giving them family housing and then later in the nineteenth century, larger better constructed units in which to live. These also were spread out, away from an overseer's view or that from the mansion, instead being close to the field where the occupants toiled. Judging by the known slave housing on The Hermitage, it can be inferred from the architectural evidence that well-made quarters of both brick masonry and log construction and family living arrangements were costs Jackson was willing to bear.
Feeding, clothing, and housing plantation slaves made economic sense. Jackson himself observed in the 183 5 that one willing laborer was worth the work of two that forced Jackson or his representative to bully them into production. It is also likely that Jackson allowed his slaves to tend to gardens of their own; with their vegetables, fruit, hogs and poultry, the slaves could supplement their diet and the rations allocated to them by the plantation masters. For example, in 1857 Sarah Jackson commented that the yard was given over completely to her poultry; she had chickens, geese, ducks, and turkeys. Separate from Jackson's poultry, significantly, was a coop behind Alfred's house that probably was for his individual use.
