Slave cabin

“ For miles the country round, in the slaves' quarters, and on the piazzas of "great houses," where white children listen to superstitious tales, the story goes, that that spot, in the heart of the "Big Cane," is a haunted place. For more than a quarter of a century, human voices had rarely, if ever, disturbed the silence of the clearing. Rank and noxious weeds had overspread the once cultivated field—serpents sunned themselves on the doorway of the crumbling cabin. ”

“ Not far away is a group of small log cabins. This cluster of simple dwellings, known as “the quarters,” is the home of the slaves, who do the work in the house and fields.
On the large plantations of the far south, there were sometimes several slave settlements on one plantation, each being a little village, with the cabins set in rows on each side of a wide street. Each cabin housed two families; belonging to each was a small garden. ”

“ When a slave, purchased, or kidnapped in the North, is transported to a cabin on Bayou Bœuf he is furnished with neither knife, nor fork, nor dish, nor kettle, nor any other thing in the shape of crockery, or furniture of any nature or description. He is furnished with a blanket before he reaches there, and wrapping that around him, he can either stand up, or lie down upon the ground, or on a board, if his master has no use for it. ”

“ A Virginian cavalier, accustomed to the graces and politesse of a slave-owning aristocracy, saw fit to sneer at their humble abodes, and their lack of the finer accessories of civilization, forgetting that a cabin is more often than a palace the cradle of the purest patriotism, and that as true American hearts beat in those huts in the wilderness as in the courtly precincts of Richmond. ”

“ A slave, his wife and family, occupy a cabin exclusively, unless the family be small, when two or more families live together. The planters find it to be their interest to use their negroes well. They always permit and, indeed, urge the slave to do overwork by planting a small plot of land, set apart for his use, with corn, tobacco, or other produce. ”

“ It was now necessary to contrive some plan to replenish our stock of provisions. Sometime before dark we started to spy out the country, cautiously moving along the edge of the woods, looking for slave cabins, as we were afraid to approach white people for fear of being captured. Just as darkness began to appear we saw in the edge173 of a small field a one-story log cabin, which afterward proved to be a slave cabin. We stopped at the edge of the woods to investigate, after which Herrick said to me: “Eby, if you will go to the cabin I will stay here and hold the fort until you return.” ”

“ And here it was scattered daily through mountain and glen; and for this equivalent the poor man must give up his land, take off the roof of his cabin with his own hand—for, as the government has not required this, the driver, like a slave one, ever faithful to his master's interest and good name, tells the starving cabiner if he will not ascend the roof of his hut and unthatch it, and tumble down the stones with his own hand, that he shall neither have the pound of meal or black bread. ”

“ Brought up amid such surroundings, one would not know much about his ancestry, if anything at all. A great planter gave no more heed to the pedigree of his slaves than he did to that of his cattle; all alike were bought and sold in the open market, and neither one nor the other had any rights or privileges apart from the will of their owners. The cabin of the slave family was, in a very literal sense, what its name implied—a cabin and nothing more. The household was not supposed to need more than one room ”

“ There are no slave quarters to be seen at the Hermitage, for in Jackson’s day the slaves who worked in the fields were scattered in their cabins about the plantation and did not all live in one long row of houses as was the prevailing custom in the South generally. There remains, however, a two-roomed log cabin just to the north of the garden which was the home of Uncle Alfred to the day of his death. ”

“ The driver's whip it cut him ev'ry day;
Our good Lord above, with his never dying love,
Made that cruel, cruel slavery pass'd away.
2. Oh child, in those times then I liv'd among the pines,
Yes, in an old log cabin I was born;
Then I heard the moan when the mothers lost their own,
In those bondage days, oh thank the Lord they're gone.
That Iron chain and band they grow rusty in this land,
No more the blood hound hold the slave at bay ”

“ Maria fully appreciates the kindness, as well as sympathizes with the wounded pride of this slave daughter; nevertheless, there is an humiliation in being driven to seek shelter in a negro cabin that touches her feelings. For a white female to seek shelter under the roof of a negro's cabin, is a deep disgrace in the eyes of our very refined society ”

“ Many a time the owner of the slaves and farm would come to the cabins late at night to catch the slaves in their dingy little hovels, which were constructed in cabin fashion and of stone and logs with their typical windows and rooms of one room up and one down with a window in each, the fireplaces built to heat and cook for occupants.
"The farm was like all other farms in Frederick County, raising grain, such as corn, wheat and fruit and on which work was seasonable, depending upon the weather, some seasons producing more and some less. ”

“ Locks were never used on any of the cabin doors or on the smokehouse. Food was there in abundance and each person was free to replenish his supply as necessary. Money was more or less a novelty as it was only given in 1¢ pieces at Christmas time. As food, clothing, and shelter were furnished, the absence was not particularly painful. Connected with nearly every home were those persons who lived "in the woods" in preference to doing the labor necessary to remain at their home. ”

“ In this state, they are immediately ordered below, the men to the hold and the women to the cabin, while boys and girls are, day and night, kept on deck, where their sole protection from the elements is a sail in fair weather, and a tarpaulin in foul.
"It is the duty of a guard to report immediately whenever a slave refuses to eat, in order that his abstinence may be traced to stubbornness or disease. Negroes have sometimes been found in slavers who attempted voluntary starvation ”

“ One of de cabins was allus ha'nted atter some of de slaves got kilt in it whilst dey was fightin'. Nobody never could live in dat cabin no more atter dat widout ha'nts gittin' atter 'em. De wust of 'em was a 'oman ha'nt what you could hear sweepin' up leaves in de yard and all dat time you might be lookin' hard and not see a leaf move. In dat cabin you could all time hear ha'nts movin' cheers and knockin' on de wall. Some of dem ha'nts would p'int a gun in your face if you met 'em in de dark. ”

“ We hear often of the distress of the negro servants, on the loss of a kind master; and with good reason, for no creature on God's earth is left more utterly unprotected and desolate than the slave in these circumstances.
The child who has lost a father has still the protection of friends, and of the law; he is something, and can do something,—has acknowledged rights and position; the slave has none. The law regards him, in every respect, as devoid of rights as a bale of merchandise. ”

“ I was given as a bed-room a little tent built of wood, about a hundred steps away from the log cabin. As the door had not been put up, I closed the opening with planks, and loaded my gun and pistols; for the forest all around is full of runaway slaves. A few years ago forty of them began to make a plantation on the mountain close by; the white settlers surrounded them and called on them to surrender, but rather than return to captivity all the slaves threw themselves into the sea. ”

“ The size and arrangements of a people's homes are no unfair index of their condition. If, then, we inquire more carefully into these Negro homes, we find much that is unsatisfactory. All over the face of the land is the one-room cabin,—now standing in the shadow of the Big House, now staring at the dusty road, now rising dark and sombre amid the green of the cotton-fields. ”

“ Log cabins, neat and whitewashed, were plentiful enough. Small cottages clustered about big, old-fashioned houses which sheltered the rude aristocracy of that backwoods democracy. All the "planter" families lived "in town." "The country" was occupied by their tenants, and by the small independent farmers, white and black.
A small log cabin stood near the point where the road wound out of the deep forest. Voices emanated from it, in accents of menace, and a tall lanky figure, rifle in hand, stood at the door.
"Howdy, Esau!" this man hailed us. "By golly, if it ain't Kirby Buckner! ”

“ But to the slave mother New Year's day comes laden with peculiar sorrows. She sits on her cold cabin floor, watching the children who may all be torn from her the next morning; and often does she wish that she and they might die before the day dawns. ”

“ The red peril, indeed, influenced every side of frontier life. The bands of women and children at the harvestings, the log rollings, and the house raisings, were not there merely to lighten the men's work by their laughter and love-making. It was not safe for them to remain in the cabins, for, to the Indian, the cabin thus boldly thrust upon his immemorial hunting grounds was only a secondary evil; the greater evil was the white man's family, bespeaking the increase of the dreaded palefaces. ”

“ Less than an acre, fenced in the rudest manner, enclosed the “farm and farm buildings,” the latter consisting of a small log house and log pigsty, the cabin, at the time our sketch opens, being, it is evident, at least two seasons old–a fact which serves to show the more plainly the poverty and thriftlessness of the inmates; for they have had time, certainly, to cultivate quite a tract of the easily-tilled land, had they enterprise and industry. But they belonged to a class not famous for these virtues–the restless, ever-moving class that pioneer the way towards the setting sun. ”

“ The negro quarters consisted of six log cabins, which had once been whitewashed, but now were extremely wretched in appearance, both without and within. It is customary on the plantations of the South to have the houses of the negroes a little removed, perhaps a quarter of a mile, from the family mansion. Thus, with the exception of the house servants, who must be within call, the slave portion of the family live by themselves, and generally in a most uncivilized and miserable way. In some cases their houses are quite neatly built and kept ”

“ Old and young, male and female, married and single, drop down together on the clay floor of the cabin each evening with his or her blanket. The night however is shortened at both ends. The slaves work often as long as they can see, and are late in cooking and mending for the coming day, and at the first grey streak of morning are summoned to the field by the driver's horn. ”

“ Their bed-clothes are a nest of rags thrown upon a crib, or in the corner; sometimes there are three or four families in one small cabin. Where the slaveholders have more than one family, they put them in the same quarter till it is filled, then build another. ”

“ No scene can be livelier or more interesting to a Northerner, than that which the negro quarters of a well-regulated plantation present on a Sabbath morning, just before church-hours. In every cabin the men are shaving and dressing ”

“ The cabins for slaves present the appearance of a hamlet. These are wooden structures of the humblest sort, built of logs or undressed planks, and afflicted with chronic dilapidation. An inventory of 1697 shows us that the cabin might contain a bed and a few chairs, two or three pots and kettles, “a pair of pot-racks, a 221 pot-hook, a frying-pan, and a beer barrel;” and advertisements for runaways describe Cuffy and Pompey as clad in red cotton, with canvas drawers, waistcoat, and wide-brimmed black hat. ”

“ The miserable hut of the worthless negro squatter was occasionally to be seen, but usually the rude cabin and small clearing marked the spot where a newly arrived fugitive had begun his home, which in due course was to pass through successive stages until it should become a well-cleared farm, with good buildings and a large stock of animals and tools. ”

“ They saw the three boys in the act of transferring their captured quails from a trap to a large coop they had placed in a wagon, and following the wagon as it left the field, they saw that when the captives were removed from the coop they were put into one of the general’s unoccupied negro cabins. After comparing notes they made up their minds that the cabin was almost full of birds, and that if they could only force an entrance into it, they would be well repaid for their trouble. They could steal some of them, and those they could not carry away they could liberate. ”

“ This cabin was built by an old negro as a place of refuge from the brutality of one of your white men. We break forth for a moment when we can bear no longer, destroy, kill, murder, if you like; but has any one of us inflicted as much misery, done as much harm, as that man in the course of his long life? ”

“ To this plantation officers with the warrant of arrest repaired and searched the cabins in the negro quarters. After the search was nearly completed, a negro scrambled from the chimney of a cabin to the roof, sprang thence to the ground and fled. ”

“ About a quarter of a mile from the dwelling-house were the huts or cabins of the plantation slaves, or field hands, standing in rows, much like the Indian villages which I have seen in the country of the Cherokees. These cabins were thirty-eight in number, generally about fifteen or sixteen feet square, built of hewn logs, covered with shingles, and provided with floors of pine boards. These houses were all dry and comfortable, and were provided with chimnies, so that the people when in them, were well sheltered from the inclemencies of the weather. ”