Legumes, Slaves, and Health

Legumes in Slave Diets

Perhaps no subject provokes such debate and emotion among historians as New World slavery. Although the practice is ancient, its fusion with racism was a modern European invention that continues to plague the Americas. Controversies taint every facet of slaves’ existence, including diets, nutrition, and health. Historians studied corn and pork’s contributions to slave diets in the American colonies and their successor nation, the United States, though eyewitnesses and food historians described diverse diets that included legumes.

American food historian Andrew Francis Smith (b. 1946), for example, remarked that the peanut fed slaves before Amerindians and Europeans adopted it in the American colonies.¹⁹⁴ Moreover, he argued that slaves introduced peanuts into the colonies and were responsible for bringing them to wider attention. Eighteenth-century travelers through the South and the Caribbean mentioned slaves’ cultivation and consumption of the legume.

American historian Marcie Cohen Ferris deemed peanuts “ubiquitous” in colonial South Carolina and Georgia, and peas and beans popular in North and South Carolina.¹⁹⁵ Peas fed slaves and Europeans from an early date. British naturalist Mark Catesby (1683-1749) stated while touring the American Southeast and Caribbean in the eighteenth century that kidney beans were a “strong, hearty food” for slaves.¹⁹⁶ Besides these legumes, an earlier section noted, and Chapter 12 mentions, that in coastal South Carolina, Georgia, and the Sea Islands, slaves ate cowpeas, often coupled with rice as hopping John. Ferris mentioned peas as a substitute for cowpeas in this dish.¹⁹⁷ American economist, historian, and 1993 Nobel laureate in economics Robert William Fogel (1926-2013) and American economist and historian Stanley Lewis Engerman (b. 1936) listed peas among slaves’ eleven primary foods.¹⁹⁸

Slaves’ Health

Given this variety, examination of slaves’ nutrition and health permits evaluation of peas, beans, peanuts, and cowpeas. These qualities were awful for the youngest, but legumes deserve no blame. Owners worked pregnant women to within days of delivery. Arduous field labor, much of it while stooped, harmed mother and fetus. Richard Steckel calculated that newborns averaged just 2.3 kilograms (5.1 pounds).¹⁹⁹ Such low masses exacerbated infant mortality of at least 35 percent. Conditions did not improve during early childhood’s meager diets. Undernutrition made children lethargic and docile, exactly what owners wanted.

Diets improved only when juveniles were old enough to toil in the fields such that “working- age slaves were remarkably well off.”²⁰⁰ In Time on the Cross—arguably the twentieth century’s seminal book on slavery—Fogel and Engerman calculated that slaves consumed nearly 4,200 calories daily, exceeding recommendations for protein, iron, calcium, and vitamin C.²⁰¹ The authors emphasized that “the high slave consumption of meat, sweet potatoes, and peas goes a long way toward explaining” why “the slave diet was not only adequate, it actually exceeded modern (1964) recommended daily levels of the chief nutrients.”²⁰² Amplifying this point, previous sections and tables noted that legumes have plentiful protein, minerals, vitamins, and, in the case of peanuts and soybeans, fat. Readers may recall that peanuts are an excellent source of copper, manganese, and vitamins B„ B_q, and E. Peas and beans are rich in phosphorus, manganese, iron, copper, magnesium, zinc, potassium, and vitamins A (equivalents), B,, B₂, B₃, B₆, B₉, C, and K. These nutrients made legumes valuable in slave diets and advanced Fogel and Engerman’s contention that slaves were as well, or perhaps better, nourished than free people.²⁰³ Among their conclusions, the two debunked “the belief that the typical slave was poorly fed”, writing that it “is without foundation in fact.”²⁰⁴ Time on the Cross angered historians who believed the book implied that slavery was not entirely loathsome.

Echoing Fogel and Engerman, American chef April McGreger remarked that “there is shockingly little evidence of nutritional diseases among slaves.”²⁰⁵ Given Steckel’s above data, she must have had adults in mind.

Slavery must be repudiated while attempting to examine slaves’ nutrition and health. Slave girls reached puberty no later than age 14.5, two years or more before European girls.²⁰⁶ That is, slave teens must have been well enough nourished to mature quickly. Yet strenuous exertions depleted calories and nutrients such that slave men were over 2.5 centimeters (1 inch) shorter than free American men.²⁰⁷ Nonetheless, U.S. slaves were taller than British and Russian workers and Caribbean and Brazilian slaves. This book correlates nutrition and height.

Beyond these data, slave birthrates—despite appalling newborn and infant mortality—exceeded deaths in the American South but not in the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America, and South America, implying that slaves ate better in the United States than elsewhere.²⁰⁸ By 1720, the U.S. slave birthrate surpassed the number of imports, a circumstance otherwise unknown in the Americas.²⁰⁹ Fogel and Engerman calculated e° for U.S. slaves in 1850—in Table 8.11—at thirty-six years, a duration longer than the average for free residents of New' York City, Boston, and Philadelphia in 1830, the occupants of Manchester, England in 1850, Austrians in 1875, Italians in 1885, and Chileans in 1920.²¹⁰

Diet cannot fully explain these differences. The American colonies and United States were healthier than slave societies elsewhere in the western hemisphere because tropical diseases killed fewer slaves in temperate North American than in Brazil, the Caribbean, and other lands nearer the equator.²¹¹ Additionally, tropical plantations specialized in sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum), which required strenuous labor in hot, humid climates and w'hich Chapter 11 discusses. Such an environment was enervating in leisure and crippling under duress.

Comparisons between Slaves and Free People

This book acknowledges the limitations of comparing slaves and free people. Toil undermined nutrition and health by sapping calories and nutrients. American historian Richard Slator Dunn (b. 1928) blamed overwork among other factors for truncating Caribbean slaves’ lives in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.²¹² Masters were no less ruthless in the American South, forcing pregnant w'omen to pick cotton (Gossypium hirsutum) as late as the week of delivery.²¹³ Compulsion began earlier in childhood and required more hours per week and days per year for slave than free.²¹⁴ So strenuous was this routine that children and women halved their workload upon emancipation.²¹⁵ Whippings and other punishments enforced discipline, indicating that slaves

TABLE 8.11

E° for Slaves and Free Peoples

had no choice but to outwork free laborers. Unsurprisingly, slaves were roughly one-third more productive than free labor.²¹⁶

Such exertions exacted costs. For example, a rice plantation near Charleston, South Carolina, yielded thirty-six skeletons, buried between 1840 and 1870, with osteoarthritis, spinal degeneration, and large slots where tendons had attached to bones, all indicating arduous toil.²¹⁷ Skeletons at Sugar Land, Texas, exhibited bones distorted by intense exertions, revealing how difficult labor was on sugarcane plantations.²¹⁸ Although Sugar Land’s remains came from people who lived after slavery’s putative abolition, the Thirteenth Amendment—ratified in 1865—permitted it and “involuntary servitude”.. .“as punishment for a crime.”²¹⁹ Another index of strenuousness is the estimate, stated earlier, that slaves consumed on average around 4,200 calories daily just to maintain their mass.

Yet comparisons are valid when and where wage labor was harsh, justifying British poet William Blake’s (1757-1827) 1804 description of factories as "dark Satanic mills.”²²⁰ About 1830U.S. factories mandated an average workday of 11.5 hours, which summer’s extra daylight lengthened.²²¹ In 1890, blast furnaces mandated eighty-four-hour weeks.²²² Although, an eight-hour day became standard during World War I, the assembly line’s adoption around then intensified work by requiring employees to keep pace with the movement of parts. A woman complained to Henry Ford that “the chain system you have is a slave driver!... My husband has come home and thrown himself down and won’t eat his supper—so done out!”²²³ As this quote suggests, onlookers likened factories to plantations and prisons.²²⁴ Farm work remains exhausting absent mechanization. For example, California migrants weed potato fields in 41.7 degrees Celsius (107 degrees Fahrenheit) heat.²²⁵ Constant stooping disfigures them.