Slave Women

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During the nineteenth century Georgia developed a mature plantation system, and records illuminating the nature of female slavery are more complete. In early childhood female slaves spent their time playing with other children and performing some light tasks.

Slave owners clothed both male and female slave children in smocks and assigned such duties as carrying water to the fields, babysitting, collecting wood, and sometimes light food preparation. As the children neared the age of ten, planters began making distinctions between the genders. At this time slave girls either were trained to do nonagricultural labor in domestic settings or joined their elders in the fields. Boys went to the fields or were trained for artisan positions, depending on the size of the plantation.

Early adolescence for female slaves was often difficult because of the threat of exploitation. For some young women, puberty marked the beginning of a lifetime of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse from masters and mistresses, overseers, male slaves, and members of the planter family. For others, work in the planter's home included close interaction with their owners, which often led to intimate relationships with white men or friendships with white women. House servants spent time tending to the needs of their plantation mistresses—dressing them, combing their hair, sewing their clothing or blankets, nursing their infants, and preparing their meals. They were on call twenty-four hours a day and spent a great deal of time on their feet.

Agricultural laborers served as the core of the workforce on both rice and cotton plantations. Since planters reserved artisan positions for male slaves, the majority of the field hands were female. Slave women constituted nearly 60 percent of the field workforce on coastal plantations. Commenting on the work of female slaves on his coastal estate, one planter noted that "women usually picked more [cotton] than men." Female slaves often were in the fields before five in the morning, and in the evening they worked as late as nine in the summer and seven in the winter. They prepared fields, planted seeds, cleaned ditches, hoed, plowed, picked cotton, and cut and tied rice stalks. Slave women also cleaned, packaged, and prepared the crops for shipment.

Maintaining family stability was one of the greatest challenges for slaves in all regions. Some owners allowed slaves to court, marry, and live with one another. Other owners did not recognize marriage among slaves. The lack of legal sanction for such unions assured the right of owners to sell one spouse away from another or to separate children from their parents. Nothing lowered morale among slaves more than the uncertainty of family bonds. William and Ellen Craft, fugitive slaves from Georgia, claimed that "the fact that another man had the power to tear from our cradle the new-born babe and sell it in the shambles like a brute, and then scourge us if we dared to lift a finger to save it from such a fate, haunted us for years" and ultimately motivated them to escape.

Several Georgia slave women achieved prominence as individuals either historically or in fictional form. Ellen Craft was among the most famous of escaped slaves. The daughter of a slave woman and her white master, she disguised herself as a white man, and her husband, William, posed as her body servant, as they made a dramatic and dangerous escape from Macon to Savannah by train in 1848, and then by steamship north. Their account of the escape, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, published in England in 1860, is one of the most compelling of the many fugitive slave narratives.

Amanda America Dickson was born in 1849, the product of Hancock County planter David Dickson's rape of his twelve-year-old slave Julia Frances Lewis Dickson. Dickson's father brought her up in his household, though she remained legally a slave until 1864 despite her privileged upbringing. Her inheritance at her father's death in 1885 caused a court challenge that went all the way to the Supreme Court of Georgia. The court ruled in her favor, confirming her status as one of the wealthiest black women in late-nineteenth-century America.

Among the richest published accounts of the plights of slave women are those found in Fanny Kemble's journal of her stay on her husband's plantations on St. Simons and Butler islands in 1838-39. Kemble was appalled at the poor conditions, both physical and emotional, under which her husband's female property suffered: in the fields, in pregnancy and childbirth, and in the uncertainties they faced in being separated by sale from their spouses or children.