More Complicated Than Meal, Meat, and Molasses: Historicizing Enslaved Rations in the Southern United States

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ABSTRACT Throughout the southern United States, enslavers issued weekly rations to the people they enslaved. While the types and amount of food varied across time and from region to region, there has not yet been a detailed study of rationing practices across the South. This article presents the first such study, exploring differences in the food Southern enslavers issued from the 1720s to the 1860s. It does so using a dataset of 596 quotes from 568 accounts by 533 formerly enslaved people, enslavers, travelers, and white abolitionists. Trends in these accounts show that weekly rations became larger and increasingly diverse throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and that important regional differences gave way to more uniform rationing practices throughout most of the South during the 1850s–1860s.