Glossary of American slavery

Broadside advertising bucks, wenches and a "picaninny" in Kentucky, 1855

Broadside advertising "acclimated" slaves separately from other people for sale, in New Orleans in 1858

A form of torture called cat-hauling, excerpt from woodcut in 1840 Anti-Slavery Almanac

This is a glossary of American slavery, terminology specific to the cultural, economic, and political history of slavery in the United States

• Acclimated: Enslaved people with acquired immunity to infectious diseases such as cholera, smallpox, yellow fever, etc. ^[1]
• Breeding slave: Used for slaves valued for their reproductive qualities, such as high fertility and health, to produce slave offspring; akin to a broodmare (female slaves) or sire (male slaves). ^[2]
• Broad wife: Also broad husband; spouse of an enslaved person who lived on another plantation or in another settlement. ^[3]
• Buck: Male enslaved person, usually of reproductive age and often with a sexually suggestive connotation. ^[4]
• Coastwise: Transportation of enslaved people by ocean-going ship between the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. ^[5]
• Coffle : Group of enslaved people in a chain gang for overland shipment on foot.
• Complete: The use of the word complete in a slave advertisement indicated a high level of competency, meaning the person had especial capability and/or the necessary training to "adeptly" perform certain work. ^[6]
• Dower slaves: Slaves brought into a family unit through the wife's previous ownership. ^[7]
• Estate slaves: An inheritance of enslaved people bequeathed from one white person to another. ^[8]
• Fancy girl : Enslaved women sold for sexual exploitation, usually young, usually with light skin color, usually at price points significantly above that for field hands or even skilled mechanics. ^[9]
• Field holler : African American work songs with roots in the plantation era.
• Gang system : Form of enslaved-labor management, contrast task system.
• Griffe: Also, griffonne, ^[10] a color/race descriptor most commonly used in Louisiana, usually describing someone who was one-quarter white and three-quarters black; ^[11] for other examples of the detailed race-mixture vocabulary developed in Louisiana, see Mulatto § Louisiana .
• Hand-sawing: Not sawing off a human hand, but a form of torture wherein an enslaved person was beaten with the toothed edge of a hand saw. ^[12]
• Likely: Used adjectivally; according to historian Calvin Schermerhorn, "Likely was code for able, and in the case of women, fertile." ^[13] Likely implied that a slave listed for sale was healthy, versatile, and strong. ^[14]
• No. 1 men: Slave traders' classification for healthy enslaved males aged 19 to 25. ^[15] An enslaved person expected to draw high bids might be tagged extra; less-marketable human beings for sale at auction were described as "fair, No. 2, 3rd rate, scrubs, and boys too small to plough." ^[16] Overall, buyers competed most for male field hands aged 18 to 30, so "the selling price of this class supplied something of a basis for the sale of all Negroes". ^[17] One index of slave prices at the Richmond market in 1849 had several price gradations for female slaves but only two subdivisions for male slaves: No. 1 men and "plow boys 5 ft 2 inches." ^[18]
• Pan toting : Food co-opted from slavers by the enslaved.
• Pickaninny : An enslaved child.
• Plow boys or plough boys: One slave-sale ad published in Tennessee in 1827 listed two enslaved boys, aged 13 and 10, as "plough boys." ^[14]
• Prime age: Enslaved individuals between the ages of 15 and 25, considered the peak years for purchasing long-term productivity and fertility. ^[19]
• Quarter hands, half hands, three-quarter hands, and full hands: Grading system for agricultural laborers based on age and capacity for work, re-evaluated annually as child workers aged and grew, or as older workers became less productive and slower. ^[20] Work assignments for quarter-hands were a quarter of the amount of work, weight, or distance expected from a full hand, etc. ^[20]
• Raised by: Slave owners described a slave as "raised by me" when he or she had lived in the enslaver's household since birth. The use of "raised by" neither indicated nor precluded a genetic relationship between enslaver and enslaved.
• Redhibition : Essentially a state-mandated warranty on enslaved people found to be "defective" or in some way misrepresented by slave dealers; specific to Louisiana. ^[21]
• Salting: Form of torture where brine was applied to the wounds of a whipped slave. ^[22] Other substances were used, including turpentine, hot-pepper juice, and dripping candle wax, et al. ^[23]
• Saltwater slave: An enslaved person who was born in Africa rather than in the Americas. ^[24]
• Scramble : A "first come, first served" supermarket-sweep-style sale of enslaved people.
• Seasoning : Period of adjustment for newly trafficked Africans brought to the Americas.
• Slave for life: Legal term used to distinguish between chattel slaves and indentured servants or apprentices, who were held in bondage for a limited term under certain conditions. ^[25]
• Stampede: Per the Slave Stampedes on the Missouri Borderlands project of Dickinson College and the U.S. National Park Service, the term stampede came into use in the 1840s to describe "serial escapes by individuals or pairs, sometimes to describe either spontaneous or planned small group escapes of 3 or more people, and yet most often to define a special type of mass escape involving a dozen or more, often armed, bands of enslaved people heading defiantly toward freedom." ^[26]
• Stripes: Strikes with a whip, which would leave bloody gashes in the skin that initially looked like stripes, at least until the multiple strikes merged into one open wound of macerated flesh; ^[27] commonly meted in out in increments of "39 stripes" because 40 or more lashes was proscribed by Deuteronomy 25:3, translated in the New International Version as, "but the judge must not impose more than forty lashes. If the guilty party is flogged more than that, your fellow Israelite will be degraded in your eyes." ^[28]
• Task system : Form of enslaved-labor management, contrast gang system.
• Tavern traders: Slave traders who used locals taverns as a place of business, and/or owners of taverns, hotels, or inns who did part-time slave trading as a side business have been called tavern traders. ^{[29] [30] [31] [13]} Some of these taverns and hotels had their own slave pens, in part so guests could incarcerate their body servants and coachmen overnight while traveling. ^{[32] [33]} Tavern trading was especially common in the first quarter of the 19th century.^{[ citation needed ]}
• Wench: Female enslaved person, usually of reproductive age and often with a sexually suggestive connotation. ^{[34] [4]}

See also

• Mulatto § Louisiana for blood quantum terminology
• Negro and Nigger
• Partus sequitur ventrem

References

1. Olivarius, Kathryn (2022). Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom . Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN   978-0-674-24105-3.
2. Smithers, Gregory (2006). The Strains of Breeding Settler Colonialism and Managed Miscegenation in the United States and Australia (Ph.D. thesis). University of California Davis. p. 162. OCLC   180171153. Slave owners and traders defined good breeding among slaves as the ability of slave men and women to sire as many children as possible to aggrandize the profits of slave traders
3. Jewett, Clayton E.; Allen, John O. (2004). Slavery in the South: a state-by-state history. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. p. 165. ISBN   978-0-313-32019-4.
4. Smithers, Gregory D. (2012-11-01). Slave Breeding: Sex, Violence, and Memory in African American History. University Press of Florida. ISBN   978-0-8130-5915-0.
5. "Slave Ship Manifests filed at New Orleans, 1807-1860". National Archives. 2016-08-15. Retrieved 2023-09-05.
6. Jones-Rogers, Stephanie E. (2019). They were her property: white women as slave owners in the American South. New Haven (Conn.): Yale University Press. p. 148. ISBN   978-0-300-21866-4.
7. "Martha Washington | Martha Washington: A Life". marthawashington.us. Retrieved 2024-06-28.
8. González, Felipe; Marshall, Guillermo; Naidu, Suresh (June 2017). "Start-up Nation? Slave Wealth and Entrepreneurship in Civil War Maryland" (PDF). The Journal of Economic History. 77 (2): 373–405. doi:10.1017/S0022050717000493. ISSN   0022-0507.
9. "Bill of sale for a girl named Clary purchased by Robert Jardine for 50 pounds". National Museum of African American History and Culture. Retrieved 2024-06-28.
10. Gates, Henry Louis Jr. (2012-08-01). Black in Latin America. NYU Press. p. 229. ISBN   978-0-8147-3818-4.
11. "griffe" . Oxford English Dictionary (Online ed.). Oxford University Press.(Subscription or participating institution membership required.)
12. Gutman, Herbert G. (1975). Fogel, Robert William; Engerman, Stanley L. (eds.). "Enslaved Afro-Americans and the "Protestant Work Ethic"" . The Journal of Negro History. 60 (1): 77. doi:10.2307/2716796. ISSN   0022-2992. JSTOR   2716796. S2CID   150340537.
13. Schermerhorn, Calvin (2015). The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815-1860. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. pp. 36 (likely), 38–39 (tavern). doi:10.12987/9780300213898. ISBN   978-0-300-19200-1. JSTOR   j.ctt1bh4d2w. LCCN   2014036403. OCLC   890614581.
14. Carey, Bill (2018). Runaways, Coffles and Fancy Girls: A History of Slavery in Tennessee. Nashville, Tennessee: Clearbrook Press. pp. 26, 76. ISBN   978-0-9725680-4-3. LCCN   2018903570. OCLC   1045068878.
15. Marrs, A.W. (2009). Railroads in the Old South: Pursuing Progress in a Slave Society. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press., doi:10.1353/book.3447. Page 61
16. Troutman, Phillip Davis (August 2000). Slave Trade and Sentiment in Antebellum Virginia (Thesis). University of Virginia. doi: 10.18130/v36d22 . pages=84–86
17. Flanders, Ralph Betts (1933). Plantation Slavery in Georgia. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press. p. 189. LCCN   33037653. OCLC   9876467.
18. "Ephraim G. Ponder to William G. Ponder - 1849". Thomasville History Center. Retrieved 2024-12-25.
19. Johnson, Walter (2013). River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. p. 159. ISBN   9780674074880. LCCN   2012030065. OCLC   827947225. OL   26179618M.
20. "Number Thirty: Visit to a Rice Plantation continued by Yeoman [Frederick Law Olmstead][sic]". The New York Times. 1853-07-21. p. 2. Retrieved 2023-09-08.
21. "If These Pages Could Talk: Touro Infirmary's First Admission Book". TriPod: New Orleans at 300. Retrieved 2023-09-21.
22. Dickman, Michael (2015). Honor, Control, and Powerlessness: Plantation Whipping in the Antebellum South (Thesis). Boston College. hdl:2345/bc-ir:104219.
23. Weld, Theodore (1839). "Floggings". American Slavery As It Is . New York: American Anti-Slavery Society. p. 63. Retrieved 2023-07-28– via utc.iath.virginia.edu.
24. Wilson-Fall, Wendy (2015-10-21). Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic. Ohio University Press. ISBN   978-0-8214-4546-4.
25. Wolfe, Brendan. "Indentured Servants in Colonial Virginia". Encyclopedia Virginia. Retrieved 2023-08-31.
26. "About the Project | Slave Stampedes on the Southern Borderlands" . Retrieved 2023-08-31.
27. Cerabino, Frank. "Cruelty of slavery shown in this 1853 Florida high court case, not in silly cartoon art". The Palm Beach Post. Retrieved 2025-01-25.
28. "Deuteronomy 25:3 - Fairness and Mercy". Bible Hub. Retrieved 2025-01-25.
29. U.S. House District of Columbia Subcommittee on Government Operations and Metropolitan Affairs (1983). Rhodes Tavern (preservation and Restoration): Hearing and Markup Before the Subcommittee on Government Operations and Metropolitan Affairs of the Committee on the District of Columbia, House of Representatives, Ninety-seventh Congress, Second Session, on H. Res. 532 ... November 30 and December 16, 1982. U.S. Government Printing Office. p. 806.
30. Fiske, David A.., Brown, Clifford Waters., Seligman, Rachel. Solomon Northup: The Complete Story of the Author of Twelve Years a Slave. United States: Praeger, 2013. Pages 182–183
31. Johnson, Walter (2013). River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. p. 86. ISBN   9780674074880. LCCN   2012030065. OCLC   827947225. OL   26179618M.
32. "The Last of His Kind: Talk with an Old Slave-Seller Who Lags Superfluous on the Stage". St. Louis Globe-Democrat. 1884-05-24. p. 12. Retrieved 2023-09-11– via Newspapers.com.
33. "Patty Cannon". Dorchester History. Retrieved 2023-10-29.
34. Stroud, George McDowell (2005). Stroud's Slave Laws: A Sketch of the Laws Relating to Slavery in the Several States of the United States of America. Black Classic Press. ISBN   978-1-58073-007-5.