Audio
Tour Stop 10 and 11
Transcript
NARRATOR
This small garden is just under a tenth of an acre. An enslaved person would be responsible for an area roughly three times this size on any given day. It’s planted year round to show the variety of crops grown on the plantation, but the actual working fields were spread throughout the island.
Kingsley’s plantations used the “task system” of labor, as opposed to the “gang system” most people envision when we think of slavery. Under a gang system, slaves worked from sun up until they were released from their labor for the day, usually sun down.
Under the task system, each day the overseer, through the various slave drivers, would assign the day’s work to each person, enough to keep the person working from sunrise until about two in the afternoon. The day’s work generally involved tending crops, but was assigned based on the needs and plans of the day. Clearing land, loading ships, cleaning cotton, tending animals, any work the plantation needed would be required of the enslaved.
Men, women, and older children put in a full day’s work. After the task was completed, the rest of the day would be spent tending their own gardens, fishing or hunting. But this was not “leisure” time. The time was used to make items to sell, to raise additional food to feed their families or sell at markets, to earn the precious money to ultimately purchase one’s own freedom.
In no way should this suggest the task system was an “easier” or “better” system of slavery. Kingsley and his overseers believed that Africans were better suited to work in the Florida climate and expected a lot out of them. In Florida’s hundred-degree heat and below freezing winters, on an island where both rattlesnakes and alligators flourished, where disease-carrying mosquitos were a daily reality, the slaves of the Kingsley plantation were expected to be content.
(SFX – sounds of hoeing, voices in background).
FIELD SLAVE Today, it’s plant one quarter of an acre. Yesterday, it was set a mile of fence posts. Tomorrow, who knows? But tomorrow will come none-the-less. (SFX – sounds of hoeing). I start at sunrise. I quit when today’s work is done. Then I work my own piece till dark.
But don’t work too hard or too fast. One has to think of the others as well as tomorrow. If I finish today’s quarter too soon, tomorrow I may be given more work. What if the next day I’m sick or hurt? What if the others fall behind or seem slow by my example? I keep an even pace because tomorrow will be the same, and tomorrow and tomorrow.
Some days are harder though. I’ve seen a man whipped like a dog. I’ve seen with my own eyes a man watch his wife be whipped, heard her cries. I saw the shame in his face and the anger in his fists as he turned away. I do not know if I could turn away. A man can close his eyes but who can close their ears? I do not know if the overseer saw what I saw. If he did, he would not have slept well that night.
I have no wife, no children. Not yet. But I will not bear a lash. I will not be another man’s dog. NARRATOR
A cornerstone of the Spanish system was that slaves were human beings with souls and intelligence. With that belief comes the understanding that you could push a man too far and that the natural result of injustice would be escape, or vengeance. The evidence of whipping at Fort George Island is rare, but not unheard of. Kingsley owned a young man named Romeo. After Kingsley’s death, his nephew, Charles McNeill inherited Romeo and moved him to the San Jose plantation. Soon afterwards, he ran away and the evidence suggests it was because he had been whipped. McNeill offered a twenty-dollar reward for the return of his slave “dead or alive.” Romeo was eventually returned to the plantation by another Kingsley relative, John Sammis, who did so on the condition “he would not beat [him] cruelly.” The records show McNeill did not physically punish him and a few years later, he was a free man.
Never-the-less, Kingsley himself stated that slave society could not survive without the constant threat of violence. And for the enslaved man or woman on Kingsley’s plantations, the fact that they probably weren’t beaten every day, in no way lessened the fact that they could have been beaten any day.
Of course, Kingsley’s view also held warning for the overseers – just because a man chose not to strike back against an injustice today, didn’t mean he wouldn’t exact vengeance tomorrow.
The daily reality of Fort George Island slave society was a delicate balance – between threats and fear, provocation and reaction. The fulcrum of this balance was the overseer.
NARRATOR
Before Kingsley purchased Fort George Island, his Laurel Grove plantation was run entirely by slave labor, including the manager and overseer. As time moved on, laws were passed requiring only white overseers. Zephaniah and Anna’s first-born son, George, grew up here and learned to manage the property. When his parents moved to Haiti in 1838, George purchased the property. – For a while, an overseer, who had to be white, reported to an owner who was, by legal definition, a Negro.
(SFX – sounds of “work” – fields, barn, docks)
Every evening managers and overseers would plan the next day’s tasks and assign them through the driver. They would then monitor the work in the fields, barns, docks, anywhere a task was being completed, walking or riding horses to each location. White or black, they adhered to Kingsley’s method of management.
OVERSEER
Six acres of cotton, six acres of corn and peas, and four of sweet potatoes. Sixteen acres per Negro in the field. But it’s the yield per acre that makes money; there’s no money in dirt. If there’s no rain and the yield is low, that’s not their fault. But if the rain is good and the soil is good, and the crops are poor, then poor work is to blame.
Every day I balance effort against results and reward good work with good favor, though punishment is sometimes necessary to ensure proper behavior. Only the most egregious behavior earns a lash. Insubordinate language or actions cannot be tolerated. Theft or destruction of the master’s property is the same. A runaway has stolen property just as if he killed the master’s hogs. Sometimes the lash is necessary, but only a stupid and wicked man imposes it unjustly; and I am not a stupid or wicked man.
The key to productive labor is satisfaction with his home. Do not interfere with his domestic life, permit him, if his loyalty and demeanor justify it, to earn his own money and allow him to spend it, within proper limits. For his own good, restrict his visits to others but allow decent neighbors to share in their festivities. In exchange for your generosity, you will be rewarded with happy Negroes and considerable profits.
NARRATOR
Kingsley’s apparently lenient -- and definitely patronizing -- view of his enslaved labor force had less to do with compassion and more to do with coercion and profit. The previous description by the overseer was taken almost word for word from Kingsley’s treatise promoting his system of slavery. And while there is no evidence of gratuitous beatings that were the realities of many antebellum plantations of the American South, there is no doubt that Kingsley or his kin would use violent and demeaning punishments as they saw fit.
(SFX – fade out under next para)
Yet, the evidence suggests Kingsley’s combination of rewards and punishments, possible manumission, and mostly hands-off domestic approach was, indeed, effective. High crop yields and very low instances of disturbance support the evidence that just enough satisfaction, just enough stability, and just enough hope for the future could control a person as effectively as the whip.
Now we move away from the realm of owners, managers, and overseers. Away from Master Zephaniah, Ma’am Anna, and their white relatives and free black children. Make your way back to the path, then through the two tabby columns.
Description
Garden
Duration
10 minutes, 13 seconds
Credit
NPS
Copyright and Usage Info