Supplementary Material for the article manuscript "More Complicated than Meal, Meat, and Molasses: Historicizing Enslaved Rations in the Southern United States" by Matthew C. Greer.
This is a dataset that includes information form 596 quotes about the rations enslaves issued to enslaved people in the Southern United States between the 1720s and the 1860s. These quotes come from 568 accounts by 533 formerly enslaved people, enslavers, travelers, and white abolitionists. Supplementary Table 1 contains data on corn rations, Supplementary Table 2 contains data on meat rations, and Supplementary Table 3 data on all other types of food issued to enslaved people.
Four main types of sources were used to create this dataset. The first the 32 volumes of transcripts of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) interviews of formerly enslaved people in the 1930s (Library of Congress 2022). These were queried using a standardized set of keywords (beef, fish, flour, herring, meat, milk, molasses, peas, peck, potato, quart, rice, salt, syrup, and yam) and variations of these words (e.g., ’lasses, taters). Corn was only included in the dataset when a specific amount was discussed, so the most common units of measurement (peck and quart) were searched for rather than corn or cornmeal. Only references to foods that were definitively issued as rations were incorporated into the dataset. References to food that was only issued on special occasions or changes to rations during the Civil War were not included. Two accounts in the South Carolina WPA narratives are attributed to Jessie Sparrow (Quotes 341 and 342 in the dataset). The two accounts are different enough to suggest that they are not from the same woman. Therefore, they are listed as separate people in this dataset. The second set of sources is nineteenth-century accounts by formerly enslaved people and white abolitionists. These accounts were searched for the keywords corn and food as these two terms were ubiquitous in discussions of rations issued to enslaved people. The third set of sources is journals, diaries, published memoirs, personal papers, and agricultural journals (including American Cotton Planter and Soil of the South, The American Farmer, DeBows’s Review, Farmer’s Register, Southern Cultivator, and Southern Planter) written by enslavers and travelers. These were searched for the keywords corn, food, slave, and negro. Finally, references to rationing practices that are discussed in secondary sources but were not independently identified in the sources discussed above were included when available.
