As to food, clothing and shelter, a few concrete items will reinforce the indications in the preceding chapters that crude comfort was the rule.  Bartram the naturalist observed in 1776 that a Georgia slaveholder with whom he stopped sold no dairy products from his forty cows in milk.  The proprietor explained this by saying:  “I have a considerable family of black people who though they are slaves must be fed and cared for Those I have were either chosen for their good qualities or born in the family; and I find from long experience and observation that the better they are fed, clothed and treated, the more service and profit we may expect to derive from their labour.  In short, I find my stock produces no more milk, or any article of food or nourishment, than what is expended to the best advantage amongst my family and slaves.”  At another place Bartram noted the arrival at a plantation of horse loads of wild pigeons taken by torchlight from their roosts in a neighboring swamp.[10]

[Footnote 10:  William Bartram, Travels (London, 1792), pp. 307-310, 467, 468.]

On Charles Cotesworth Pinckney’s two plantations on the South Carolina coast, as appears from his diary of 1818, a detail of four slaves was shifted from the field work each week for a useful holiday in angling for the huge drumfish which abounded in those waters; and their catches augmented the fare of the white and black families alike.[11] Game and fish, however, were extras.  The staple meat was bacon, which combined the virtues of easy production, ready curing and constant savoriness.  On Fowler’s “Prairie” plantation, where the field hands numbered a little less than half a hundred, the pork harvest throughout the eighteen-fifties, except for a single year of hog cholera, yielded from eleven to twenty-three hundred pounds; and when the yield was less than the normal, northwestern bacon or barreled pork made up the deficit.[12]

In the matter of clothing, James Habersham sent an order to London in 1764 on behalf of himself and two neighbors for 120 men’s jackets and breeches and 80 women’s gowns to be made in assorted sizes from strong and heavy cloth.  The purpose was to clothe their slaves “a little better than common” and to save the trouble of making the garments at home.[13] In January, 1835, the overseer of one of the Telfair plantations reported that the woolen weaving had nearly supplied the full needs of the place at the rate of six or six and a half yards for each adult and proportionately for the children.[14] In 1847, in preparation for winter, Charles Manigault wrote from Paris to his overseer:  “I wish you to count noses among the negroes and see how many jackets and trousers you want for the men at Gowrie, ... and then write to Messrs. Matthiessen and Co. of Charleston to send them to you, together with the same quantity of twilled red flannel shirts, and a large woolen Scotch cap for each man and youth on the place....  Send back anything which is not first