Plantation women quilted, helped raise the children, and helped their husbands supervise work on the plantation. Slaves cooked, worked on the plantations, chopped firewood, cleaned, and made clothes and candles. Slaves were not allowed to go to school. Yeomen usually did their own farming, hunting, fixing, making tools, and chopping firewood. Their wives cooked, cleaned, took care of the children, and made soap, butter, candles, and clothing.
For entertainment, men had shooting contests; women, sewing and quilting ; and children, hopscotch, kite flying, and marbles. The Southern Colonies in themselves had many diverse people who led very distinct lives. Tip: To turn text into a link, highlight the text, then click on a page or file from the list above. The 13 Original Colonies. The New England Colonies. The Middle Colonies.
The Southern Colonies. Get a free wiki Try our free business product. To edit this page, request access to the workspace. Housing, Food, and Clothing In the Southern Colonies, women wore petticoats and cotton dresses and girls, just the latter. Chores, School, and Games Children in the Southern Colonies were taught manners, reading, writing, and prayers. Daily Life in the Southern Colonies. Page Tools Insert links Insert links to other pages or uploaded files. Refinements included brass or iron andirons, shovel, tongs, and bellows at each fireplace, with curtains at the window, and cushions for the chairs.
Personal property was scarce for the average colonist, consisting of a few handmade clothing items including a few wool items for winter and a pair of shoes. Lower classes ate from wooden bowls. Middle-class families had earthenware or pewter, bed and table linen, knives, forks, and a Bible. Tumblers, mugs, flagons, tankards and cups were used for drinking. The wealthy also had household chores performed by servants or slaves. Cooking of any meal was a major undertaking. Activity was centered around the fireplace, with wood-fired cooking with hanging pots swung over the fire or in the oven on the side of the brickwork.
Cook stoves, invented by Franklin in , were not commonly used at this time. Cooking utensils and methods were basic. The farmer rose early and headed out to handle his chores. At around 10 AM he returned for a big breakfast of smoked beef or turkey, sugar, and sometimes milk, butter or eggs. The remaining meal of the day was dinner occurring at 9 PM followed shortly with bedtime.
Game, fish, smoked beef or pork, vegetables, wheat bread, pie and pudding were some of the usual dinner staples. The potato was new to the diet of the colonist, appearing after when the Scots-Irish introduced it. Hogs and hominy was seasoned with cabbage or greens. While an image of a life of idleness and leisure for the Southern colonial woman may have evolved over time, the impression is not one of fact for most females.
The mistress of the plantation was spared from much drudgery with servant and slave help, as she primarily handled the duties of providing food for her large family and guests.
She was responsible for the management of the large family in an era of limited home technology for even the most basic of activities. Wealthy ladies were often supported by a large number of servants. Mary-Ann Cooks, makes my bed, and makes my punch. Pegg washes and milks. Women in the backwoods settlements and remote farms were dependent on their own labors. These women were significantly more independent and self-sufficient, and endured many hardships even in the mids.
Keeping house was more trying as the food was more scarce, the clothing crude, furniture was quite basic and limited, and houses small.
Even in the earliest settlements colonial women were uniquely efficient. While working to settle on the boundary line between Virginia and North Carolina, Mrs. Certainly the hospitality widely offered to visitors in the Southern colonies was largely due to the success of the home management of Southern women. A stranger has no more to do but to enquire upon the road where any gentleman or good houskeeper lives and there he may depend upon being received with hospitality.
The seclusion of plantation life made entertaining friends and strangers desirable. But even in the frontier settlements, visitors were a welcome sight. The clothing of the average Southern farmer was simple and practical. Men dressed in coarse linen shirts, stockings, leather coats or apron buckskin pants, caps and cowhide shoes.
Women of the day also wore durable clothing. They also wore their riding coats, jockey hats, muslin cravats and black bearskin muffs. In the colonial America of the eighteenth century, the typical family size was large, with some eight children. Women often married quite young, sometimes at an age of thirteen or fourteen. The birthrate was 40 to 50 per colonists. According to available data, one in seven women died during their fertile years as a result of childbirth.
It is not surprising that there is no evidence of any practice of birth control. The death rate in the colonies was from persons per each year, compared to England that actually had some 40 persons died per each year.
The reasons usually given for the lower death rates in the colonies was, first, that there were better food harvests leading to better diets, secondly that the lower population density held down the spread of communicable diseases, and lastly that the availability of wood from the vast forests provided a warmer winter for most people than in England.
Even infant mortality was better in the colonies, where 12 to 15 of babies died each year compared to England where no fewer than 20 per died. Half of population in the s was believed to have been below the age of fifteen. The lives of these youths were founded on the sense of obedience without question to their elders.
In some places, such as the Chesapeake, free communities of African Americans existed. Some black farmers owned slaves themselves, adding to our modern-day confusion over the role slavery played in the eighteenth-century economy.
Segregation among enslaved Africans and free white citizens was more common in northern colonies. It was common practice for southern planters to use their people as messengers and to run errands. Many were well-known throughout local communities, which made it incredibly difficult for them to disguise themselves or try to escape to freedom.
In places like Virginia, free populations were visible too, adding to the tension of keeping enslaved blacks complacent with their status as property while witnessing free blacks walking in town. This threat would prove one of several reasons for states like Virginia to push free populations out in the early nineteenth century. What pushed many of these leading figures and supporters towards revolution largely was a mixture of religious autonomy; belief in English natural rights and liberty, and in the case of the planter class, a wariness of the rising amounts of debt individuals were taking on with British creditors.
The latter is perhaps what separates motives between northern and southern colonists during the years leading up to the American Revolution. In the South, the main economy was structured around the tobacco trade.
Between frequent droughts, market instability, and depletion of fertile soil, Virginia, in particular, faced economic uncertainty in the s. To make matters worse, many of the planter class became accustomed to living on credit with foreign banks and creditors.
While they borrowed handsomely to enrich their estates with the newest European furnishings, they expected to export tobacco at a price that would bring them high returns. Instead, the price of and demand for tobacco plummeted in the s as Britain faced a recession because of the financial ruin its credit was in from years of over-extension and mismanagement.
Couple these events with creditors who began calling in their loans to the Southern gentry class at the same time Parliament issued the Sugar and Stamp Acts , and one can see how the sudden demand for hard money many wealthy planters did not have much in hard money — land ownership provided their wealth that would trigger a reaction like it did.
This is not to suggest that economic reasons were the primary motives for Southern radicals and residents to protest British taxation; plenty of argument and defense of liberty and freedom were equally afoot in petitions and grievances. But unlike the merchant class of Boston and New England, new British taxation threatened to squeeze Southern interests and the economy further than it wanted.
Unable and unwilling to denounce slavery, despite many complaining of its economic burden, the Southern economy forged ahead while elected officials attached themselves to protest movements in the northern colonies, no doubt to show solidarity for liberty, even if their motives were slightly different for doing so.
Rev War Article. By Adam E. Library of Congress. An illustration of 18th century Savannah, Georgia. A drawing of George Washington's estate, Mount Vernon, with its signature cupola.
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