Trash Lends Insight Into Slave Life

It was outside the women’s restroom at Mt. Vernon that archeologist Dennis Pogue collected some of his best trash--remnants of wine bottles, china, even leftover dinners--buried in a cellar of slave quarters 200 years ago.

Pogue said he sifted through bits of fine imported porcelain, swirled stemware and shards of wine bottles as well as more than 25,000 bones of opossums, sheep, cattle, geese and other animals.

The discovery, during a recently completed archeological dig on George Washington’s 500-acre Virginia plantation, tends to dispel some myths about slave life, said Pogue, who works for the plantation.

The items, similar to many unearthed in a similar dig several years ago at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home, suggest that all slaves may not have eaten only out of gourds and crude wooden bowls as originally thought. Some may have used china and porcelain handed down from the mansion. The wine bottles don’t necessarily suggest the slaves drank wine, Pogue said. They may have held other liquids.

The range of animal bones discovered suggests that some slaves’ diets were more diverse than originally thought, that they had time to hunt and had access to weapons, Pogue said. Lead shot also was found in the trash.

“We’re very confident that the slaves had some weapons,” Pogue said. “They had a wider diversity of foods . . . and most of them would have come from the slaves’ own efforts.”

The suggestion that slaves had time to hunt would quash the notion that every slave worked from dawn to dusk, Pogue said.

“We’re trying to be very careful not to say more than the data suggest,” Pogue continued. “We’re not going to say they were living the life of Riley . . . but clearly they had time to do these things.”

Other academics concurred in some of Pogue’s conclusions that, although slave life was harsh, materially it may have been somewhat better than historians previously believed.

“The daily life of slaves was very, very hard in comparison to the life of their owners and other whites,” said Russell Adams, chairman of the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University. “The diet was borderline, enough to keep them producing, but not enough to make them very healthy. The seasonal work was arduous, especially when agricultural products were bringing high prices.”

But Adams said that after harvest, on Saturday nights and on Sundays, slaves did have some leisure time and were encouraged to hunt to supplement their diets and keep busy.

Pogue said it is unclear whether all of Washington’s more than 300 slaves enjoyed fine china and hunting privileges or just the 70 blacksmiths, carpenters, shoemakers, spinners, weavers and other artisans who lived near the mansion.

Historians have documented a plantation hierarchy that awarded the highest status--and best living conditions--to slaves who worked in the mansion, followed by those in crafts and then field hands.

Pogue said he hopes to dig at the site of Mt. Vernon’s field slaves’ quarters this summer to compare living conditions.

One item unearthed at Mt. Vernon and in digs elsewhere is a type of bowl called colonoware, a crude, unglazed kind of pottery. Archeologists wonder whether this was made by slaves, American Indians or both, Pogue said.

“It may be some African holdover,” Pogue said, or the bowls may have had something to do with the kind of foods slaves ate.