Charleston William Faux, Memorable Days in America, Part 2 (London, 1823), 114.
Item
Title
Charleston William Faux, Memorable Days in America, Part 2 (London, 1823), 114.
Includes music itself or text of song
no
Identity of singers; solo/group
enslaved
group
Voice/instrument
voice
voice
Space/room
plantation
genre
work songs?
Geographical location
Virginia
Excerpt
We then viewed the Colonel's estate, consisting of 600 acres, of hill and dale, 90 of which are meadow irrigated, and which produces 2,000 dollars in hay annually, while the tobacco crop is commonly worth from 100 to 150 dollars an acre. Here is a marl bank, by which the Colonel has improved the estate, which, including its first cost, employs 20,000 dollars, and nets, from 12 to 15 percent. It is cultivated by from 12 to 20 negroes , who seem happy and well treated, singing and working merrily. The Colonel thinks slaves are better off than free - men. ' All slave- holders think so, especially those idle men who keep them merely for hiring out, that they may live entirely by the labour and breeding of blacks. Free blacks, in a slave state, are most of them unhappy,
Context
Faux is visiting the estate of a person named Colonel Heb and he describes his false perception of the enslaved working there.
Bias of author
Bias presented in this text is about average for nineteenth-century sources written by learned, traveling white men.