Enslaved Women and Manor Mistresses in Plantation Life
Plantation owners in Northern Virginia depended on the girls and women they owned to "increase" inventories of "chattel property" through the birth of enslaved babies. As the Gunston Hall population of bondswomen and bondsmen grew, so too did George Mason IV's household wealth. His colonial family was focused on enslaved females for other reasons, as well; they had culinary skills that enhanced and, possibly, threatened the master class.[1]
Enslaved girls and women cooked meals for the Masons. At Gunston Hall, Ann Eilbeck Mason kept spices in the bedroom she shared with George IV--rather than in the kitchen. This decision may have stemmed from an imagined concern that her family members could fall victim to a toxin served in food. More likely, she simply did not trust the enslaved people who kept her husband and children alive and well. Such suspicion was registered as a worry, commonly expressed by other plantation mistresses, that enslaved girls and women might steal the spices for the slave pot.[2]
[1] Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 306.
[2] Ibid. In 1767, during Ann Eilbeck Mason's lifetime, "two of Mason's slaves were executed for attempting to poison their overseers, and according to a newspaper report, the slaves' 'Heads were cut off, and fixed on the chimnies of the Court-House'": Jeff Broadwater, George Mason: Forgotten Founder (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006),35. Presumably, George Mason IV was consulted about this specific form and public presentation of capital punishment.
Creator: Elizabeth Perez-Garcia