The Heights of American Slaves: New Evidence on Slave Nutrition and Health

Abstract

In recent years the nutritional adequacy of the slave diet has received increasing attention from historians. Scholars have analyzed a wide array of sources such as the manuscript censuses of agriculture and population, the ex-slave narratives, diaries, plantation account books, and agricultural and medical journals to shed new light on the quantities, varieties, and nutritional content of foods consumed by slaves (Fogel and Engerman, 1974; Owens, 1976; Sutch, 1975; Kiple and Kiple, 1977; Savitt, 1978; Crawford, 1980; Kahn, 1983). While these studies have yielded considerable information on the average quality of the slave diet in the American South or for slaves in particular localities, relatively little systematic evidence has been available to date on how the level of nutrition varied among different groups in the slave population, and over time.