Chapter IV: Clothing

The masters [in Georgia] make a practice of getting two suits of clothes for each slave per year, a thick suit for winter, and a thin one for summer. They provide also one pair of northern made sale shoes for each slave in _winter_. These shoes usually begin to rip in a few weeks. The negroes' mode of mending them is, to _wire_ them together, in many instances. Do our northern shoemakers know that they are augmenting the sufferings of the poor slaves with their almost good for nothing sale shoes? Inasmuch as it is done unto one of those poor sufferers it is done unto our Saviour. The above practice of clothing the slave is customary to some extent. How many, however, fail of this, God only knows. The children and old slaves are, I should think, _exceptions_ to the above rule. The males and females have their suits from the same cloth for their winter dresses. These winter garments appear to be made of a mixture of cotton and wool, very coarse and _sleazy_. The whole suit for the men consists of a pair of pantaloons and a short sailor-jacket, _without shirt, vest, hat, stockings, or any kind of loose garments!_ These, if worn steadily when at work, would not probably last more than one or two months; therefore, for the sake of saving them, many of them work, especially in the summer, with no clothing on them except a cloth tied round their waist, and _almost all_ with nothing more on them than pantaloons, and these frequently so torn that they do not serve the purposes of common decency. The women have for clothing a short petticoat, and a short loose gown, something like the male's sailor-jacket, _without any under garment, stockings, bonnets, hoods, caps, or any kind of over-clothes._ When at work in the warm weather, they usually strip off the loose gown, and have nothing on but a short petticoat with some kind of covering over their breasts. Many children may be seen in the summer months _as naked as they came into the world_. I think, as a whole, they suffer more for the want of comfortable bed clothes, than they do for wearing apparel. It is true, that some by begging or buying have more clothes than above described, but the _masters provide them with no more_. They are miserable objects of pity. It may be said of many of them, "I was _naked_ and ye clothed me not." It is enough to melt the hardest heart to see the ragged mothers nursing their almost naked children, with but a morsel of the coarsest food to eat. The Southern horses and dogs have enough to eat and good care taken of them, but Southern negroes, who can describe their misery?