This quarter, I assigned Liberty, Equality, Power in the U.S. history survey.

I might try another book next year because it’s getting to be too expensive for the students.

Anyway, it’s a solid book. Reading over the chapter on “The Old South, 1790-1850,” I stumbled over this bit, describing the deep South:

“Slaves under the task system won the right to cultivate land as ‘private fields’—farms of up to five acres on which they grew produce and raised livestock for market. There was a lively trade in slave-produced goods, and by the late 1850s slaves in the lowcountry not only produced and exchanged property but also passed it on to their children.”

Interesting history here. I know that slaves kept garden plots and sometimes had money. But here we have the actual ownership of land. Would this be a case of the labor theory of property at work? Property ownership is derived from mixing one’s labor with the land. Surprising to see it at work in the Old South. Interesting to ponder what that tells us about the South and about human nature under the conditions of life there.