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Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology

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Shovels for the South: Farm Implements, Entrepreneurism, and Slave Resistance in Antebellum America

This paper focuses on shovels, hoes, and other agricultural implements manufactured in the North for use on Southern plantations. Could a Yankee produce a plow that a slave could not break? Slaveholders issued this challenge, Northern manufacturers took it up, and enslaved men and women confounded both in their relationship to the tools of compulsory agricultural labor. Drawing on Southern agricultural improvement journals, plantation records, and the accounts of Northern firms, this paper considers the many competing claims placed on something so simple as a wooden hoe handle.