Planters switched from provisioning slaves to granting garden plots to save money

Evidence

The most important of these was access to garden plots of land on the plantations. The Code Noir required masters to feed their slaves with a set number of provisions each week. Relatively quickly, however, many masters began using a practice borrowed from Dutch colonies, in which slaves were given a small plot of land to cultivate rather than being given weekly provisions. They were also given all or part of Saturday, in addition to the free Sunday they already had, to cultivate these plots. This arrangement was a way for planters a way to save money, although it could backfire if slaves were unable to grow enough food to feed themselves, as was the case especially in times of drought. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 175

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The garden-plot system and the customary rights slaves built around them directly connect to the article on trees as infrastructure and self-provisioning ecologies, extending the ideas of how enslaved people carved autonomy out of plantation space.
• XREF: Connects to Sidney Mintz’s and others’ accounts of how provision grounds became the seedbed of slave autonomy and proto-market activity across Caribbean slavery.