Slaves' Food

choi

Edward Kosner, Behind Stars and Bars; Two Yankee reporters spent 19 months in six of the Confederacy's grimmest prisons before escaping across 200 miles of rebel territory. Wall Street Journal, June 22, 2013
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB ... 74883515985340.html
(book review on Peter Carlson, Junius and Albert's Adventures in the Confederacy; A Civil War
Odyssey. PublicAffairs, 2013)

Quote: "Over the next four weeks, the party stumbled west, traveling only at night, keeping to the woods, slogging through thigh-high snow drifts. Time and again, field slaves, risking flogging or worse, took them into their spare cabins, warmed them by the fire, fed them pork and cornbread, and sent them on their way. White women whose husbands and sons—"outliers"—were hiding in the bush to avoid the Confederate draft concealed them in barns and corncribs until the coast was clear. Here the escapees benefited from a central contradiction plaguing the Confederacy: Poor Appalachian whites resented having to fight to preserve the slavocracy of the rich coastal planters and were happy to help fugitive Yankees.

My comment:
(a) There is no need to read the rest.
(b) The essence of the book is about two Yankee reporters, Junius Browne and Albert Richardson, of New York Tribune, who were captured in Vicksburg, Mississippi. They left a prison this way: "At dusk one day, they flashed a work pass at the stockade sentries and simply strolled away into the woods. They had been guests of the Confederacy for 19 months and 14 days."
(c) What interests me is that on their way back to Union line, the reporters were fed with pork (and probably chickens also) by slaves. Blacks told me that slaves raised animals on the side --or their (slaves') consumption, not their matsers'. This may explain why Americans, white and black, have been the tallest in the world (until a few years ago).