1789, record of sale of enslaved people by Thomas Washington, cited inPhilip D. Morgan,Slave Counterpoint, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998, Part 1, Chapter 3, p. 198, footnote 85,[1]
[The 16-year-old boy has] beentaskable these 3 years past.
1796, court record,Neufville v. Mitchell, 1 Desaussure 480, South Carolina, cited inHelen Tunnicliff Catterall (ed.),Judicial Cases concerning American Slavery and the Negro, Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1929, pp. 277-278,[2]
defendant[…] states[…] many of them were diseased and nottaskable;
1813,Bahama Gazette, 19 December, 1813, cited in Howard Johnson,The Bahamas from Slavery to Servitude, 1783-1933, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, p. 29,[3]
to oblige Planters to plant a certain quantity of Provisions to eachtaskable Negro
1829,Basil Hall, chapter 18, inTravels in North America[4], volume 2, Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Carey, page229:
Those [slaves] actually in the field were 44taskables, while the remaining 13½ were employed as cart drivers, nurses, cooks for the negroes, carpenters, gardeners, house servants and stock minders[…].
[…] the whole labour of the 122 slaves maintained, does not exceed that which would be obtained from the employment of fifty-seven and a half able bodied labourers, or, in the language of the country,taskables.
1937,Guion Griffis Johnson,Ante-Bellum North Carolina, Chapel Hill, p. 83, cited inMelville Herskovits,The Myth of the Negro Past, Boston: Harper, 1941, Chapter 5, p. 128,[6]
The very young and the old were usually engaged in the house, while the full “taskables” were more profitably employed in the field.
1998,Philip D. Morgan,Slave Counterpoint[7], Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,Part 1, Chapter 4, p. 222:
A listing of an early-nineteenth-century Lowcountry estate revealed but one driver for 104 slaves (or forty-fivetaskables), and he was both an old man and a mere half-hand.
