Barbeque In Colonial Virginia

“I don’t think you can really understand the South if you don’t understand barbeque—as food, process, and event.” Barbeque has been one of the quintessential foods of the South and especially North Carolina for over 300 years and one can find its wood-smoked legacy throughout the Old North State. In colonial Virginia, where barbecue is thought to have first been introduced to white settlers, slave-owners made the duty of cooking barbecue for slaves (this was also the case in South Carolina). However, in North Carolina, white farmers and journeymen, and black slaves practiced the art of barbecue. White and black men continued the tradition of barbeque into the Twentieth Century, when they turned profits from the meat, with the majority …show more content…
By the time English settlers established permanent residence in North America, pork had become a mainstay of the colonial diet, and nowhere more than in North Carolina. When the crown asked William Byrd II to survey the boundary between North Carolina and Virginia, the Virginia aristocrat mentioned “the only business [in North Carolina] is raising hogs… the inhabitants of North Carolina devour so much swine’s flesh that it fills them full of gross humours… and that begets the highest taint of scurvy.” At this point however, barbeque could mean any number of meats (although pork was by far the most common) cooked in this way. Barbeque pork received the title “barbeque” in 1808, when Massachusetts congressman, Josiah Quincy denounced speeches by Southern congressmen, by stating the Southern congressmen came from the “quarter of the country…while the gin circulated, while barbecue was roasting,” referring to pork barbeque …show more content…
In 1831, Nat Turner planned his rebellion at a barbeque, and would eventually lead his fellow Virginia slaves in the most well-known and bloodiest slave revolt in the U.S. It is also argued that thirty-one years earlier, another slave revolt, “Gabriel’s Rebellion” was planned at a slave barbeque. In Southeastern North Carolina, a free black man named Henry Evans came to the Fayetteville area in 1775 in order to preach, as he ws a Methodist Preacher. White officials in Fayetteville banned him from the city as they did not want a black man in the center of town preaching to slaves and uplifting them. Evans continued preaching, however, and he held his sermons in the woods, that slaves from the area escaped during the night to attend. At these meetings, the large congregations ate barbeque, cooked in a manner that produced little smoke and flame to remain