Courtesy of the Library of Congress
During the Reconstruction period 1863-1877, the various forms of debt peonage in the shipping industry in port cities like Baltimore that replaced slavery hardly improved the diet of former slaves. At the turn of the century the port city of New Orleans for example had large populations of workers who inhabited boarding houses, poor houses, and hobo encampments. As a result restaurants that catered to these workers sprung up around the city that had menus that centered around the continuation of the antebellum diet including, the 3m’s—meat (salt pork), meal, and molasses—as well as in the case of the Chesapeake region, terrapins and crabs which served as rations which enslaved Africans turned into a delicacy.
