taskable
nounEtymology From task + -able.
1
US, Historical, Obsolete On a plantation exploiting an enslaved labour force, a person considered to be capable of performing labour, especially field labour.
- Those [slaves] actually in the field were 44 taskables, while the remaining 13½ were employed as cart drivers, nurses, cooks for the negroes, carpenters, gardeners, house servants and stock minders […].1829, Basil Hall, chapter 18, in Travels in North America, volume 2, Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Carey, page 229:
- […] 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.1833, George Richardson Porter, The Tropical Agriculturalist,, London: Smith, Elder, page 40:
2 more examples
- 1937, Guion Griffis Johnson, Ante-Bellum North Carolina, Chapel Hill, p. 83, cited in Melville Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past, Boston: Harper, 1941, Chapter 5, p. 128, The very young and the old were usually engaged in the house, while the full “taskables” were more profitably employed in the field.
- A listing of an early-nineteenth-century Lowcountry estate revealed but one driver for 104 slaves (or forty-five taskables), and he was both an old man and a mere half-hand.1998, Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, Part 1, Chapter 4, p. 222: