Adjective
To which tasks can be assigned.
Usage- not-comparable
- Examples
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a taskable intelligent agent; a taskable sensor
(of an enslaved person held on a plantation) Considered to be capable of performing labour, especially field labour.
Usage- US usage
- Historical
- not-comparable
- Obsolete
- Examples
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More examples (3)
1789, record of sale of enslaved people by Thomas Washington, cited in Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998, Part 1, Chapter 3, p. 198, footnote 85, [The 16-year-old boy has] been taskable these 3 years past.
1796, court record, Neufville v. Mitchell, 1 Desaussure 480, South Carolina, cited in Helen Tunnicliff Catterall (ed.), Judicial Cases concerning American Slavery and the Negro, Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1929, pp. 277-278, defendant […] states […] many of them were diseased and not taskable;
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, to oblige Planters to plant a certain quantity of Provisions to each taskable Negro
Noun
On a plantation exploiting an enslaved labour force, a person considered to be capable of performing labour, especially field labour.
Usage- US usage
- Historical
- Obsolete
- Synonyms
- taskable handworking slave
- Examples
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More examples (4)
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 […].
[…] 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 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.