How the chicken built America: the lowly bird helped sustain slaves, feed the nation's cities, and create our modern way of life.

• Author: Lawler, Andrew
• Position: TIMES PAST

In the late 1600s, plantation owners in Virginia were worried. Some enterprising slaves were raising pigs, cows, and horses and selling them at a profit. With that money, they might buy their freedom. In 1692, the Virginia General Assembly enacted a law forbidding slaves to own large livestock.

But it made no mention of chickens.

That loophole wound up having a profound effect on our diets. It led to the creation of an underground chicken economy for America's slaves, which helped establish the chicken as a dietary staple in the U.S., and eventually as the most popular meat on American menus.

The story of the chicken's rise in America begins on another continent. Most slaves came from West Africa, and the chicken was a staple as well as a sacred animal often used in religious rituals in places stretching from modern-day Senegal to Nigeria. West Africans were well versed in how to keep their flocks happy with garden waste and table scraps, and some slaves in America capitalized on that knowledge.

Chicken coops had sprung up around slave quarters in Virginia and Maryland by the mid-1600s, and in the Carolinas soon after. A visitor to George Washington's Mount Vernon observed that the chicken "is the only pleasure allowed to Negroes" and that the slaves "sell the chickens in Alexandria and buy with the money some furniture." Virginia planter Landon Carter mentions 200 chickens "entrusted" to his slave Sukey. Though Sukey's birds may have been the property of her owner, most flocks belonged to the slaves. If their masters wanted chicken meat or eggs, they usually had to buy it. In 1775, in what was likely a typical exchange, Thomas Jefferson bought three chickens for two silver Spanish bits (roughly $30 today) from two female slaves at his Shadwell plantation in Albemarle County, Virginia.

In Charleston, female slaves at the city market sold chickens and eggs "from morn 'til night," the SouthCarolina Gazette reported. There, they were free to charge white customers high prices. "They often lay up money," noted Fredrika Bremer, a Swedish writer who toured the antebellum South, "and I heard speak of slaves who possess several hundred dollars."

Though purchasing one's freedom became more difficult by the 19th century, chicken profits still helped slaves buy things they otherwise could never have afforded, like well-made clothes. The birds were also currency in the underground slave economy. Chicken-rich slaves on one Virginia farm, for example, contracted enslaved carpenters to build wooden stools for their cabins in exchange for fowl.

Because their friends and relatives stood to benefit financially, black cooks in plantation kitchens began moving the menu away from beef, pork, and goose and toward chicken. As a result, white Southerners began eating more of it, and soon the ancient West African meal of fried chicken became popular on tables across the South.

'Hen Fever' and Immigrant Jews

Chicken might have remained a regional curiosity if not for a jolt of excitement that came from, of all places, China.

After its defeat in the First Opium War (1839-42) against the United Kingdom, China was forced to open trade to the West. In the 1840s, Yankee captains of clipper ships brought new specimens of Asian chickens to America's shores. These large and colorful birds sparked a frenzy of collecting and speculation that began in New England and radiated across the country.

Exotic fowl sold for fantastic prices: At a time when factory workers typically earned less than 10 cents an hour, a pair of Chinese birds might go for as much as $700.

"He looked like some Oriental king in some magnificent Italian opera," wrote Herman Melville about one such fowl in an 1853 short story satirizing what was called "hen fever." The protagonist in the tale mortgaged his farm to obtain this fine bird.

The speculative "hen fever" bubble burst just before the Civil War (1861-65), but breeders began to cross the hefty exotics with the smaller but hardier Western counterparts to produce a bird that could lay more eggs and produce more meat. This happened at a time when the U.S. was beginning to industrialize. As huge factories sprang up in cities across the North, a source of cheap protein was critical to sustaining the millions of workers who made this new industrial economy possible.

Chicken would become that cheap protein, thanks in part to the arrival of millions of Jews fleeing poverty and persecution in Russia and Eastern Europe in the late 1800s. Beef was too expensive for these immigrants, and Jewish law prohibits pork. So Jews began to buy chickens shipped on the new railroad networks from the Midwest and the South to the Northeast. The first major chicken slaughterhouses sprang up in New York City to meet this demand. One horrified rabbi wrote in 1887 of "rivers of mud, mire and blood" in lanes so crowded with people and birds that the butchers "lack room to turn." In 1900, New York City boasted 1,500 kosher butcher shops stocked by 2,000 train cars filled with live chickens that arrived mainly from farms in the Midwest.

The demand soon caught the attention of...