Essay on American Slavery

Moans of anguish fill the air, a man has fallen down from intense labor and is getting whipped to get back up. The man tries to get up, desperately pushing himself off the ground, yet the whip lashing into his body gives him no such opportunity. Eventually he falls flat, never to get up again. The person who was whipping him shrugged, “He was a waste of food anyways.” This was the life for a slave in the South before the Civil War. Destined to work in chains until they weren’t of use to the owner. In this essay I will prove that the North learning of the harsh treatment of slaves through the Fugitive Slave

The children were then called, like so many pigs, and like so many pigs they would come and devour the mush” (Douglass 23-24). The food presented to the slaves was hardly considered food being

Le Hardy de Beaulieu sketched a plantation of 200 Negros. Of these slaves, only 110 men and women were able to perform properly. The others consisted out of infants, children below the age of fourteen and elders. Of these 110, 10 or so were likely to be bedstuck ill. Hunderd slaves had to perform as if they were Twohunderd or every slave has to work as if they were two. To uphold these high expectations, guards had to chain and whip the poor negros. These precautions led to underperformance and injuries...

Frederick L. Olmsted’s journeys throughout the American South during the mid-1950’s gives readers an inside “scoop” on what living conditions were like for many slaves during the pre-Civil War years as they labored on various cotton, sugar, and rice plantations. His personal accounts and impressions of the slave system across the southern states – from Virginia to Texas - are well documented in a collection of his journals, “The Cotton Kingdom.” Much of the Northern population, as well as Olmsted, had a preconceived idea of how slaves lived and were treated in the South. After spending time on several plantations, farms, and homes of Southerners from all classes, and interviewing travelers, plantation owners, overseers, and even the slaves themselves, his perceptions, to some degree, changed. Olmsted’s observations and writings as a journalist for the New York Daily Times document some of his personal views of various participants within the slavery system in the Southern United States.

House slaves were given nicer clothing to wear, as to be presentable in the home, while field slaves often received merely a “homespun shirt that was made on the plantation”. Clearly, a distinction can be made between then house slave and field slave and although one might conclude that the house slave was treated better it truly depended on the plantation owner and his or her treatment of the slave.

Slave as defined by the dictionary means that a slave is a person who is the property of and wholly subject to another; a bond servant. So why is it that every time you go and visit a historical place like the Hampton-Preston mansion in Columbia South Carolina, the Lowell Factory where the mill girls work in Massachusetts or the Old town of Williamsburg Virginia they only talk about the good things that happened at these place, like such things as who owned them, who worked them, how they were financed and what life was like for the owners. They never talk about the background information of the lower level people like the slaves or servants who helped take care and run these places behind the scenes.

Another example of slave master’s methods to dehumanize slaves were the living conditions provided to slaves. Along with the lashings and severe punishment to which slaves were often subjected, they were also kept half-starved. As Douglass writes, “They [Henrietta and Mary] seldom knew what it was to eat a full meal.” Douglass adds, “I have seen Mary contending with the pigs for the offal thrown into the street.” (pp. 411-412) This reveals how slave masters would not feed slaves adequate portions of food, which led to many slaves being extremely thin and malnourished. Knowledge of such despicable acts happening to one's family can only inspire feelings of despise, disgust and hatred. Douglass, however, used this as fuel to inspire his freedom.

The study of slave children has brought many important facts to light. Infant and child mortality rates were twice as high among slave children as among southern white children. The leading

Slaves had no rights at all in the south. Many worked as servants and farm laborers. Some practiced skill trade as shoemaking and others worked on cotton plantations as field hands. Men and women did harsh backbreaking labor in the fields. They cleared new land, planted seeds, and harvested crops in all weather. Teenagers worked alongside the adults pulling weeds, picking insects off the crops and carrying water to the other workers. Some slaves became skilled workers such as blacksmiths and carpenters. Some slaves worked in cities but their earnings belonged to their owners. Planters often hired these skilled workers to work on their plantations. Older slaves like women worked as servants in the planter’s house. They cooked, cleaned and did other chores under the supervision of the planter’s wife.

The slaves prepared their own food and carried it out into the field in buckets. Slaves were housed in slave cabins. Small, rudely built of logs with clapboard sidings, with clay chinking. The Floors were packed with dirt, and they were leaky and drafty. The combination of wet, dirt, and cold made them diseased infested environments.

The majority of the slaves were employed in agricultural areas in the South. By the mid-19th century, a large number of slaves worked in urban areas as well, and about 5% worked in more industrial occupations. The hours of the slave workers were long. The average life expectancy of African slaves was at least 12% lower than whit Americans in 1850 and the infant mortality rate was 25% higher for slaves. Oftentimes slave marriages and families dissolved due to separation. This concept is horrible when you take under consideration that family was the entire basis of African culture.

Slavery has a lot of effects on African Americans today. History of slavery is marked for civil rights. Indeed, slavery began with civilization. With farming’s development, war could be taken as slavery. Slavery that lives in Western go back 10,000 years to Mesopotamia. Today, most of them move to Iraq, where a male slave had to focus on cultivation. Female slaves were as sexual services for white people also their masters at that time, having freedom only when their masters died.

Life for slaves was difficult. Every year they normally received two cotton shirts, one jacket, two pairs of trousers, a pair of socks, a pair of shoes, a coat, and a wool hat. To eat, slaves of the time mostly were given eight pounds of pork or fish, and cornmeal salt herring each month. Slaves were housed in wooden shacks with dirt floors, but sometimes they were made of boards nailed up with cracks stuffed with rags. The beds

After a long day of working, slaves then had personal free time. This is the time that they used to make food and clothing for their families. Since slave owners last priority was their slave's comfort, they often provided the bare minimum for their slave's survival. They didn't want to waste money on luxuries, but they did want to keep them alive and well enough so that they could still work for them.

Another common form of slave resistance was theft. Slaves pilfered fruits, vegetables, livestock, tobacco, liquor, and money from their masters. The theft of foodstuffs was especially common and was justified on several grounds. First, slave rations were often woefully inadequate in providing the nutrition and calories necessary to support the daily exertions of plantation labor. Hungry slaves reasoned that the master’s abundance should be shared with those who produced it. Second, slaves