What job did most slaves have?

What job did most slaves have?

By 1830 slavery was primarily located in the South, where it existed in many different forms. African Americans were enslaved on small farms, large plantations, in cities and towns, inside homes, out in the fields, and in industry and transportation.

Though slavery had such a wide variety of faces, the underlying concepts were always the same. Slaves were considered property, and they were property because they were black. Their status as property was enforced by violence — actual or threatened. People, black and white, lived together within these parameters, and their lives together took many forms.

Enslaved African Americans could never forget their status as property, no matter how well their owners treated them. But it would be too simplistic to say that all masters and slaves hated each other. Human beings who live and work together are bound to form relationships of some kind, and some masters and slaves genuinely cared for each other. But the caring was tempered and limited by the power imbalance under which it grew. Within the narrow confines of slavery, human relationships ran the gamut from compassionate to contemptuous. But the masters and slaves never approached equality.

The standard image of Southern slavery is that of a large plantation with hundreds of slaves. In fact, such situations were rare. Fully 3/4 of Southern whites did not even own slaves; of those who did, 88% owned twenty or fewer. Whites who did not own slaves were primarily yeoman farmers. Practically speaking, the institution of slavery did not help these people. And yet most non-slaveholding white Southerners identified with and defended the institution of slavery. Though many resented the wealth and power of the large slaveholders, they aspired to own slaves themselves and to join the priviledged ranks. In addition, slavery gave the farmers a group of people to feel superior to. They may have been poor, but they were not slaves, and they were not black. They gained a sense of power simply by being white.

In the lower South the majority of slaves lived and worked on cotton plantations. Most of these plantations had fifty or fewer slaves, although the largest plantations have several hundred. Cotton was by far the leading cash crop, but slaves also raised rice, corn, sugarcane, and tobacco. Many plantations raised several different kinds of crops.

Besides planting and harvesting, there were numerous other types of labor required on plantations and farms. Enslaved people had to clear new land, dig ditches, cut and haul wood, slaughter livestock, and make repairs to buildings and tools. In many instances, they worked as mechanics, blacksmiths, drivers, carpenters, and in other skilled trades. Black women carried the additional burden of caring for their families by cooking and taking care of the children, as well as spinning, weaving, and sewing.

Some slaves worked as domestics, providing services for the master’s or overseer’s families. These people were designated as «house servants,» and though their work appeared to be easier than that of the «field slaves,» in some ways it was not. They were constantly under the scrutiny of their masters and mistresses, and could be called on for service at any time. They had far less privacy than those who worked the fields.

Because they lived and worked in such close proximity, house servants and their owners tended to form more complex relationships. Black and white children were especially in a position to form bonds with each other. In most situations, young children of both races played together on farms and plantations. Black children might also become attached to white caretakers, such as the mistress, and white children to their black nannies. Because they were so young, they would have no understanding of the system they were born into. But as they grew older they would learn to adjust to it in whatever ways they could.

The diets of enslaved people were inadequate or barely adequate to meet the demands of their heavy workload. They lived in crude quarters that left them vulnerable to bad weather and disease. Their clothing and bedding were minimal as well. Slaves who worked as domestics sometimes fared better, getting the castoff clothing of their masters or having easier access to food stores.

The heat and humidity of the South created health problems for everyone living there. However, the health of plantation slaves was far worse than that of whites. Unsanitary conditions, inadequate nutrition and unrelenting hard labor made slaves highly susceptible to disease. Illnesses were generally not treated adequately, and slaves were often forced to work even when sick. The rice plantations were the most deadly. Black people had to stand in water for hours at a time in the sweltering sun. Malaria was rampant. Child mortality was extremely high on these plantations, generally around 66% — on one rice plantation it was as high as 90%.

One of the worst conditions that enslaved people had to live under was the constant threat of sale. Even if their master was «benevolent,» slaves knew that a financial loss or another personal crisis could lead them to the auction block. Also, slaves were sometimes sold as a form of punishment. And although popular sentiment (as well as the economic self-interest on the part of the owners) encouraged keeping mothers and children and sometimes fathers together, these norms were not always followed. Immediate families were often separated. If they were kept together, they were almost always sold away from their extended families. Grandparents, sisters, brothers, and cousins could all find themselves forcibly scattered, never to see each other again. Even if they or their loved ones were never sold, slaves had to live with the constant threat that they could be.

African American women had to endure the threat and the practice of sexual exploitation. There were no safeguards to protect them from being sexually stalked, harassed, or raped, or to be used as long-term concubines by masters and overseers. The abuse was widespread, as the men with authority took advantage of their situation. Even if a woman seemed agreeable to the situation, in reality she had no choice. Slave men, for their part, were often powerless to protect the women they loved.

The drivers, overseers, and masters were responsible for plantation discipline. Slaves were punished for not working fast enough, for being late getting to the fields, for defying authority, for running away, and for a number of other reasons. The punishments took many forms, including whippings, torture, mutilation, imprisonment, and being sold away from the plantation. Slaves were even sometimes murdered. Some masters were more «benevolent» than others, and punished less often or severely. But with rare exceptions, the authoritarian relationship remained firm even in those circumstances.

In addition to the authority practiced on individual plantations, slaves throughout the South had to live under a set of laws called the Slave Codes. The codes varied slightly from state to state, but the basic idea was the same: the slaves were considered property, not people, and were treated as such. Slaves could not testify in court against a white, make contracts, leave the plantation without permission, strike a white (even in self-defense), buy and sell goods, own firearms, gather without a white present, possess any anti-slavery literature, or visit the homes of whites or free blacks. The killing of a slave was almost never regarded as murder, and the rape of slave women was treated as a form of trespassing.

Whenever there was a slave insurrection, or even the rumor of one, the laws became even tighter. At all times, patrols were set up to enforce the codes. These patrols were similar to militias and were made up of white men who were obligated to serve for a set period. The patrols apprehended slaves outside of plantations, and they raided homes and any type of gathering, searching for anything that might lead to insurrection. During times of insurrection — either real or rumored — enraged whites formed vigilance committees that terrorized, tortured, and killed blacks.

While most slaves were concentrated on the plantations, there were many slaves living in urban areas or working in rural industry. Although over 90% of American slaves lived in rural areas, slaves made up at least 20% of the populations of most Southern cities. In Charleston, South Carolina, slaves and free blacks outnumbered whites. Many slaves living in cities worked as domestics, but others worked as blacksmiths, carpenters, shoemakers, bakers, or other tradespeople. Often, slaves were hired out by their masters, for a day or up to several years. Sometimes slaves were allowed to hire themselves out. Urban slaves had more freedom of movement than plantation slaves and generally had greater opportunities for learning. They also had increased contact with free black people, who often expanded their ways of thinking about slavery.

Slaves resisted their treatment in innumerable ways. They slowed down their work pace, disabled machinery, feigned sickness, destroyed crops. They argued and fought with their masters and overseers. Many stole livestock, other food, or valuables. Some learned to read and write, a practice forbidden by law. Some burned forests and buildings. Others killed their masters outright — some by using weapons, others by putting poison in their food. Some slaves comitted suicide or mutilated themselves to ruin their property value. Subtly or overtly, enslaved African Americans found ways to sabotage the system in which they lived.

Thousands of slaves ran away. Some left the plantation for days or weeks at a time and lived in hiding. Others formed maroon communities in mountains, forests or swamps. Many escaped to the North. There were also numerous instances of slave revolts throughout the history of the institution. (For one white interpretation of slave resistance, see Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race) Even when slaves acted in a subservient manner, they were often practicing a type of resistance. By fooling the master or overseer with their behavior, they resisted additional ill treatment.

Enslaved African Americans also resisted by forming community within the plantation setting. This was a tremendous undertaking for people whose lives were ruled by domination and forced labor. Slaves married, had children, and worked hard to keep their families together. In their quarters they were able to let down the masks they had to wear for whites. There, black men, women, and children developed an underground culture through which they affirmed their humanity. They gathered in the evenings to tell stories, sing, and make secret plans. House servants would come down from the «big house» and give news of the master and mistress, or keep people laughing with their imitations of the whites.

It was in their quarters that many enslaved people developed and passed down skills which allowed them to supplement their poor diet and inadequate medical care with hunting, fishing, gathering wild food, and herbal medicines. There, the adults taught their children how to hide their feelings to escape punishment and to be skeptical of anything a white person said. Many slave parents told their children that blacks were superior to white people, who were lazy and incapable of running things properly.

Many slaves turned to religion for inspiration and solace. Some practiced African religions, including Islam, others practiced Christianity. Many practiced a brand of Christianity which included strong African elements. Most rejected the Christianity of their masters, which justified slavery. The slaves held their own meetings in secret, where they spoke of the New Testament promises of the day of reckoning and of justice and a better life after death, as well as the Old Testament story of Moses leading his people out of slavery in Egypt. The religion of enslaved African Americans helped them resist the degredation of bondage.

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Related Entries:
• «Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race»
• Letter from Henry Tayloe on the domestic slave trade
• E. S. Abdy description of a Washington, D.C., slave pen
• George Fitzhugh advocates slavery
• A slave experience of being sold south
• The case of Mrs. Margaret Douglass
• Nell Irvan Painter on soul murder and slavery

What job did most slaves have?

Though it is barely mentioned in school textbooks, slavery was a key institution in the development of New York, from its formative years. We believe the philosophical notion that if you want to understand the present, you have to start by understanding the past.

What Americans know about freedom we learned in the school of slavery. Those in our past who spoke the language of liberty always had in mind — and often in view — shackles on the legs and manacles on the wrists of the enslaved.

At the height of the revolutionary conflict, George Washington, our greatest apostle of freedom but also the owner of hundreds of slaves, warned that if the Americans did not resist British tyranny they would become «as tame and abject slaves as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway.»

New York has preeminently been the capital of American liberty, the freest city of the nation — its largest, most diverse, its most economically ambitious, and its most open to the world. It was also, paradoxically, for more than two centuries, the capital of American slavery.

As many as 20 percent of colonial New Yorkers were enslaved Africans. First Dutch and then English merchants built the city’s local economy largely around supplying ships for the trade in slaves and in what slaves produced — sugar, tobacco, indigo, coffee, chocolate, and ultimately, cotton. New York ship captains and merchants bought and sold slaves along the coast of Africa and in the taverns of their own city. Almost every businessman in 18th-century New York had a stake, at one time or another, in the traffic in human beings.

During the colonial period, 41 perent of the city’s households had slaves, compared to 6 percent in Philadelphia and 2 percent in Boston. Only Charleston, South Carolina, rivaled New York in the extent to which slavery penetrated everyday life. To be sure, each slaveholding New Yorker usually owned only one or two persons.

In the urban landscape, there were no plantations. Slaves slept in the cellars and attics of town houses or above farmhouse kitchens in the countryside. They did virtually all of the work of many households — bringing in the firewood, the water, and the food; cleaning the house and the clothing; removing the wastes. They were vital to the work of early craftsmen and manufacturers, and many became skilled artisans themselves. And they performed almost all the heavy labor of building New York’s infrastructure.

Slaves constructed Fort Amsterdam and its successors along the Battery. They built the wall from which Wall Street gets its name. They built the roads, the docks, and most of the important buildings of the early city — the first city hall, the first Dutch and English churches, Fraunces Tavern, the city prison and the city hospital.

Slavery was no milder in the urban North than in the Deep South. Instances of abusive treatment permeate public and personal records. The city’s Common Council passed one restrictive law after another: forbidding blacks from owning property or bequeathing it to their children; forbidding them to congregate at night or in groups larger than three; requiring them to carry lanterns after dark and to remain south of what is now Worth Street; threatening the most severe punishments, even death, for theft, arson, or conspiracy to revolt — and carrying out these punishments brutally and publicly time and again.

Paradoxically, New York was also, from the start, a center for efforts to abolish slavery. SLAVERY IN NEW YORK also tells the story of how the black population began to plant its cultural roots, producing a rich legacy of poetry, art, music and literature in the face of adversity while at the same time, actively resisting injustice.

The records that document the oppression of the enslaved are, if one reads them carefully, evidence of just how creative and passionate they were in their quest for liberty.

With every obstacle in their way, the enslaved were able to form and nurture families, to overcome frequent loss and separation, and to pass along cultural legacies to their children.

First to arrive every market day to sell food and the products of their idle moments, they demonstrated an amazing combination of street smarts and entrepreneurial energy.

1. Disparaged for their passivity, the enslaved were twice able to shake the eighteenth-century British Empire with their revolts against slavery in New York.
2. Taken for granted by their Patriot slaveholding masters, they were acknowledged to be among the most valiant fighters on the British side during the Revolutionary War.
3. Mocked for their crudeness during slave times, they were able to fashion the musical, dance, and theatrical traditions that have been at the core of American culture ever since.
4. Without abandoning a treasured memory of African homelands, they came together to create a dynamic form of African American religion that continues to inspire today.
5. Deprived of the right to vote in the 1820s, they organized political pressure groups, created a lively press, and shaped a political rhetoric that has been at the heart of every civil rights movement in the United States and around the globe ever since.

The message is ultimately uplifting, even inspiring. In confronting, resisting, and eventually defeating an institution as powerful as chattel slavery, black New Yorkers and their white allies forged the tools of freedom that all Americans treasure today.

Slavery as a Cause of the Civil War

The role of slavery in bringing on the Civil War has been hotly debated for decades. One important way of approaching the issue is to look at what contemporary observers had to say. In March 1861, Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederate States of America, gave his view:

The new [Confederate] constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution — African slavery as it exists amongst us — the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution . . . The prevailing ideas entertained by . . . most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. . . Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of . . . the equality of races. This was an error . . .

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner–stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition.

— Alexander H. Stephens, March 21, 1861, reported in the Savannah Republican, emphasis in the original

Today, most professional historians agree with Stephens that slavery and the status of African Americans were at the heart of the crisis that plunged the U.S. into a civil war from 1861 to 1865. That is not to say that the average Confederate soldier fought to preserve slavery or that the North went to war to end slavery. Soldiers fight for many reasons — notably to stay alive and support their comrades in arms — and the North’s goal in the beginning was preservation of the Union, not emancipation. For the 200,000 African Americans who ultimately served the U.S. in the war, emancipation was the primary aim.

The roots of the crisis over slavery that gripped the nation in 1860–1861 go back to the nation’s founding. European settlers brought a system of slavery with them to the western hemisphere in the 1500s. Unable to find cheap labor from other sources, white settlers increasingly turned to slaves imported from Africa. By the early 1700s in British North America, slavery meant African slavery. Southern plantations using slave labor produced the great export crops — tobacco, rice, forest products, and indigo — that made the American colonies profitable. Many Northern merchants made their fortunes either in the slave trade or by exporting the products of slave labor. African slavery was central to the development of British North America.

Although slavery existed in all 13 colonies at the start of the American Revolution in 1775, a number of Americans (especially those of African descent) sensed the contradiction between the Declaration of Independence’s ringing claim of human equality and the existence of slavery. Reacting to that contradiction, the Northern states decided to phase out slavery following the Revolution. The future of slavery in the South was debated, and some held out the hope that it would eventually disappear there as well.

When the U.S. Constitution was written in 1787, however, the interests of slaveholders and those who profited from slavery could not be ignored. Although slaves could not vote, white Southerners argued that slave labor contributed greatly to the nation’s wealth. The Constitution therefore gave representation in the Congress and the electoral college for 3/5ths of every slave (the 3/5ths clause). The clause gave the South a role in the national government far greater than representation based on its free population alone would have given it. The Constitution also provided for a fugitive slave law and made 1807 the earliest year that Congress could act to end the importation of slaves from Africa.

The Constitution left many questions about slavery unanswered, in particular, the question of slavery’s status in any new territory acquired by the U.S. The failure to deal forthrightly and comprehensively with slavery in the Constitution guaranteed future conflict over the issue. All realistic hope that slavery might eventually die out in the South ended when world demand for cotton exploded in the early 1800s. By 1840, cotton produced in the American South earned more money than all other U.S. exports combined. White Southerners came to believe that cotton could be grown on with slave labor. Over time, many took for granted that their prosperity, even their way of life, was inseparable from Africa slavery.

In the decades preceding 1860, Northerners increasingly supported the right of farmers and workers to enjoy the fruits of their labor and try to better themselves. Slavery did not fit with this view. Many Northerners opposed its presence in the territories, which were viewed as the birthright of ambitious, free white men. The proposed admission of Missouri as a slave state in 1820 provoked a national debate over slavery. After much discussion, the 1820 Missouri Compromise was worked out. Under its terms, Maine was admitted as a free state at the same time that Missouri came in as a slave state, maintaining the balance between slave and free states. Additionally, Congress prohibited slavery in all western territories lying above latitude 36° 30’ (the southern boundary of Missouri).

The Missouri Compromise quieted agitation over slavery for only a while. In the 1830s, concerns over the issue resurfaced for several reasons. One was the appearance in the North of a tiny number of very persistent agitators calling for the immediate abolition of slavery (the abolitionists). Another was the bloody 1831 Nat Turner slave rebellion in Virginia. White Southerners believed Northern abolitionists encouraged slave revolts, while Southern efforts to silence the abolitionists aroused Northern fears about freedom of speech.

Later, U.S. victory in the Mexican War of 1846–1848 brought the nation vast new acreage in the West. Once again, the status of slavery in the territories became a hot issue. A new agreement, the Compromise of 1850, was required when the California Territory sought to join the Union. Aspects of the compromise included 1) admission of California as a free stat 2) a stronger fugitive slave law; 3) assurance that Congress would not interfere with the interstate traffic in slaves in the South; and 4) prohibition of the slave trade in the District o Columbia. The compromise left open the status of slavery in the other areas won from Mexico. Then, in 1854, the Kansas– Nebraska Act effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise, causing more violent disputes over slavery. Pro– and anti– slavery factions turned the Kansas Territory into a bloody battleground.

Mostly as a result of tensions over slavery, a new party, the Republicans, arose in the North in the 1850s. The Republicans made prohibition of slavery in the territories their chief issue. The party was the first in the nation’s history to draw its support from one section only. Inevitably, the party aroused deep anger in the South. Attitudes in the two sections of the nation continued to harden in the late 1850s. In 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision ruled that Americans of African descent were not U.S. citizens. A failed effort to start a slave uprising in Virginia by abolitionist John Brown in 1859 spread fear and distress across the South.

The presidential election of 1860 was fought entirely along sectional lines. The Democratic Party finally splintered over slavery, with the party fielding two candidates. The Republicans nominated Abraham Lincoln of Illinois. His platform included government support of road and harbor projects and higher tariffs (import taxes) to protect American industry, in addition to keeping slavery out of the territories. Lincoln won the election by sweeping the Northern states, while failing to gain a single electoral vote in the Deep South. Spurred by South Carolina, the states of the Deep South decided that limitation of slavery in the territories was the first step toward a total abolition of slavery.

One by one, seven states — South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas – left the Union. Lincoln hoped desperately to maintain the Union without war. When he decided to resupply the U.S. army at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, Confederate forces fired on the fort. Lincoln then asked for 75,000 volunteers to put down the rebellion. This prompted Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas to join the Confederacy. Civil war had come.

There were many sectional differences in 19th–century America. Differences over slavery were the only ones that could not be settled by peaceful means. Much evidence from that time shows that the secession of seven Deep South states was caused mostly by concerns over the future of slavery. When Mississippi seceded, she published a “Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Include and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union.” It stated:

“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery. Utter subjugation awaits us in the Union, if we should consent longer to remain It is not a matter of choice, but of necessity. We must either submit to degradation, and to the loss of property worth four billions of money [the estimated total market value of slaves], or we must secede from the Union framed by our fathers, to secure this as well as every other species of property.”