Slavery: Typical Conditions on Plantations

Slavery: Typical Conditions on Plantations

The daily conditions of the lives of American slaves prior to emancipation varied significantly depending mainly on the nature and sentiments of plantation owners and the overseers who watched over the plantation's slaves. Generally, slaves worked from dawn to dusk, six days a week with Sundays off. Because nighttime was their only opportunity to tend to themselves, much of their nights were, by necessity, used to care for their wounds, prepare their food, and care for their children and repair their clothes instead of sleeping very much (Douglass, p.6).

Slaves were rarely if ever provided with anything in the way of beds, and merely slept of the cold floors of their cabins, more often than not, huddled together for warmth, under a ragged horse blanket, if they were fortunate enough to have one. Their yearly clothing supplies for adult slaves consisted of two coarse linen shirts, one pair of linen trousers, one pair of shoes, a single pair of stockings, and a heavier pair of winter trousers and jacket made from "Negro cloth,"

Monthly ration of food for slaves amounted to approximately eight ponds of pork or fish and a single bushel of corn meal (Douglass, p.6). Children too young to work received only a single shirt and nothing else; they lived barefoot and more or less naked until they reached working age. In many cases, children of slaves were fed more like pigs than human beings, eating a "mush" made from coarse boiled corn meal poured into trough, using their hands or maybe an oyster shell or roof shingle (Douglass, p.16).

Female slaves worked more in the house, doing chores and tending to the needs of the plantation owner's wife and family, but sometimes worked the fields as well. The men performed the main labor in the fields, the specific nature of which depended on the type of crops and the chores they necessitated, but which usually included plowing fields, tending to cattle or oxen, and harvesting cotton and tobacco crops. Overseers used cowhide whips and wooden clubs to enforce their rules, some more cruelly and arbitrarily than others. Whereas most did whip their slaves, some did so only for perceived necessity and without deriving pleasure or satisfaction from it; others did so with extreme and deliberately wanton cruelty, utterly without reason or "justification" even in the context of the time. Cruelty manifested itself I many other ways on plantations, such as by the forced overfeeding of any slave who was overheard to complain of being hungry for lack of sufficient food.

One fairly typical practice consisted of force feeding molasses or other heavy liquid foods to induce discomfort and vomiting in response to complaints of hunger, intended to convince the slave that being perpetually hungry was no worse than its alternative. On the other hand, amongst themselves, plantation owners were subject to shame for underfeeding their slaves; some of those who did employed spies within the ranks of their slaves, to identify complainers, lest they expose them to ridicule from other slave owners, and addressed complaints with whippings (Douglass, p.11).