Living Conditions Among Slaves

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.

Slavery as a Cruel Institution Cruelty can be defined as an inhumane action done to an individual or group of people that causes either physical or mental harm. Slavery, at its very core, was a cruel and inhumane institution. From the idea behind it to the way that it was enforced, it degraded the lives of human beings and forbade the basic liberties that every man deserves under the Constitution of the United States. Three major areas where cruelty was especially prevalent were in the slaves working conditions, living conditions, and loss of fundamental freedoms. Working conditions for slaves were about as bad as can possibly be imagined. Slaves worked from dawn till dusk and sometimes even longer. Solomon Northrup describes his

Today, slavery is not something you see in modern day society. For the most part, people are treated fairly while working, are given benefits such as holidays and the option to take a sick day when feeling ill, and are paid a good wage for their services as an employee. But unfortunately this was not the case back in the 1800s where slavery was popular among the southern parts of the United States.

Buckets were placed in these compartments for bathroom uses and other necessary uses (). Slaves that were placed far from these buckets had difficulty in reaching them because of the number of other slaves around them (Falconbridge, 1788). This situation would cause slaves to release themselves where they were and would cause several health issues and diseases to arise (Falconbridge, 1788). Later on in his account, Falconbridge describes the upkeep of the slaves on the voyages. The slaves were usually fed twice a day, but on most other ships they were only fed once (Falconbridge, 1788). Their food would be severed in small buckets and slaves would be placed in groups of ten for each bucket (Falconbridge, 1788). “Upon the Negroes refusing to take sustenance, I have seen coals of fire, glowing hot, put on a shovel and placed so near their lips as to scorch and burn them. And this has been accompanied with threats of forcing them to swallow the coals if they any longer persisted in refusing to eat.” (Falconbridge, 1788). Upon the resistance of the obligations of eating, slaves were extremely punished for disobeying and these punishments were severely cruel and inhumane. Slaves were forced to obey the slave owners no matter what the situation was. Slaves were even forced to exercise which would aid in the upkeep of their health (Falconbridge,

On the plantation the slaves were provided small housing. Each hut was cramped and sometimes held ten people. They had little furniture, and the beds were usually made of rags and straw. Weekly food ration were distributed every Saturday including: corn meal, lard, some meat, molasses, peas, greens, and flour. Each day the

Why would it matter if your master was rich or poor, you all are slaves their is no difference in the way that you are treated. You both are deemed as cattle, meaning that you are considered being less than a human being! “it was worth a half- cent to kill a "nigger," and a half-cent to bury one.” This quote evoked a lot of emotion,because if you sit and ponder on it they(slave masters) pay hundreds of dollars for them(slaves) and in return the slaves make hundred or thousands of dollars for their master(s). Even though, they pay money for them and go through a lot to retrieve the slaves they can be quickly replaced because of how quickly slaves are brought over from their home to the united states which makes the death of a slave equal nothing. "there is no flesh in his obdurate heart." This quote really gives you somewhat of an insight on how the slaves felt about a particular overseer who was merciless on the slaves, he was deemed as the worse overseer they had ever encountered many said that he was every where around every corner and under every tree. Everywhere they looked he was their waiting and watching

Hidden underneath a cloaks of materialistic wealth and “religious devotion” slave owners retain the same evil prerogative and negative sentiment towards African Americans. Slave owners were acquisitive and put more value on their garden plantations and horses than on the lives of African Americans. Slaves must meticulously take care of the horses that live on the plantations because slave owners would punish them if the horses’ “food was too wet or too dry; he got it too soon or too late; he was too hot or too cold; he had too much hay and not enough grain” (Douglass). Repetition of the word “too” emphasizes that slaves, no matter how hard they tried, were never fully able to complete a task correctly and, in the minds of slaveholders, if a task was not completed correctly, slaves did not “deserve” compensation. It is ironic that the treatment of slaves was inherently worse than that of actual animals which furthers the fact that slavery summoned a role reversal in society; slaves were forcefully overworked like animals and the animals became human.

Enslaved people were treated extremely harshly by Southern slave owners. Slaves were instructed to do heavy labor, and if they did not worth to their maximum ability they were cruelly treated with whippings, beatings, and they were sometimes even maimed. Slaves barely had enough food, clothing, and shelter to get through

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

Furthermore, they were continuously threaten by physical torture, which might be imposed upon them for no reason but their masters’ bad mood that day. They were always whipped for hours, often beaten with hoes and sticks, and sometimes killed as animals by their cruel masters with no pity and compassion at all, which was also not illegal. There is one very scary but reflective example presented by Douglass in his narrative that a woman slave was killed brutally by her mistress because she just had a rest while the baby whom she took care of was crying. Behind this, she was actually kept working every night and rarely had a nap. A trivial “mistake” shockingly cost her life to pay for the baby’s cry. According to many more details by Douglass, those slaves lived in a life in which they not only needed to keep worrying about what to eat and when to take a break, but also needed to never stop thinking about how they should behave like an infallible machine in order to escape from their masters’s bloody cowskins. In a word, slaves were deprived of the right to work hard to earn a living, and became the livestocks which were forced by human to do whatever they needed them to do, which also meant they could be tortured or killed just for the same reason why an animal could be killed.

Colonel Lloyd was very rich, and had owned many slaves and plantations. On the plantations, slaves were given clothes once every year, and if they were torn or worn, they had to work naked. They were all given basic food every day, and everybody slept on the floor and shared one blanket. If they do not wake up, they are whipped.

The conditions and common practices aboard a slave ship are horrific. I say this because they would use huge buckets to go to the restroom and the children would fall into it. They also were very cramped in that small space in the ship. The British also made them dance to think it is a way to be freed. The British also sometime throw some enslaved Africans over board if they wont do something they are told to do so. These are only some of the conditions and common practices aboard a slave ship.

Life under slavery is known to be controversial among historians. The well being of a slave mainly depended on the kind of agriculture they worked on, the area they lived, and also the time period they lived in. The plantation system changed slavery heavily from 1700 to 1830. In the early 1700s, the average slave was a young male in his twenties from either the Caribbean or Africa. By 1830, the average slave was just as likely to be male as they were female. Most of these slaves by this point were actually born in North America and spoke english. They also worked on a plantation with many other slaves. These plantations and the rise of agriculture were the main reasons for change in slave life. Due to the substantial amount of slaves on a plantation, it was very easy for male slaves to find a female mate. This lead to marriage between slaves and a decrease in the need for importation of slaves. The importation of slaves decreased so much that it was banned by Congress in 1808.

When thinking about a slave's health, most people would think of them as very ill and sick. In reality, slaves sometimes had better health than the whites in the south. Slavemasters made sure their slaves were in the best condition possible. If their slaves were sick, they would not bring in as much money affecting slave masters economic prospects. Slaveholders paid large amounts of money to keep their slaves healthy. Not because they cared about the actual slave, but because they cared about the money they weren’t making while sick (Busick 1,2,5). To slave masters, unhealthy slaves were useless, making it very important to give their slaves all the medical attention they need to keep them healthy. Slaves even received health care. Although

During their few hours of gratuitous time, most slaves did their own personal study. The diet supplied by slaveholders was generally short, and slaves often supplemented it by tending small plots of land or fishing. Many slave owners did not provide enough clothing, and slave mothers often worked to clothe their families at night later on long days of toil. One visitor to colonial North Carolina wrote that slaveholders rarely gave their slaves meat or fish, and that he witnessed many slaves wearing only rags. Although there were exceptions, the prevailing attitude among slave owners was to allot their slaves the bare minimum of food and clothing; anything beyond that was up to the slaves to gain during their very limited time off from employment.