Slave Art: Created Behind Closed Doors

Slaves were bought and sold in many places, mostly for laboring farm land. In the Atlantic world during the 1500's and 1600’s there were many causes and effects to African slave trade. Many Europeans needed slaves to labor on their lands.

The author also explores the profitability of slavery as an institution, as while the tendency of slave owners to keep their capital invested in slaves rather than industry resulted in a lack of economic diversification in the South, it also resulted in great profits during times of high demand for agricultural products. Phillips states that more research is required in this area.

During the mid 1600’s, slave laws were passed to officiate slavery as an economic custom and to further promote the ideal of slave labor. A slave by the 1700’s is an African American who works for the entirety of his or her life without pay that endures inflicted pain by his or her masters and furthermore is a title that is inherited through generation. To get to point, slaves began to grow weary of their conditions thus leading them to run off and escape their plantations in hopes of getting away from their conditions and be free.

Many slaves in the movie were nothing more than exchange value. “Exchange- value, at first sight, presents itself as a quantitative relation, as the proportion in which values in use of one sort are exchanged for those of another sort” (Edles and Appelrouth 2015:76). In the movie Django’s wife was to be sold to him and Dr. Schultz for $12,000 because that was what Mr. Candie believed her to be

The Southern states had a great number of slaves, over 12 million slaves were brought to the colonies thousands of slaves were imported every year.The slave trade was a source of income in the South, at the time there were

Frederick Douglass' narrative reveals a lot about the work of the slaves. Some few slaves worked in the master's house, some more worked in the master's production huts around the farm, but most of them worked in the field under the watch of an overseer with a whip ready in hand. The slaves would be punished, sometimes very severely, if they weren't working early in the morning. They could also be punished if they didn't work fast enough or well enough. After a long day of work, they would have to go to their huts and do their own cooking and washing. They could only sleep a few hours a night after doing all the work they had to do. When they were finished with their work they would fall down on their beds and "sleep till they [were] summoned to the field by the driver's horn." (48) Looking at the slaves as property, the master wanted to use them as much as he could to get his money's value. He didn't think of them as human beings who had needs, but as machines

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.

To be a slave in the south back then was to suffer a deprivation of freedom so extreme as to be qualitatively distinct from all other forms of unfreedom. The master-slave relationship became violent to where slaves could not form any work or family relationship without the master approval. By law then the slaves could not make contracts, own property, or form legal partnership on his or her own. This does not mean that the master did not feed or support his slaves. “In the one, the end in view is the happiness of the youth; born to equal right with that governor, on whom the duty devolves of training the young to usefulness, in a station which he is afterwards to assume among freeman.(6) The end is the profit of the master, his security and the public safety; the subject, one doomed in his own person, and his posterity , to live without knowledge, and without the capacity to make anything his own, and to toil that another may reap the

Slaves would normally work from dusk till dawn, so they usually didn’t get a break for lunch. Some slaves worked inside, taking care of individuals. Some cooked, some slaves nursed, did laundry, etc. Some plantation owners allowed slaves to work for others and earn money. The owners would keep a portion of the money and sometimes let the slave keep it. This could be a way to buy your freedom.

The Slave States used their factories and plantations as reasons for owning slaves. The plantation owners were very greedy and slaves were very cheap and did absolutely did all the work for them. It was nearly free labor and it increased your social status as well. The more slaves you owned, the wealthier you looked and the more likable and desirable you are to those around you.

The daily life of a slave in North Carolina was incredibly difficult. Hard workers, especially those in the field, played from sunrise until sundown. Even small kids and the elderly were not exempt from these long work hours. Slaves were generally granted a day off on Sunday, and on infrequent holidays such as Christmas or the Fourth of July.

When being a slave, you would most likely work from when you are six, to whenever you die. For clothes, you would be given two coarse shirts, pair of linen trousers, one jacket, one pair of trousers for winter from negro cloth, pair of stockings and one pair of shoes as an adult. If you were a child, you would be given two coarse linen shirts per year. If you clothes failed not last as long as they should, you would go around naked until it was the next allowance-day. Slaves would have to work long and tiring jobs everyday. Most would either work on small or large plantations. When you are a slave, you would have to work from dawn to dark tending crops. After you finish your jobs during the daytime, at night, you would carry water, split wood, feed pigs, shuck corn and clean cotton. If you weren’t a slave working on the plantations, you were working in your masters home. You could be a seamstress, carpenter, blacksmith, cook or servant. Even though you were a slave, masters would still care if their crops were being taken care of. They would hire doctors just so that all of their work wouldn’t be stopped. Being a slave in the south would mean that you would never be free, even if you hoped for

The slave’s life depended on their owners. Most owners treated their slaves well by making sure they had decent food, clean houses, and warm clothes to wear. Other planters spent little time caring about these things. They were determining to get the most work possible from their slaves. Slaves worked from sunup to sundown, at least sixteen hours a day. They sometimes suffered whippings and other cruel punishments. Owners thought of them as valuable property, that way the owners wanted to keep their human property healthy and as productive as they can. Keeping slaves families together was very difficult to do because slaves were considered as