Slave Living Conditions

Many Scholars now use the term chattel slavery or also known as traditional slavery to refer to a type of slavery where a person belonged to another person. Slavery is a system that allows individuals to sell, buy, capture, and own other individuals as their own personal property. Slaves freedom to do what they wanted were taken from them, their control over their bodies were taken from them because they were considered a person’s “Property” to whoever owned them. They were forced to work and do as they are told or they would have to suffer severe and sometimes even fatal consequences and that impacted many types of relationships. ”Slavery is theft—theft of a life, theft of work, theft of any property or produce, theft even of the children a slave might have borne”(Kevin Bales, Understanding of Global Slavery). Slavery with all of its demeaning, oppressing of the black masses was a complicated force and a powerful presence when it came to numerous relationships. For example, masters and slaves, slaves and their families, masters wives and black women slaves, slaves and other slaves, and blacks and whites.

Most slaves lived in slave cabins with dirt floors. Slaves usually got real cheap clothing that was plain and dirty. Some slaves sewed different patches of cloth on their clothes to show their true colors. Some slaves were allowed to plant their own gardens and raise their own chickens to make their own food.

The economic, geographic, and social factors was what caused the growth of slavery to be encouraged in the southern colonies. It is believed this way because many slaves were used as if they were tools for others.

Situations became more intense for those slaves who actually reached the plantations over in the Americas. Many of the plantation owners had returned home to Europe, leaving their holdings (slaves and land) in America to be managed by overseers who were often unstable. Often times slave families were split up and they were not allowed to learn to read or write. African men, women, and children were forced to work with little to eat or drink. From today’s perspective this seemed very inhuman to treat another human being in such a manner. However, in between the 16th and 19th centuries the harsh treatment of slaves was accepted on the basis they were not considered ordinary human beings; they were if anything a sub race a less superior one. Slave labor provided some of the most sought after items in Atlantic and European trading exchange such as sugar, coffee, and cotton of the Caribbean; tobacco and rice of North America and lastly gold and sugar of Portuguese and Spanish South America. These commodities represented about a third of the value of European trade at the time.

How was the life of African American slaves in the south? The life of the African Americans was very hard. Slaves were used and tortured. These events were terrible or horrible. In the south, in 1860 there were about 400,000 slaves kept in households. Almost four million African Americans remained slavery. African Americans were living in bad places. Slaves extended their own culture, fellowship, and community. They joined Americans and Africans as an element to create a new culture (433). Communication and being together is important in their lives.

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

The process of Emancipation in the United States dismantled what was known as Chattel slavery, but didn’t initially prohibit the actions taken to work around this. African Americans were still struggling with a system of oppression that sought to keep them in other forms slavery. The south at this time was still known as a “landed aristocracy,” meaning that those who owned land held majority of the wealth. The idea was to redistribute confiscated lands to African Americans to grant them economic independence, since their labor was the foundation of all the generated profits. The Sherman Field Orders would grant this for the African American population, only to later be dismantled by state legislation. Generally, the Black community wanted

Imagine, if you will, rising earlier than the sun, eating a mere “snack”- lacking essentially all nutritional value - and trekking miles to toil in the unforgiving climate of the southern states, and laboring until the sun once again slipped under the horizon. Clad only in the rags your master provided (perhaps years ago), you begin walking in the dark the miles to your “home.” As described by the writers Jacob Stroyer and Josiah Henson, this “home” was actually a mere thatched roof, that you built with your own hands, held up by pathetic walls, over a dirt floor and you shared this tiny space with another family. Upon return to “home,” once again you eat the meager rations you were provided, and fall into bed

Most slaves’ living conditions were extremely poor, and they had no legal rights. They forced to work hard which led to their high mortality rate. Many slaves passed away in the first decade of living in Virginia. Slaves worked from sun up to sun down with fifteen minutes break for lunch. Owners tried to fed, give clothes and shelter for enslaves to keep them alive. Conversely, many planters tried to save by decreasing costs of salves’ food, clothing, and tools. Slaves went through punishments for minor mistakes all the time. A group of ten to fifteen slaves were sleeping at a cabin with a single room. The room’s floor covered with old rags and straw. There was no medical care for slaves except their traditional African

Life of a slave was not an easy one. Slaves were often chained when they weren’t working so they wouldn’t attempt to escape. Tobacco was a major crop in the upper South so tobacco farms solely relied on slaves to plant and harvest the crops; likewise for cotton plantations in the Deep South. Plantation owners would hire overseers to manage the slaves in the fields. Women, children, or

Chattel slavery, so named because people are treated as the personal property, chattels, of an owner and are bought and sold as commodities, is the original form of slavery. When taking these chattels across national borders it is referred to as Human Trafficking especially when these slaves provide sexual services.

Sophocles wanted to warn ancient greeks of the consequences of going against one's oracle. When writing Oedipus the King Sophocles portrayed our tragic hero Oedipus as a man who has Schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a long-term mental disorder of a type involving a breakdown in the relation between thought, emotion, and behavior, leading to faulty perception, inappropriate actions and feelings, withdrawal from reality and personal relationships into fantasy and delusion, and a sense of mental fragmentation. Oedipus was neglected as a child by his real parents which can lead to schizophrenia. This isn’t a theory, however; Oedipus portrays common characteristics of someone who has schizophrenia.

Slavery is a stain in the history of the United States that will always be particularly remembered for the cruelty it exhibited. Up until 1865 slaves were imported in shiploads and treated as if they were merely cattle. On the farms slaves were given no mercy and had to work long, arduous days for nothing. Additionally they were often subject to cruel overseers who would beat and whip them on a regular basis. As brutal and destructive as the institution of slavery was, slaves were not defenseless victims. Through their families, and religion, as well as more direct forms of resistance, Africans-Americans resisted the debilitating effects of slavery and created a vital culture supportive of human dignity.

Examination of the Slave Experience Most African Americans of the early to mid-nineteenth century experienced slavery on plantations similar to the experiences described by Frederick Douglass; the majority of slaves lived on units owned by planters who had twenty or more slaves. The planters and the white masters of these agrarian communities sought to ensure their personal safety and the profitability of their enterprises by using all the tactics-physical and psychological-at their command to make slaves obedient. Even Christianity was manipulated in a way that masters communicated to their slaves that God had commanded them to obey their masters. Hence, by word and deed whites tried to convince

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.