What kind of jobs did slaves do

Many slaves were engaged in construction of roads and railroads. Most slave labor, however, was used in planting, cultivating, and harvesting cotton, hemp, rice, tobacco, or sugar cane. On a typical plantation, slaves worked ten or more hours a day, "from day clean to first dark," six days a week, with only the Sabbath off. At planting or harvesting time, planters required slaves to stay in the fields 15 or 16 hours a day.

When they were not raising a cash crop, slaves grew other crops, such as corn or potatoes; cared for livestock; and cleared fields, cut wood, repaired buildings and fences. On cotton, sugar, and tobacco plantations, slaves worked together in gangs under the supervision of a supervisor or a driver. 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. Bibliography: Pogue, Dennis J. Podcast Mount Vernon Everywhere! Back to Main menu Center for Digital History.

Metro Area. It also ended Haiti's dominance of world sugar production. Cuba assumed this position during the 19th century, and even after slavery was abolished there in , sugar remained the foundation of its economy and its primary export commodity throughout the 20th century. Sugar was also produced by slave labor in the other Caribbean islands as well as in Louisiana in the United States.

During the colonial period in the United States, tobacco was the dominant slave-produced commodity. Concentrated in Virginia and Maryland, tobacco plantations utilized the largest percentage of enslaved Africans imported into the United States prior to the American Revolution. The American Revolution cost Virginia and Maryland their principal European tobacco markets, and for a brief period of time after the Revolution, the future of slavery in the United States was in jeopardy. Most of the northern states abolished it, and even Virginia debated abolition in the Virginia Assembly.

The invention of the cotton gin in gave slavery a new life in the United States. Between and , slave-produced cotton expanded from South Carolina and Georgia to newly colonized lands west of the Mississippi. This shift of the slave economy from the upper South Virginia and Maryland to the lower South was accompanied by a comparable shift of the enslaved African population to the lower South and West.

After the abolition of the slave trade in , the principal source of the expansion of slavery into the lower South was the domestic slave trade from the upper South. By , 1. The vast majority of enslaved Africans employed in plantation agriculture were field hands. Even on plantations, however, they worked in other capacities. Some were domestics and worked as butlers, waiters, maids, seamstresses, and launderers. Others were assigned as carriage drivers, hostlers, and stable boys.

Artisans—carpenters, stonemasons, blacksmiths, millers, coopers, spinners, and weavers—were also employed as part of plantation labor forces. Enslaved Africans also worked in urban areas. Upward of ten percent of the enslaved African population in the United States lived in cities. In the southern cities they totaled approximately a third of the population.

The range of slave occupations in cities was vast. Domestic servants dominated, but there were carpenters, fishermen, coopers, draymen, sailors, masons, bricklayers, blacksmiths, bakers, tailors, peddlers, painters, and porters.

Although most worked directly for their owners, others were hired out to work as skilled laborers on plantations, on public works projects, and in industrial enterprises. A small percentage hired themselves out and paid their owners a percentage of their earnings. Each plantation economy was part of a larger national and international political economy.

The cotton plantation economy, for instance, is generally seen as part of the regional economy of the American South. By the s, "cotton was king" indeed in the South.