African American Slavery In The 1800's

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A plantation is a large landholding devoted to a cash crop such as cotton or tobacco. During the 1700s, a slave was normally a man in his twenties, recently coming from Africa or the Caribbean, they worked on these plantations, or isolated small farms. Few of these slaves, from different regions of Africa, spoke the same language. Slave women had limited children because of severe malnutrition. By 1830, women were just as likely to be slaves as male. Slaves who worked on plantations were able to find mates more easily than a slave on a scattered farm. The work of the typical slave in 1850 was on a large farm or plantation with at least ten fellow bond servants. Around three-quarters of all slaves that year had masters with ten or more slaves. Large cotton and sugar plantations …show more content…
Never would a plantation lack tasks for slaves of either gender, and a slave's day would span from dawn to dusk. Slaves would tote cotton bales to the ginhouse, gather wood for supper fires, and fed the mules when darkness made fieldwork impossible. They all had to sleep in log cabins on wooden planks. Even though all antebellum Americans worked long hours, no one experienced the harsh discipline along with the long hours that slave field hands endured. American slavery encouraged repulsive brutality. Despite the systems brutality, some slaves advanced, and even though it wasn’t to freedom, it was to semiskilled or skilled indoor work. Masters thought of slaves as promiscuous and flattered themselves into thinking they held slave marriages together. The keenest challenge to the slave family came not from the slaves but from slavery. There was nothing to protect slave families. Even though some slaveholders were reluctant to break apart slave marriages by sale, economic hardships might force their hand. The buying and selling of slaves disrupted attempts to create a stable family