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What slavery realy was
Since at least 1830, Americans have struggled with two conflicting images of slavery: one a romantic vision and the other an inhumane horror. Well before the Civil War, minstrel shows depicted stereotypes of good-natured slaves with a carefree plantation life. Composer Stephen Foster romanticized master-slave relationships as warm and caring in songs such as “Old Folks at Home” and “Massa’s in de Cold, Cold Ground.” When abolitionists depicted slavery, however, they focused on whips, slave catchers, separated families, squalor, disease, and near starvation. More effective than the radical William Lloyd Garrison, evangelicals like Theodore Dwight Weld and James G. Birney lectured to gain converts to the cause. Former slaves such as Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass enthralled audiences with their accounts. Douglass’ autobiography also gave readers an insider’s view of slavery. The most influential book in the abolitionist movement proved to be a novel, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Relating the horrors of slavery, the novel became a best seller and also a widely-produced play.
In reality, no single characterization of slavery can be accurate, because it varied from plantation to plantation and master to master. In 1860 nearly 4 million people were slaves. Only twenty-five percent of southern families owned slaves, and the great planter class made up less than 1 percent of the southern population. Typically, southern slaveowners were relatively small farmers who worked side by side with any slaves they owned. From the other perspective, more than half of the South’s slaves lived on plantations. Southern slaveowners did include a handful of free blacks.
The vast majority of slaves worked to raise a cash crop, typically cotton. However, since southern farmers and planters worked to be self-sufficient, slaves also raised corn, vegetables, hogs, and hay. Work was year-round, except for a short Christmas holiday. Masters typically hired labor for their most dangerous jobs, refusing to risk the lives of their expensive slaves. By the 1850s, a slave could produce $80-$120 in wealth for his master and cost $30-$50 to maintain. Slaves had to be constantly supervised. On large plantations they worked according to the task system (each slave given a specific amount of work to finish that day) or the gang system (slaves worked under a white overseer or black slave driver). Legally, slaves were chattel property, or personal possessions. Buying, trading, and selling of slaves through slave traders or at auctions was always one of the most visible aspects of the cruelties of slavery. Typically the flow of slaves was “down the river—the Mississippi” from older, declining tobacco states to the cotton states of the Deep South.
Slaves had no civil rights, and legally could not own property, make contracts, marry, leave a plantation without permission, or even learn how to read in most southern states. Slaves’ rights were simply to live with a minimum standard of food, clothing, and shelter. Even these depended on the master. Legally, an owner could not kill his slave, but if he died in the process of punishment that was [next page]