What was life like on a plantation in the south?
Life on Southern Plantations represented a stark contrast of the rich and the poor. Slaves were forced to work as field hands in a grueling labor system, supervised by an overseer and the strict rules of the plantation owners. However, only a small percentage of Southerners were actually wealthy plantation owners.
What was family life like for slaves?
A father might have one owner, his “wife” and children another. Some enslaved people lived in nuclear families with a mother, father, and children. In these cases each family member belonged to the same owner. Others lived in near-nuclear families in which the father had a different owner than the mother and children.
What conditions did the slaves live in?
Unsanitary conditions, inadequate nutrition and unrelenting hard labor made slaves highly susceptible to disease. Illnesses were generally not treated adequately, and slaves were often forced to work even when sick. The rice plantations were the most deadly.
Did slaves have beds to sleep in?
There were no beds given the slaves, unless one coarse blanket be considered such, and none but the men and women had these. This, however, is not considered a very great privation.
How did slaves raise babies?
Mothers were taken from their own children to nurse the offspring of their masters. And slave children were torn from mothers and brought into the house to be raised alongside the master’s sons and daughters.
How did slaves cope with their lives?
Enslaved people adopted a variety of mechanisms to cope with the degrading realities of life on the plantation. They resisted slavery through everyday acts, while also occasionally plotting larger-scale revolts.
What did slaves do on Sunday?
During their limited leisure hours, particularly on Sundays and holidays, slaves engaged in singing and dancing. Though slaves used a variety of musical instruments, they also engaged in the practice of “patting juba” or the clapping of hands in a highly complex and rhythmic fashion.