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Life

AuctionBy 1860, eighty-eight percent of slave owners in America owned at least twenty slaves. But if a slave owner had a large amount of land then they would own more than a hundred slaves. According to people who studied slavery, over a four-year period of time, thirty percent of the slave population died in the United States. The slaves in America would work from sunrise to sunset, but around harvest time, when they had to gather the crops, they would have to work an eighteen-hour shift. Women, even if they were pregnant, had to work the same amount of hours. The pregnant women had to work no matter what their condition, until their baby was to be born. After they had their child they were only allowed to stay on bed rest and recover for a month. When they finally recovered and prepared to work again, they were expected to carry their child on their backs as they worked out in the field. When the child became at least five years old it was time for them to begin working on the plantation.

AuctionMasters wanted their slaves to become Christians because it made them easy to control. The masters would tell the slaves something and say it was the word of god, and they’d believe him because they could not read the bible. The masters were scared that the slaves would use become too smart if they knew how to read. That is why the masters did not want their slaves to learn how to read, and there were laws against it. The slaves were also not aloud to practice their African religious rituals. The masters also thought that the drums would verify some type of message as a signal for a slaves uprising.


SittingSlaves were not only encouraged to have a large amount of children, but they were encouraged to marry. They figured that if male slaves were married then it would be less likely for them to run away. Some of those males did not want to be married to a woman who worked under the same owner because they did not like seeing their wives beaten and mistreated. They did not feel as though it was right for the slave owners to beat and mistreat their wives while they witnessed it. Thirty-two percent of marriages were from slavery. In some cases slaves were even treated as a slave owner’s child. Close bonds of affection and friendships were most likely to happen when the slaves were treated as the slaver owner’s child. The women in the family sometimes educated slaves even though it was illegal to do so when masters died, the house slaves that were trusted were promised freedom, but that promise was not always kept. The slaves that worked in the house had life better than the slaves that had to work out in the fields. The house slaves sometimes had access to better food and would occasionally receive hand-me downs from the family whom they were working for. Some slave owners were not so nice; they would wait until dinner was over and then spit in the kettles and pans so that they could make sure that the slaves would not eat the leftovers.

The rate for slaves dying is very high. Plantation owners would try to do and say what they could to encourage the slaves to have children so that when a slave passed away there was always someone to replace them. The slave owners would make a promise to the women that if they had the children like they were asked, they would be free after they had fifteen children. By the time a female got to the age of twenty they were suppose to have four to five children. The women were supposed to start having their children at the age of thirteen, and some of the younger women were announced for sale as “good breeding stock”.