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The treatment of slaves in the United States varied widely depending on conditions, times and places. Treatment was generally characterized by brutality, degradation, and inhumanity. Whippings, executions, and rapes were commonplace. Exceptions existed to virtually every generalization, for instance, there were slaves that employed white workers, slave doctors that treated upper-class white patients, and slaves who rented-out their labor.[1]
Slaves were generally denied the opportunity to learn to read or write, in order to ensure that they did not form aspirations that could lead to escape or rebellion.
Medical care to slaves was generally provided by other slaves or by slaveholders' family members. Many slaves possessed medical skills needed to tend to each other, and used many folk remedies brought from Africa.
In some states, religious gatherings were prohibited, because it was feared that such meetings would facilitate communication and may lead to rebellion.
Slaves were punished by whipping, shackling, hanging, beating, burning, mutilation, branding, and imprisonment. Punishment was most often meted in response to disobedience or perceived infractions, but sometimes abuse was carried out simply to re-assert the dominance of the master or overseer over the slave.
Slavery in the United States involved wide-ranging rape and sexual abuse. Many slaves fought back against sexual attacks, and many died resisting. Others carried psychological and physical scars from the attacks. Sexual abuse of slaves was partially rooted in a patriarchal Southern culture which treated all women, black and white, as property or chattel. Racial purity was the driving force between Southern culture's strong prohibition of sexual relations between white women and black men, but ironically, the same culture encouraged sexual relations between white men and black women, which produced a large number of mixed-race (mulatto) offspring.
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In 1850, a publication provided guidance to slave owners on how to produce the "ideal slave":[2]
According to historians David Brion Davis and Eugene Genovese, who won major awards for their work on slavery, treatment of slaves was both harsh and inhumane. Whether laboring or walking about in public, people living as slaves were regulated by legally authorized violence. Davis makes the point that some aspects of plantation slavery took on a "welfare capitalist" similarity. He also writes:
"Yet we must never forget that these same 'welfare capitalist' plantations in the Deep South were essentially ruled by terror. Even the most kindly and humane masters knew that only the threat of violence could force gangs of field hands to work from dawn to dusk 'with the discipline,' as one contemporary observer put it, 'of a regular trained army.' Frequent public floggings reminded every slave of the penalty for inefficient labor, disorderly conduct, or refusal to accept the authority of a superior."[3]
Treatment of slaves tended to be harsher on large plantations, which were often managed by overseers and owned by absentee slaveholders, in contrast with small slave-owning families, where the closer relationship between the owners and slaves sometimes resulted in a more humane environment.[4]
After 1820, some slave owners, in response to the inability to import new slaves from Africa, improved the living conditions of their slaves in order to induce them to not run away.[5]
Some pro-slavery advocates asserted that many slaves were content with their situation. African-American abolitionist J. Sella Martin countered that the apparent contentment was merely a psychological reaction to the exceeding dehumanizing brutality that some slaves experienced, such as witnessing their spouses sold at auction, or seeing their daughters raped.[6]
Slaveholders were fearful that slaves would rebel or try to escape. Most slaveholders attempted to reduce the risk of rebellion by minimizing the exposure of slaves to the world outside their plantation, farm, or workplace. Depriving slaves of such exposure eliminated dreams and aspirations that might arise from awareness of the larger world, restricted access to information about other slaves and possible rebellions, and degraded the slaves by stifling their ability to exercise their mental faculties.[7]
Education of slaves was generally discouraged, because it was feared that knowledge - particularly the ability to read and write - would cause slaves to become rebellious.[8] In the mid nineteenth century, slaveholding states passed laws making education of slaves illegal. Punishments in Virginia in 1841 was whipping with 20 lashes to the slave, and a fine of 100 pounds to the teacher. Punishment in North Carolina in 1841 whipping with 39 lashes to the slave, and a fine of $250 to the teacher.[9] Education was not illegal in Kentucky, but was virtually nonexistent.[10]
In Missouri, some slaveholders educated their slaves, or permitted the slaves to educate themselves.[11]
In 1840, following the Stono Rebellion, Maryland legislated some laws that restricting working hours for slaves: no work was permitted on Sundays, and the hours of work per day was limited to 15 hours in the Summer, and 14 in the Winter. Charles Johnson asserts that these laws, in addition to apparent compassion, were motivated by a desire to pacify slaves and prevent future revolts.[12]
The quality and quantity of medical care received by slaves is not known with certainty: some historians conclude that the quality was equal to that of whites (because whites were acting to preserve the value of their property), others conclude that medical care was poor, and others conclude that care provided by slaveholders was neglectful, but that slaves often provided their own adequate treatment.[13]
According to Byrd, throughout the south, there was a dual system of medical care, that provided poorer care for blacks than whites.[14] The system also excluded blacks from formal medical training opportunities. During the era of slavery, a medical care system was established that put blacks primarily in charge of caring for other blacks, and this "health subsystem" would persist long after slavery was abolished.[15] Blacks took an active role in the health care of the black community, to the extent that Virginia passed a law in 1748 prohibiting blacks from advertising certain treatments.[16]
Treatment for illnesses usually was provided by fellow slaves or by slaveowners or their family - physicians were employed to treat slaves only rarely.[17] White and black women played a large role in caring for sick members of the household. Some slaves possessed medical skills, such herbal remedies and acting as midwives, and their skills were often employed to aid both blacks and whites.[18] The poor quality of treatments offered by the slaveholder contributed to the survival of African remedies and treatments in North America, as slaves treated each other.[19] In Missouri, slaveholders generally provided adequate health care to their slaves, partially out of humanitarian concerns, but also to keep the slaves productive, and partly to protect the owner's investment.[20]
White medical researchers performed medical experiments on slaves without the consent of the slaves, and frequently put slaves on display to illustrate medical conditions.[21]
In the early seventeenth century in some colonies, a slave could become free by converting to Christianity, but this method of obtaining freedom was eliminated in the mid-seventeenth century.[22]
In 1725, Virginia granted slaves the right to create a church, and this led to the establishment of the First Church of Colored Baptists.[23]
South Carolina law permitted law enforcement to break up any religious meeting where more than half the participants were black.[24]
It was common for masters to pay slaves small bonuses at Christmas, and some slave owners permitted their slaves to keep earnings and gambling profits. (One slave, Denmark Vesey, is known to have won a lottery and bought his freedom.)
Fogel argues that the material conditions of the lives of slaves compared favorably with those of free industrial workers. They were not good by modern standards, but he emphasized the hard lot of all workers, free or slave, during the first half of the 19th century. Fogel contended that over the course of his lifetime, the typical slave field hand received about 90% of the income he produced.[25] In a survey, 58% of historians and 42% of economists disagreed with Fogel's proposition that the material condition of slaves compared favorably with those of free industrial workers.[25]
Slaves were considered legal non-persons except if they committed crimes. An Alabama court asserted that slaves "are rational beings, they are capable of committing crimes; and in reference to acts which are crimes, are regarded as persons. Because they are slaves, they are incapable of performing civil acts, and, in reference to all such, they are things, not persons."[26]
Slaves were punished by whipping, shackling, hanging, beating, burning, mutilation, branding, and imprisonment. Punishment was most often meted in response to disobedience or perceived infractions, but sometimes abuse was carried out simply to re-assert the dominance of the master or overseer over the slave.[27]
Those who punished slaves also used weapons such as knives, guns, field tools, and objects found nearby. The whip was the most common instrument used against a slave. One slave said that, “The only punishment that I ever heard or knew of being administered slaves was whipping,” although he knew several that had been beaten to death for offenses such as sassing a white person, hitting another negro, fussing, or fighting in quarters.[28]
Slaves who worked and lived on plantations were the most frequently punished. Punishment could be administered by the plantation owner or master, his wife, children (white males), and most often by the overseer or driver.
Slave overseers were authorized to whip and punish slaves. One overseer told a visitor, "Some Negroes are determined never to let a white man whip them and will resist you, when you attempt it; of course you must kill them in that case."[29] A former slave describes witnessing females being whipped: “They usually screamed and prayed, though a few never made a sound.”[30] If the woman was pregnant, workers might dig a hole for her to rest her belly while being whipped. After many of the slaves were whipped, overseers might direct bursting the wounds and rubbing them with turpentine and red pepper. Another report was that the overseer took a brick, ground it into a powder, mixed it with lard and rubbed it all over the slave.[28]
A metal collar was put on a slave to remind him of his wrongdoings. Such collars were thick and heavy; they often had protruding spikes that made fieldwork difficult and prevented the slave from sleeping while lying down. Louis Cain, a former slave, describes his witness to another slave being punished, “One nigger run to the woods to be a jungle nigger, but massa cotched him with the dog and took a hot iron and brands him. Then he put a bell on him, in a wooden frame what slip over the shoulders and under the arms. He made that nigger wear the bell a year and took it off on Christmas for a present to him. It sho’ did make a good nigger out of him.”[28]
Slaves were punished for a variety of reasons, most of the time it was for working too slow, breaking a law such as running away, leaving the plantation without permission, or not following orders given to them. Myers and Massy describe the practices: “The punishment of deviant slaves was decentralized, based on plantations, and crafted so as not to impede their value as laborers.”[31] Whites often punished slaves in front of others to make an example. A man named Harding describes an incident where a woman assisted several men in a small rebellion, “The women he hoisted up by the thumbs, whipp’d and slashed her with knives before the other slaves till she died.”[32] Men and women were sometimes punished differently; according to the 1789 report of the Virginia Committee of the Privy Council, males were often shackled and women and girls were left freely to go about.[32]
Branding of slaves for identification purposes was common during the colonial era, but in the nineteenth century, branding use employed mostly as punishment.[33] Mutilation, such as castration or cutting off ears, was a relatively common punishment in the colonial era, and such punishments were still used as of 1830. Any kind of punishment was permitted for runaway slaves, and many bore the wounds of shotgun blasts or dog bites inflicted by capturers.[34]
In 1717, Maryland law provided that slaves where not entitled to jury trials for misdemeanors, and empowered county judges to impose punishments by whipping, up to 40 lashes.[35]
In 1729, Maryland passed a law permitting punishments for slaves that included hanging, decapitation, and severing the body into four quarters for display in public places.[36]
In 1740, South Carolina passed a law prohibiting cruelty to slaves, however, slaves could still be lawfully killed in some circumstances. The anti-cruelty law prohibited cutting out the tongue, putting out the eye, castration, scalding, burning, and cutting off limbs; but permitted whipping, beating, putting in irons, and imprisonment.[37]
By law, slave owners could be fined for not punishing recaptured runaway slaves. Slave codes authorized, indemnified or even required the use of violence, and were denounced by abolitionists for their brutality. Both slaves and free blacks were regulated by the Black Codes and had their movements monitored by slave patrols conscripted from the white population. The patrols were authorized to use summary punishment against escapees; in the process, they sometimes maimed or killed the escapees.
The historian Nell Irwin Painter and others have documented that Southern history went "across the color line." Contemporary accounts by Mary Chesnut and Fanny Kemble, both married in the planter class of the Deep South, as well as accounts by former slaves gathered under the Works Progress Administration (WPA), all attested to the abuse of women slaves by white men of the owning and overseer class.
The slave-owning colonies had laws governing the control and punishment of slaves, called slave codes.[38] South Carolina established its slave code in 1712, based on the 1688 English slave code employed in Barbados. The South Carolina slave code served as the model for other colonies in North America. In 1770, Georgia adopted the South Carolina slave code, and then Florida adopted the Georgia code.[39] The 1712 South Carolina slave code included provisions such as:[40]
The South Carolina slave code was revised in 1739 with the following amendments:[41]
The slave codes of the tobacco colonies (Delaware, Maryland, North Carolina, and Virginia) were modelled on the Virginia code, which was initially established in 1667.[42] The 1682 Virginia code included the following provisions:[43]
In 1811, Arthur William Hodge was the first slave owner executed for the murder of a slave in the British West Indies.[44] However, he was not, as some have claimed, the first white person to have been lawfully executed for the killing of a slave.[45] Records indicate at least two earlier incidents. On November 23, 1739, in Williamsburg, Virginia, two white men, Charles Quin and David White, were hanged for the murder of another white man's black slave. On April 21, 1775, the Fredericksburg newspaper, the Virginia Gazette reported that a white man, William Pitman, had been hanged for the murder of his own black slave.[46]
Laws made to punish the whites for punishing their slaves were often weakly enforced or could be easily avoided. In the case Smith v. Hancock, the defendant (before a white jury) justified punishing his slave because the slave was attending an unlawful meeting, discussing rebellion, refused to surrender, and resisted the arresting officer by force.[47]
Slavery in the United States encompassed wide-ranging rape and sexual abuse.[48] Many slaves fought back against sexual attacks, and many died resisting. Others carried psychological and physical scars from the attacks.[49]
Rape laws in the South embodied race-based double standards. Black men accused of rape in the Colonial period were often punished with castration, but the penalty increased to the death penalty in the antebellum period.[50] White men could rape female slaves without fear of punishment.[51]
Angela Davis contends that the systematic rape of female slaves is analogous to the concept of the Right of the first night. She also contends that rapes were a deliberate effort by slaveholders to extinguish any spirit of resistance in the female, and to reduce her to the lowest kind of animal.[52]
Sexual abuse of slaves was partially rooted in a patriarchal Southern culture which treated all women, black and white, as property or chattel.[53] Although the Southern code of honor put white women on a pedestal, treating them as dependent and submissive, black women were often consigned to a life of sexual exploitation.[54] Racial purity was the driving force between Southern culture's strong prohibition of sexual relations between white women and black men, but ironically, the same culture encouraged sexual relations between white men and black women, which produced a large number of mixed-race (mulatto) offspring.[55]
Children who resulted from such rapes were slaves as well, because they took the status of their mothers, unless freed by the slaveholder.
Slave breeding were those practices of slave ownership that aimed to influence the reproduction of slaves, in order to increase profit and wealth of slaveholders.[56] Slave breeding included coerced sexual relations between male and female slaves, promoting pregnancies of slaves, sexual relations between master and slave with the aim of producing slave children, and favoring female slaves who produced a relatively large number of children.[57]
The Nobel economist Robert Fogel prompted controversy by disagreeing that slave-breeding and sexual exploitation destroyed black families. He argues that the family was the basic unit of social organization under slavery, it was in the economic interest of slave owners to encourage the stability of slave families, and most of them did so. Most slave sales were either of whole families or of individuals at an age when it would have been normal for them to leave the family.[25] Eyewitness testimony from former slaves does not support Fogel's view. Frederick Douglass, who grew up as a slave in Maryland, reported the systematic separation of slave families and widespread rape of slave women to boost slave numbers.[58] In addition, court cases, such as that of Margaret Garner or Celia, a slave in 19th-century Missouri who killed her master when pregnant the third time by him, dealt with women slaves who had been sexually abused by masters.[59]
Slaves were predominantly male in the colonial era, but ratio of male-to-female slaves became more equal in later years, resulting in a slavery system that owned, controlled and sold entire families of slaves.[60]
Slaves were at constant risk of losing members of their families if their owners decided to sell members for profit, punishment, or to pay debts. A few slaves retaliated by murdering owners and overseers, burning barns, killing horses, or staging work slowdowns.[61]
In the early 1930s, members of the Federal Writers' Project interviewed former slaves, and also made recordings of the talks, the only such records made. In 2007, the interviews were remastered and reproduced on modern CDs and published in book form, in conjunction with the Library of Congress, Smithsonian Productions and a National Public Radio project. In the introduction to the oral history project called Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk About Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation, the editors wrote,
As masters applied their stamp to the domestic life of the slave quarter, slaves struggled to maintain the integrity of their families. Slaveholders had no legal obligation to respect the sanctity of the slave's marriage bed, and slave women— married or single — had no formal protection against their owners' sexual advances. ...Without legal protection and subject to the master's whim, the slave family was always at risk."[62]
The book includes examples of enslaved families torn apart when family members were sold out of state, as well as accounts of sexual violations of enslaved women by the men who held power over them.
Female slaves were stereotyped as lustful and promiscuous "Jezebels" who shamelessly tempted white owners into sexual relations. This stereotype of promiscuous slaves was partially motivated by a need to rationalize the large number rapes of female slaves by white males. This stereotype was reinforced by the fact that female slaves were forced to work partially clothed in the hot climate, and their clothes were removed during slave auctions.[63]
Many female slaves, called "fancy maids", were sold into concubinage or prostitution, which was termed the "fancy trade".[64] Concubine slaves were the only class of slaves that sold for higher prices that skilled male slaves.[65]
The offspring of the rapes of slave by whites were mixed-race slaves whose appearance was characterized as mulatto. The offspring of mulattos and black slaves were also generally characterized as mulatto. The number of mixed-race slaves increased dramatically in the early nineteenth century: in 1850 there were 245,000 mulattos, but in 1860 there were 411,000 out of a total slave population of 3,900,000.[66]
If free, some of the mulattos would have been legally accepted as white under contemporary state laws, because they had more than half to seven-eighths white ancestry.
The most famous example of such mostly white slaves were the alleged children of President Thomas Jefferson by his mixed-race slave Sally Hemings, who was three-quarters white by ancestry. Europeans who visited Virginia in the 18th century commented on the numerous mixed-race slaves.
As in President Thomas Jefferson's household, the presence of lighter-skinned slaves as household servants was not merely an issue of skin color. Sometimes planters used mixed-race slaves as house servants or favored artisans because they were their own children or other relatives. Several of Jefferson's household slaves were the grown children of his father-in-law John Wayles and the enslaved woman Betty Hemings, who were brought to the marriage by Jefferson's wife. In turn, the widower Jefferson had a long relationship with Wayle's and Betty's daughter Sally Hemings. She was much younger than Jefferson, an enslaved woman who was mostly of white ancestry and half-sister to his late wife, a legitimate daughter of Wayles. The Hemings children grew up to be closely involved in Jefferson's household staff activities; one became his chef. Two sons trained as carpenters. Three of his four surviving mixed-race children by Sally Hemings passed into white society as adults.[67]
Planters who had mixed-race children sometimes arranged for their education, even in schools in the North, or as apprentices in crafts. Others settled property on them. These were all ways to pass on social capital to them. Some fathers freed the children and their mothers. While fewer in number than in the Upper South, free blacks in the Deep South were more often mixed-race children of planters and were sometimes the recipients of transfers of property and social capital. For instance, Wilberforce University, founded by Methodist and African Methodist Episcopal (AME) representatives in Ohio in 1856 for the education of African-American youth, was in its first years largely supported by wealthy southern planters. They paid for the education of their mixed-race children. When the American Civil War broke out, the majority of the school's 200 students were mixed race and from such wealthy Southern families.[68] The college closed for a couple of years before the AME Church bought it and began to operate it.
In many households, treatment of slaves varied with the slave's skin color. Darker-skinned slaves worked in the fields, while lighter-skinned house servants (sometimes the child of the master or son of the house) had comparatively better clothing, food and housing.[61]