Did Slaves have to do everything for the whites or did they just work for them?
Answers
Answer:
As soon as Europeans began to settle in America, in the early 16th century, they imported enslaved Africans to work for them. As European settlement grew, so did the demand for enslaved people. Over the next 300 years more than 11 million enslaved people were transported across the Atlantic from Africa to America and the West Indies, and Britain led this trade from the mid-17th century onwards. Ports such as Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow sent out many slaving ships each year, bringing great prosperity to their owners. Many other cities also grew rich on the profits of industries which depended on slave-produced materials such as cotton, sugar and tobacco.
Answer:
In the early 19th century, most enslaved men and women worked on large agricultural plantations as house servants or field hands.
Life for enslaved men and women was brutal; they were subject to repression, harsh punishments, and strict racial policing.
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.
Enslaved men and women created their own unique religious culture in the US South, combining elements of Christianity and West African traditions and spiritual beliefs.
Life on the plantation
In the early 19th century, most enslaved people in the US South performed primarily agricultural work. By 1850, only 400,000 enslaved people lived in urban areas—where many engaged in skilled labor such as carpentry, blacksmithing, and pottery. Almost three million worked on farms and plantations. Because most of the agricultural output of the South was produced on large plantations, more than half of all enslaved men and women lived on plantations that had more than 20 enslaved laborers; about a quarter lived on plantations that had more than 50.^1
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