What Is The Role Of Slavery In The 19th Century

In the 19th Century slaves in the South were treated as property, worked to almost the brink of death, and mentally and physically abused by their masters. The life of a slave on large plantations was daily physical labor from sun up to sun down, six days a week. Cultivation of cotton was done year round, there wasn’t an off season. Not all slaves were crop workers, some dug ditches, built houses, worked as house servants, or any other form of labor their owner saw fit. At times slaves were outsourced to other plantations to work, some made enough money to purchase their freedom. Planters often thought of slaves as children requiring constant care and supervision. Slaves were a form of capital, they were the tools of production for a booming economy.
Many slaves married and had children and they didn’t want their family unit to be broken up. One-third of the slaves being sold in the South were court-ordered sheriff’s actions to payback the planters debts. Then the slaves began to organize and resist slavery. In 1811 hundreds of slave in Louisiana marched through New Orleans, with guns, waving flags, and beating drums. It took 300 soldiers of the U.S. Army to stop their actions. Nat Turner led a bloody rebellion, in which 60 whites were killed in Virginia in 1831. Some also escaped their bondage with the help of the Underground Railroad. An informal network of sympathetic free blacks who helped fugitives from the South escape to the North. Approximately 130,000 slaves used the Underground Railroad for their freedom. The married slaves were less likely to run away from families, so they sabotaged farm equipment, worked slowly and inefficiently, but one of the extreme actions of their discontentment was to poison the entire plantation owners’