Out of the average from 1776 through 1800, 38,000 slaves were given to the English, 20,000 to the French, 10,000 to the Portuguese, 4,000 to the Dutch, and 2,000 to the Danish.

     By 1540, about 10,000 slaves were being brought yearly from Africa. In the end about 15 million Africans were moved to the Americas between 1540 and 1850. Some ships from Africa carried over 200 more slaves then they were supposed to. Slaves were bought for $25 in Africa and sold for $150 in the Americas. Child-bearing started around the age of thirteen, and by twenty the women slaves would be expected to have four or five children. To encourage child-bearing some population owners promised women slaves their freedom after they had produced fifteen children.

     Slaves were used to do many things such as working in peoples homes and doing chores around their houses to field work on small farms for one person and they were also used to work on large plantations. Plantations were used to grow many crops such as tobacco, rice, sugar and cotton. The slaves were forced to tend the crops and when they were ripe and ready to harvest the slaves had to do most of, if not all, the work by hand. For the slave owners to get the most work from the slaves they would work them from sunrise to sunset.


     House slaves usually lived better than field slaves. They usually had better food and were sometimes given the family’s cast-off clothing. However, not all slaves-owners took this view, Harriet Jacobs reports that her mistress “ would station herself in the kitchen, and wait till it was dished, and then spit in all the kettles and pans” to make sure that the slaves did not eat the scraps off of them.

     Their living accommodation was also better than those of other slaves. In some cases the slaves were treated like the slave-owners children. They treated them with all respect after they were done with all of there work. That meant that friendship and affection for each other happened a lot. Even though it was illegal, some house slaves were educated by the family members that owned them. They thought that trusted house slaves who had provided good service over a long period of time were sometimes promised their freedom when their masters had died. However, there are many cases where this promise was not kept and the slaves still had to work as slaves for other people.


This story was told by William Wells Brown, a Fugitive Slave (1847)

     During the time that Mr. Cook was my boss, I was a house servant, a situation preferable to that of a field slave, as I was better fed, better clothes for me to wear, and not obliged to rise at the ringing of the bell, but about half an hour after. I have often laid and heard the crack of the whip, and the screams of the slave. My mother was a field slave, and one morning was ten or fifteen minutes behind the others in getting into the field. as soon as she reached the spot where they were at work, the boss commenced whipping her. She cried, “Oh! pray, Oh! pray, Oh! pray,” which are words generally spoken by the slaves while getting whipped.

Content By: Jacki, Tyler, and Spenser