Both were forced to perform grueling labor, subjected to mental and physical degradation, and denied their most basic rights. Enslaved men and women were beaten mercilessly, separated from loved ones arbitrarily, and, regardless of sex, treated as property in the eyes of the law.
Life on the fields meant working sunup to sundown six days a week and having food sometimes not suitable for an animal to eat. Plantation slaves lived in small shacks with a dirt floor and little or no furniture. Life on large plantations with a cruel overseer was oftentimes the worst.
Enslaved people were regarded and treated as property with little to no rights. In many colonies, enslaved people could not testify in a court of law, own guns, gather in large groups, or go out at night.
Whipping, a common form of slave punishment, demanded the removal of clothing. For the female slave, this generally meant disrobing down to the waist. Although her state of half dress allowed the woman some modesty, it also exposed her naked breasts to all eyes.
Servants worldwide
The hard and backbreaking work – many hours and every day – the enslaved laborers had in common with servants in large parts of the world in the 1600s and 1700s. It was a life characterized by illness and infant mortality. But the enslavement applied to all aspects of his or her life.
Women could be honoured for being priestesses or family members and had some citizen rights. Slaves, by contrast, had no legal or social standing at all and could be treated as beasts of burden by their masters.
Basic garment of female slaves consisted of a one-piece frock or slip of coarse "Negro Cloth." Cotton dresses, sunbonnets, and undergarments were made from handwoven cloth for summer and winter. Annual clothing distributions included brogan shoes, palmetto hats, turbans, and handkerchiefs.
Slaves were punished for not working fast enough, for being late getting to the fields, for defying authority, for running away, and for a number of other reasons. The punishments took many forms, including whippings, torture, mutilation, imprisonment, and being sold away from the plantation.
Slave children received harsh punishments, not dissimilar from those meted out to adults. They might be whipped or even required to swallow worms they failed to pick off of cotton or tobacco plants. During adolescence, a majority of slave youth were sold or hired away.
Thousands of slaves fled bondage each year in the decades before the Civil War. The most frequent calculation is that around one thousand per year actually escaped. Some runaways sought a brief respite from slavery or simply wanted to reach family and friends.
The ancient Roman slaves who had the hardest lives were those who were put to work in the mines. They had to spend long hours underground in hot, cramped conditions. The mines were also unsafe and often slaves were killed in accidents.
Weekly food rations -- usually corn meal, lard, some meat, molasses, peas, greens, and flour -- were distributed every Saturday. Vegetable patches or gardens, if permitted by the owner, supplied fresh produce to add to the rations. Morning meals were prepared and consumed at daybreak in the slaves' cabins.
Punishment was often meted out in response to disobedience or perceived infractions, but sometimes abuse was performed to re-assert the dominance of the enslaver (or overseer) over the enslaved person.
Music, storytelling, and religion provided an emotional outlet and carried on traditions—some from Africa and others forged in years of enslavement. Some people spent their free time visiting other farms or plantations where their spouses or family members lived.
Slaves, especially those in the field, worked from sunrise until sunset. Even small children and the elderly were not exempt from these long work hours. Slaves were generally allowed a day off on Sunday, and on infrequent holidays such as Christmas or the Fourth of July.
The average lifespan of enslaved Africans who worked on colonial sugar and rice plantations was seven years. Extreme physical demands relied on equally extreme instruments of torture to ensure control over enslaved peoples and to protect plantation profits.
Between the ages of seven and twelve, boys and girls were put to work in intensive field work. Older or physically handicapped slaves were put to work in cloth houses, spinning cotton, weaving cloth, and making clothes.
During the winter, slaves toiled for around eight hours each day, while in the summer the workday might have been as long as fourteen hours.
Demotion. A common punishment was demoting an enslaved person to a less desirable work assignment, such as sending a house slave or craftsman to work in the fields.
Separation from family and friends was probably the greatest fear a black person in slavery faced. When a master died, his slaves were often sold for the benefit of his heirs.
The whip that was used to do such damage to the slaves was called a “cat-of-nine tails”. It was a whip that was woven and flowed into nine separate pieces. Each piece had a knot in the middle, and broken glass, and nails at the very end.
For the most part, they were housed in the same lodgings as their owners, usually in an attic or back room. When households were too small to accommodate all its enslaved laborers, and the proprietor was wealthy enough, a separate building for the more senior servants -- cooks, drivers, etc.
“A lot of slave babies died during slavery because they weren't breast-fed. They were fed concoctions of dirty water and cows milk,” she said. Meanwhile, those children's mothers were giving white children their milk. And women reported that oral histories have been reinforced by modern technology.
The history and culture of black hair dates back to the 1400s, when the first documented slave trade occurred. Slaves wore elaborate hairstyles, but were soon forced to shave and cut off their hair, stripping them of the last piece of their identity as a way to control them.
Plaits, braids and cornrows were the most convenient hairstyles to keep their hair neat and maintained for a week. Enslaved people who worked indoors were forced to wear their hair in one of those styles or a style similar to that of their slaveowner if they did not cover their hair with a scarf, kerchief or wig.