At the age of sixteen, enslaved boys and girls were considered full-fledged workers, tasked as farm laborers or forced into trades.
The enslaved population at Mount Vernon typically worked from the time the sun rose in the morning until it set in the evening, with about two hours off for meals in between. 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.
While some women attempted not to become mothers, and a minority were unable to reproduce, most women negotiated childbirth and raising children within the confines of the slave regime, and they took a lot of care in raising their daughters to survive enslavement as females.
Slaves were generally allowed a day off on Sunday, and on infrequent holidays such as Christmas or the Fourth of July. During their few hours of free time, most slaves performed their own personal work.
It included coerced sexual relations between enslaved men and women or girls, forced pregnancies of enslaved women, and favoring women or young girls who could produce a relatively large number of children.
Slaves were punished by whipping, shackling, hanging, beating, burning, mutilation, branding, rape, and imprisonment.
Many slaves suffered from dysentery, dropsy, fevers, and digestive and nervous diseases. Yaws, a non-venereal form of syphilis, was common, and there were regular epidemics, such as a cholera epidemic in Grenada in 1830.
During their limited leisure hours, particularly on Sundays and holidays, slaves engaged in singing and dancing. Though slaves used a variety of musical instruments, they also engaged in the practice of "patting juba" or the clapping of hands in a highly complex and rhythmic fashion.
The risk of sale in the international slave trade peaked between the ages of fifteen and twenty five, but the vulnerability of being sold began as early as age eight and certainly by the age of ten, when enslaved children could work competently on the fields.
some slaves wore their hair long and bushy on top and ...others cut it short, or combed and parted it neatly, or shaved it at the back or at the front, or trimmed it to a roll.
As a result of this high infant and childhood death rate, the average life expectancy of a slave at birth was just 21 or 22 years, compared to 40 to 43 years for antebellum whites. Compared to whites, relatively few slaves lived into old age.
Mothers were taken from their own children to nurse the offspring of their masters. And slave children were torn from mothers and brought into the house to be raised alongside the master's sons and daughters.
Marriage of enslaved people in the United States was generally not legal prior to the Civil War (1861–1865).
Let us say that the slave, He/she, began working in 1811 at age 11 and worked until 1861, giving a total of 50 years labor. For that time, the slave earned $0.80 per day, 6 days per week. This equals $4.80 per week, times 52 weeks per year, which equals pay of $249.60 per year.
Slaves worked from dawn to well after dark from Monday through Saturday. Sundays were the only day they had to rest during the week. The only holidays that were usually free of work were Christmas and the Fourth of July.
Wages varied across time and place but self-hire slaves could command between $100 a year (for unskilled labour in the early 19th century) to as much as $500 (for skilled work in the Lower South in the late 1850s).
During the fighting, in 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. This document freed all enslaved people in the Confederate states. In 1865 the Confederacy was defeated. Then slavery was abolished in the United States by the 13th Amendment to the Constitution.
When Union troops arrived in Galveston on June 19, 1865, Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger delivered General Order No. 3, which said: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.
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.
Slaves' inventions exploited by owners
Slave owners often took credit for their slaves' inventions. In one well-documented case, a black inventor named Ned invented an effective, innovative cotton scraper. His slave master, Oscar Stewart, attempted to patent the invention.
Slaves often found themselves rented out, used as prizes in lotteries, or as wagers in card games and horse races. 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.
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.
Slaves received an allotment of clothing by two chief methods. Some were given a quantity of cloth to construct garments themselves with the expectation was that the woman of the house would make clothing for her entire family. Others were given a handful of garments meant to last through the season.