Mistreatment of Woman

Women during slavery had to take care of their children and had to face punishment. They also lived with the threat of being sexually abused or raped by their owners. Among the entire punishments woman faced during slavery, whippings were the most common. The wips were made of plaited cow skin. 

Woman would run away trying to protest whippings or also to escape from being mistreated.  Their job wasn’t different from the men. They both did equally difficult work; woman worked in the fields with the men. However pregnant women and nursing mothers were given lighter work called “trash gang”, which consisted of pregnant, nursing and elderly women.  Woman that will confront their masters were punished severely if not by death their hand would be amputated. They were hung from trees and burnt with fire as they swing them.  A form of domestic punishment women faced was to have the domestics kneel with their bare knees on pebbles and work.  They lived their lives threatened to being rape, the mistreatment from the planters were sick mentality and showed immense hatred towards the blacks. The females slave misery continued for a long time, with no hopes of ever ending.

http://scholar.library.miami.edu/slaves/womens_resistance/individual_essays/harmony.html

There were laws in slavery?

Well, yea slaves had to follow laws that their masters created. Slavery throughout the South had to lived under a set of laws called the Slave Codes. The basic idea of the Slave Codes was to basically let slaves know that they were considered property, not people. Slaves were not allow to go against the whites, make contracts, leave the plantation without permission or hit a white person even if it was for self defense, buy and sell things, gather with their people and visit the homes of slave owners or free blacks. They had no social life and weren’t given no type of freedom it was nothing but work, work and more hard work.. Not like today, back in the day there was no such thing as murder in slavery, or rape of a woman, it was just considered trespassing.

            The laws became even tighter if there were rumors of slave revolt.  Patrols were set up to protect the Slave codes. It searched for anything that can lead to insurrection. If insurrection occurs or not, whites will form committees that will torture and kill the blacks. The blacks had to follow the slave codes and most of them did to prevent any type of mistreatment.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2956.html : Includes information about Slave codes

Problems that slaves had to face..

Slaves weren’t living how we are living now, and many of us don’t really appreciate what we have, if we compared our lives to theirs maybe we can actually see the difference. They lived in crude quarters that would leave them vulnerable to bad weather and disease. They had a small amount of clothing and  had to work as domestics in order to get some clothing from their masters. Heat and humidity caused a lot of health problems for several slave workers. Their health was worst than their owners and it was mostly because of inadequate nutrition, and hard labor leading to diseases. They had no medical support and illnesses weren’t treated the right way. 

             In rice plantations, slaves had to stand in water causing malaria. Because of this children began dying. Not only did they have to deal with hard work , diseases and illness but they had to live under thee threat of sale. Slaves were sold as if they were a piece of clothing, or animals. They were sold as a form of punishment, Families were separated and were scattered in different places. However even families were to find each other, they still had to live with the taught that at any time their owners can decide to sale them. Live was just not easy for these slaves…

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2956.html: How they lived that cause illnesses and diseases 

Role of Slavery in America..

During the decades before the civil war started, the cotton that slaves used accounted for half the value of all United States exports, and it provide all the cotton used in the northern textile industry and about 70 percent of the cotton was also used in British Mills.  However the slave south failed to establish commercial and financial or manufacturing companies.

Learning about slavery I was able to find out that there were some famous slaveholders,

Some famous slaveholders that you might have heard have are Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington as well as Benjamin Frankly and Jonathan Edwards.  Slavery is basically treated as an important aspect of history, including the African American history. Even though slavery wasn’t such a good historical event that occurred in the United States it did play an important role for our nation. It played a crucial role in the making of the modern world, in other words it helped in the settlement and development of the New World. Also, in the history of the United Stated, it existed in all English mainland colonies. The debate over slavery dominated the American politics and it lead to an important event of our American history the Civil War. The war that helped achieve the independence of certain countries.

http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/modules/slavery/index.cfm : Digital History/ Learning About Slavery and Its Background.

Slavery.. No freedom...No education. only WORK.

Around the 1600's Africans began to be shipped to different locations as slaves. An estimation 30-60 millions African men, woman, and children were taken away from their African homelands and brought here to the United States.  Slaves were put to do a lot of the hard work and overruled by their owners. They were treated like garbage and were given no respect. They were sent to American colonies during the 1600's however there were more slaves in the South because of its several large plantations. Yea you might be wondering why the North didn’t really need slaves, well it was because they didn’t have as many farms as the South did.

In the 1800’s plantations slaves had a whole different name, which was field hands.  Their jobs were much longer than other slaves; they had to pick cotton and plants.  From sunrise to sunset they spent hours working. Besides working in plantations, some slaves worked in factories while others were construction workers on canals and railroads. Slaves were creative people, they weren’t able to receive a good education but they were able to increase their craft working skills, learn how to work riverboats, etc.  As I said blacks weren’t given any type of education, the white owners didn’t want them to learn how to read or write because they believed that it might help them or encourage them to run away.  I believe that it wasn't fair for slaves, they worked hard and they deserved to at least have something to entertain them during their free time. Life back was just so unfair, plantation owners were just greedy and selfish people. 

http://library.thinkquest.org/J0112391/slavery.htm