Working conditions for slaves were about as bad as can possibly be imagined. Slaves worked from dawn till dusk and sometimes even longer. Solomon Northrup describes his experience as a slave on his Louisiana plantation:

The hands are required to be in the cotton field as soon as it is light in the morning and with the exception of ten or fifteen minutes, which is given them at noon to swallow their allowance of cold bacon, they are not permitted a moment idle until it is too dark to see, and when the moon is full, they often times labor till the middle of the night (Northrup 15).

The slaves lived in constant fear of punishment while at work, and it was that fe

White southerners did not regard slaves as people, and thus did not treat them as such. Former slave Josiah Henson wrote an autobiography in which he explains the lack of rights afforded to slaves. He describes a scene in which his father is being hunted because he attacked the overseer who was trying to molest his mother. "The fact of the sacrilegious act of lifting a hand against the sacred temple of a white man's body...this was all it was necessary to establish. And the penalty followed: one hundred lashes on the bare back, and to have the right ear nailed to the whipping- post, and then severed from the body" (Henson 32). They eventually captured his father and inflicted this penalty. His father was shipped off and for a while his family lived in relative peace, until the owner of the plantation died, and they were forced to leave. Henson laments that:

These living conditions caused many to resort to immoral methods of survival, as Henderson relates:

When the family increased the children all slept together, both boys and girls, until one got married; then a part of another cabin was assigned to that one, but the rest would have to remain with their mother and father, as in childhood, unless they could get with some of their relatives or friends who had small families, or unless they were sold (Stroyer 14).

After an extremely difficult day of labor, the cruelty continued when the slaves returned to housing that could be described as "inadequate" at best. Jacob Stroyer, one of fifteen children, was born on a plantation in South Carolina in 1849. He relates the conditions that his family lived in:

Common as are slave- auctions in the southern states, and naturally as a slave may look forward to the time when he will be put upon the block, still the full misery of the event- - of the scenes which precede and succeed it- - is never understood till the actual experience comes. The first sad announcement that the sale is to be; the knowledge that all ties of the past are to be sundered; the frantic terror at the idea of being "sent south;" the almost certainty that one member of a family will be torn from another; the anxious scanning of purchasers' faces; the agony at parting, often forever, with husband, wife, child- - these must be seen and felt to be fully understood (35).

Henson's mother wept profusely and begged the man who purchased her to buy him as well, but he simply disregarded her and kicked her out of the way. This is a fine metaphor for the way that slaves and African-Americans were treated in the early 1800's. Slavery was a cruel institution, and the slaves were treated cruelly. The slaves were treated inhumanely. Perhaps Henson sums it up best with his reaction to the treatment of his mother at the slave trade: "This was one of my earliest observations of men; an experience which I only shared with thousands of my race,

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1940
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)