LIFE ON A SLAVE PLANTATION

A ‘plantation’ is a large farm concentrating on growing a single main cash crop – for sale in the European markets at great profit. The main cash crops grown were: Tobacco Cotton Sugar Cane

PLAN OF A TYPICAL PLANTATION SLAVE HUTS OWNER’S HOUSE

WORK ON A SUGAR PLANTATION Sugar Cane Plantation Owner Field Hands

Breaking New Ground

Slaves planting a cane cuttings and hoeing squares of earth begin another day of work. They were summoned to the fields before dawn by the ringing of a bell or a blast on a conch-shell.

White overseers [managers] – with whips – supervise field slaves.

As the crusher squeezes the juice out of the bundles of cane, the mangled stalks are ejected from the mill and used to stoke fires at the boiling house and distillery.

Slaves ladle steaming juices from vat to vat to clear it of the scum which is carried away in a brick channel. A gutter leads the boiling liquid into cooling-trays beneath the open windows.

The sugar-making completed, slaves set to work producing rum at the distillery. Among other tasks, they keep the fires under the stills well stoked and remove barrels of liquor.

Inside the distillery, skilled slaves sample the spirit to see if it is strong enough

Barrels of sugar and rum, brought in carts from the remote plantation to the nearest beach, are rolled into dinghies and rowed out to lighters moored in the shallow water which take them to the nearest port for shipment to Europe.

PUNISHMENTS!

SLAVERY WAS BASED ON USE OF VIOLENCE. This crude drawing of 1791, based on fact, records the punishment of a slave who was unable to work because he was too ill to get up. He was ducked in a vat of boiling sugar juice and severely burned.

BEATINGS A 1796 record of an incident in which a female was given 200 lashes.

Stocks were often used to punish drunken slaves Stocks were often used to punish drunken slaves. Here is shown an unusual bed-stocks. THE STOCKS Here is shown an especially cruel example of a stocks which allows no movement and no rest..

Neck Rings and muzzles

The Treadmill Whipping Exhaustion Head Shaved

Executions

RUNAWAYS!

The most effective way of dealing with runaways was to send out bloodhounds to run the slaves down.

For slaves, the only real alternative to slavery was to run away, either to the ’free’ states of the North or to a precarious life in the swamps and woodlands.

MIGRATION AWAY FROM THE SLAVE STATES Runaway slaves would try to make their way to the industrial cities of the the northern States, or, westwards to California.