Looking at slavery from the side of the slave, the conditions varied extremely; in gen eral the work was lighter and the relations with the master more humane in the border slave States where farming was more diversified. The great cotton, rice and sugar plantations of the Far South made heavier demands upon the slave; and the plantations were often managed by hired overseers. The conditions varied also according to the character, intelligence and temper of the masters; easy-going, kind hearted, genuinely religious masters and mis tresses often felt a strong personal responsi bility for their slaves; but it was part of the system of slavery that passionate, coarse and overbearing men and women might own slaves and frequently treated them with harshness, severity or extreme cruelty.
The condition of the slave varied also ac cording to his employment. Most of them were field hands, engaged in the rudest and most toilsome labor; but some were employed as roustabouts on the river steamers, as long shoremen, and others as skilled carpenters, blacksmiths, masons, plasterers and the like. A much greater number were busy as house hold servants, there being practically no other domestic service obtainable in the South. People, therefore, who needed such services and owned no slave hired one — almost always the handsomest, most intelligent and most promising slaves were used for household service, and it was a highly prized privilege, bringing better food, abundance of cast-off clothing and personal relations with the white people.
The field slaves worked long hours, com monly from sunrise to sunset, and were kept up to their work by white overseers, and on large plantations also by negro slave drivers armed with the whip. Men and women and half-grown boys and girls were engaged in this field labor. Their houses were cabins in the negro quarters, usually small, dark and dirty, but often as good as the ordinary house of the poor white. The clothing of the field hand was rough, coarse and scanty. Thrifty planters esti mated that it cost about $15 a year, on an average, to feed and clothe a slave.
Most adult slaves were married, but family relations were so disturbed by sale and a feel ing of irresponsibility that such relations were very changeable. The slaves usually had Sun day free and a few days of jollification at Christmas; in many churches negroes attended the same services and were received as mem bers. Many communities had their own churches with a rude and boisterous worship, conducted by slave preachers.
One of the incidents or accompaniments of slavery much in the minds of people at that time was sale. Negroes who, in the colonial days, could be bought as low as $50, by 1830 were worth $500; and by 1860 prime cotton hands were quoted as high as $1,500. The South, in 1860, valued its slave property at about $2,000,000,000. Of course this high value de pended upon the opportunity to market surplus slaves and to buy hands as needed; hence, a lively system of picking up slaves at private sale, gathering them into coffles or gangs and shipping them south by land or river, there to be sold out again. Though the slave trader was universally despised by the white people, the kindest master might get into debt and have to sell his slaves, or his death might cause his property to be divided. Auction sales were very frequent and abounded in pathetic incidents of the division of families and the sale of infants away from their mothers.
Another frequent incident was escape.
Slaves were always running away and taking refuge in swamps or forests; many of them returned, took their flogging and went to work again; many others became fugitives, and made their way to the Northern States; and thou sands of them remained there or passed on farther north to Canada. These fugitives were commonly the most determined and ablest of their race and by stealing themselves they de preciated slave property, especially in the bor der States.
A third striking incident of slavery was manumission,— from early Colonial days slaves were set free by indulgent masters during their life or by their wills; and the free negroes in the South in 1860 were about one-sixteenth of the whole number. The process of setting slaves free was commonly hedged about by two restrictions: (1) The master must give bonds that the freedman should not become a public charge; (2) in some States he was obliged to remove him from the Commonwealth in which he was set free.
A fourth incident was insurrection. Beside several risings in Colonial days, of which the New York Slave Plot of 1741 is the best known, there were three insurrections or attempted in surrections in the 19th century: the Gabriel insurrection in Virginia (1800); the Denmark Vesey in Charleston (1822) ; and the Nat Turner rising in Virginia in 1831, in which 70 white people were massacred. This was the last of such movements; even during the Civil War there was no slave rising in the South, but the fear of it was a constant motive in the minds of the Southern people.