I'm Lantai, and today I'm going to uncover the truth about the life of black slaves in 19th-century America. It is believed that the living conditions of black slaves in the United States in the 19th century were very good, even better than in other countries of the same period, and slave owners regularly checked their bodies.
However, this claim raises some questions. Some people think that this is simply nonsense, and if the living conditions of black slaves in the United States in the 19th century were really so good, why did they still help the North during the Civil War?
First of all, we must admit that the living conditions of black slaves in the United States in the 19th century were indeed better than we imagined. Even some blacks who fled from the South to the North, while criticizing the cruelty of the slavery system in the South, admitted that the slaves in the South could eat about 7 per week2 pounds of meat, although most of them are cheap chicken and fish.
Frederick Douglass was a 19th-century black writer, and his "Autobiography of an American Black Slave" has been published by a domestic publishing house, making it a must-read book for those who know the history of black slavery in the United States.
He was a black man who fled from the South to the North, so his book was full of criticism and bashing of Southern slave owners. According to U.S. historical records, in 1898, the average daily protein intake of African-Americans in the Philadelphia area was only 15% lower than that of Chinese in 2013, and data from the College for Colored Youth showed that the average daily protein intake of students in the school was even higher than that of China in 2013.
But this is only one aspect of the life of black slaves in the United States, and the other side is that they are not actually human beings in the legal sense, but only the property of slave owners, no different from animals such as cows, horses, pigs, etc.
Although some black Americans eat well, their lives are extremely miserable.
The 19th-century American slaves in the film lived in heavy labor, working in the fields from morning to night, doing heavy work such as planting, managing, and harvesting cotton, sugar cane, rice, tobacco, and so on.
Whether it is plowing the land, raising the field, cutting down trees, mopping wood, or hoeing the land, there is no time to be idle. For example, during the cotton picking season in August every year, female slaves would bring a small bag and a large basket to work in the cotton fields at dawn, except for a 10-15 minute meal at noon to eat cold bacon with corn tortillas, and the rest of the time they would work non-stop until it was dark and they could not see clearly.
The white overseers also weighed the cotton they picked, and if they did not reach a certain weight, the lightest punishment was 40 lashes, and the black slaves were whipped if they overslept and ate for too long.
Despite serving slave owners in the rooms of the manor, their lives were equally hard.
In the movie, the image of the American black slave maid is not accurate. These "house slaves" are also under heavy work pressure and are punished if the task is not completed.
For example, black slaves who worked as maids were forbidden to leave their rooms, and they were not allowed to go to the toilet in the house. If they needed to go to the toilet, they had to get permission from the slave owner, and if they went to the toilet for too long, they were whipped.
At home, these "house slaves" not only have a clear division of labor, but also are absolutely forbidden to talk to each other during working hours, even between husband and wife. Even at night, both the ** who cleans the bedroom and the ** who is in charge of sewing must sleep on the floor of the hostess's bedroom in order to be at her service at all times.
In the same year, the British fleet patrolled the African coast to fight black slaves**, which led to a significant reduction in the import of black slaves from the United States, and black slaves** soared as a result.
Before the outbreak of the American Civil War, the market price of a prime-aged black slave could reach $2,000, which is equivalent to 3,100 grams**, or 62 pounds**.
According to the gold price on January 5, 2023, this black slave is worth about 1.2 million yuan. Although the most black slaves before the Civil War were between $1000-2000, for American estate owners, black slaves were given $7 per monthThe cost of feeding 2 catties of chicken or fish is only 3 US dollars, no more than 36 US dollars a year, and it is only 800 US dollars when you are 20 years old.
In contrast, slave owners were still able to make a lot of profits.
The "trade in black slaves" was a dark period in American history. At that time, slave owners in the American South no longer regarded slaves as just labor, but as an asset that could be used.
They treated slaves as cruelly as animals. In the 19th century, slave owners in the American South even introduced a series of "incentives" to encourage slaves and male slaves to have children as soon as possible, so as to increase the number of slaves they had.
These "incentives" include: Subordinates can work less during pregnancy, receive additional rations and food after production, and even get relatively expensive beef.
Behind these rewards, however, lies a bigger problem. **Although the fertility rate is high, the mortality rate is also extremely high, even reaching a staggering 70%.
At the same time, ** subordinates are more likely to be violated by male slave owners. The slave owners justified their actions with the excuse that "the black slaves had strong desires and could not control themselves", but this excuse only made people more angry.
However, even in such an environment, there were some slave owners who showed a hint of humanity. Their attitude towards slaves was relatively benevolent, but this did not hide the cruelty and injustice of the slave system.
This dark period in American history reminds us to cherish peace and freedom, but also to be wary of any form of injustice and exploitation.
In the era when the legal status of black slaves in the United States was a "commodity", they often paid the price of their lives to protect their chastity and personal safety. Their children are also sold as cattle when they reach adulthood.
Despite such a harsh reality, the black slaves resisted in their own way. For example, a black man named Josiah Hansen recalls that after his mother was sold, she knelt before the buyer and pleaded and was even beaten to the ground in order not to be separated from her son.
But even in this case, she was determined to protect her family.
In 19th-century America, the life of black slaves was full of pain and helplessness. In Kentucky, a black slave couple and their two children fled to Cincinnati, but they were unfortunately discovered and captured by a pursuit party.
At the point of life and death, the wife chose to let the children die to avoid the pain of slavery again. In order to protect their children, the black slaves even chose to drown them within 4 weeks that the children could be cared for.
Silva, a black slave living in Maryland, has killed 13 children. When she was found, she was sent to the gallows, but she refused to repent, saying that she did not regret killing the child, because she knew that it was better than making the child a slave.
Although in terms of food, American black slaves were even better than the food of the Japanese people, the strongest country in Asia before World War II, they were still slaves and commodities. They can't decide the future of themselves, their wives and their children, and their lives are full of helplessness and sadness.
In the slave society, the pain of separation of flesh and blood was common, and even as husbands, they had to watch their wives being insulted by slave owners. This may be why the Irish of that era, although their protein intake was far less than that of black slaves, had never heard of an Irish-American who would want to sell themselves into slavery just to eat meat.
This may be because, no matter how well blacks eat, they are always just slaves, commodities; And the Irish, no matter how bad they mix and how badly they eat, they are always free people.
Human dignity is priceless, and this is something that black Americans desperately strive for.