Life in
Slavery

Slaves lived under a system of ultimate subjugation, where their owners had overwhelming control over their lives. They routinely suffered brutal working conditions, violence, and the devastating separation of families. Yet many slaves still found ways to resist their bondage and to carve out some level of autonomy. They feigned illness to avoid work. They ran away, sometimes seeking to escape completely and other times for a respite of only a day or two. They worshipped on their own terms. They created a new, syncretic African American culture.

Historians’ understanding of slave societies in the United States comes in large part from a rich body of slave narratives. During the nineteenth century a few escaped slaves who had learned to read and write published their experiences as books. These books were often sponsored by white abolitionists with the goal of publicizing the humanity of blacks and the horrors of slavery. Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Solomon Northup, and Harriet Jacobs were among the slaves whose narratives captured the imagination of the public by revealing the often hidden aspects of slaves’ experience. These books found a large audience: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), for example, had sold 30,000 copies worldwide by 1860.

Historians have also benefited from slave narratives compiled during the twentieth century. As part of the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal program to provide work during the Great Depression of the 1930s, the federal government hired writers to conduct interviews with ex-slaves. Of course, these men and women had grown old and vulnerable to memory loss, and it’s not clear what impact the presence of white interviewers may have had on their responses. However, the interviews offer valuable insight into the lives of slaves who never escaped, lacked the ability to read and write, and had no way to voice their stories during their lives in bondage. The following documents from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries provide windows into the experiences of southern slaves.