Before the American Civil War, many of the vast Southern regions of the United States were slave states, and local plantation owners and slave owners kept a large number of black slaves to serve themselves, driving black slaves to carry out various heavy labors.
At that time, about seventy-five percent of black slaves worked on plantations of various types, collectively known as "field slaves," and most of the black slaves in the fields worked on the most difficult cotton plantations.
In order to improve the efficiency of black slaves and produce more cotton, the brutal acts of American cotton planters against black slaves are far beyond our modern imagination, and the planters invented a set of cruel punishments to maximize the value of black slaves and make black slaves frightened.
U.S. cotton planters have invented a system that increases productivity, an effective but complex labor management system known as the "thepushingsystem."
The so-called system of oppression is essentially a means of systematically using violence to continuously squeeze the value of black slaves, using various violent means to stimulate the labor of black slaves, and at the same time not to make them die out in a short period of time like the black slaves in sugar plantations in the Caribbean, which can greatly improve the efficiency of slavery.
American cotton planters enslaved black slaves to work in the fields from dawn to dark, planting, managing, and harvesting cotton, sugar cane, rice, tobacco, and other work, and the black slaves also had to cultivate the land, raise the field, cut down trees, drag wood, and hoe the ground.
During the cotton-picking season that begins in August, in order to finish the cotton harvest as quickly as possible and speed up the progress, the plantation owners will have the overseers wake up the black slaves every day when it is not dawn (four or five o'clock in the morning).
The slightly more kind plantation owners would give the black slaves a simple wash and wash, then have breakfast (mainly tortillas, bread, and meat, but some miserly planters only provided cold corn bread), then gave them a bag and a large basket, and took them to the cotton field to start picking cotton.
Pick cotton
In order to compress the time, some cotton plantation owners chose to let the black slaves get up and work in the cotton fields until about 7 o'clock, and then sent someone to pull breakfast into the cotton fields, distribute it to each black slave, give it ten minutes to eat and rest, and then continue to drive them to work.
In order to reduce costs, some plantation owners only provided black slaves with two meals a day, did not provide breakfast, and after waking up black slaves in the morning, they directly drove hungry black slaves to the cotton fields to pick cotton.
Whether or not the black slaves ate in the morning, they would eventually begin to bend down to pick cotton with the morning light and dew, moving around the fields like walking dead. Under the supervision of the overseer, the black slaves had to keep plucking cotton from the cotton plants and putting them into cloth bags, and then pouring them into their own large baskets. Picking cotton was a hard and repetitive labor, and the black slaves had no other choice, they didn't need to think, they just had to bury their heads in the mill, move forward, complete their tasks, and repeat this action constantly, which made the black slaves more and more skilled and numb.
Plantation owners or supervisors carefully controlled the labor scene of the black slaves, and in order to facilitate management, the supervisors divided the black slaves into groups, about every 15 black slaves, and then arranged a black slave laborer to be the captain, who led the other black slaves to work. Because the black slave captains are specially selected "models" with good physical strength and high efficiency, their work efficiency is faster than that of ordinary blacks, but other black slaves must try to catch up with the progress of the captain (they must work hard to keep up with the progress of the work), and once they fall behind too much, they will be warned and beaten by the overseers.
The overseers also set the spacing between each black slave in order to see the labor of the black slaves. At work, each group of black slaves was lined up, each responsible for a ridge, and began to bend down to work. Overseers walked back and forth around, keeping an eye on each slave who was working, either on foot or on horseback, so that they could clearly see which slave was left behind, and to ensure that when the punishment was imposed, they could kill the chickens and monkeys in full view of the public.
In the cotton fields, many black slaves could not rest more than three times a day, even the lactating female black slaves could not rest for long, at most every hour, the black slaves could take turns walking to the bucket to drink a spoonful of water. Some particularly cruel plantation owners, in order not to waste time, did not even provide water to quench the thirst and heat of the black slaves during non-meal periods.
Henry Bibb, a black slave, recalled that when he was "working" on a cotton plantation near the Red River in Louisiana, the plantation owner would only let the black slaves eat a full meal two hours before dawn, and then do a full day's work, and the black slaves had only one rest from waking up to dark.
A scene of life in the American South
By noon, the black slaves could finally rest and eat, but there was no table, and the black slaves could only stand or squat with pots to eat. In general, black slaves had more lunches than breakfasts, and were saltier (for increased physical strength). In some plantations that treated black slaves more kindly, in order to maintain their physical strength, in addition to obtaining bread as a staple food, black slaves could also eat a certain amount of pork or salted pork, and even fried chicken, watermelon and other foods.
In the southern part of the U.S. East Coast, local adult blacks receive half a pound of salted pork a day, supplemented by an unlimited supply of potatoes, green beans, and other grains. Not only that, but local plantation owners regularly distribute syrup and fruit to black slaves. However, plantation owners generally do not provide milk or goat milk to black slaves, because many black slaves lack biological enzymes to break down lactose, and giving them milk is likely to cause diarrhea and vomiting, or even diarrhea and dehydration.
After studying some of the surviving "black slave recipes", Professor Fogel, an American economist, found that some black slaves at that time had a high standard of living, and on the eve of the Civil War, the consumption of black slaves in some parts of the South reached an average annual rate of 179 pounds, while Italian workers in the same period could only get 9 pounds of meat per year. The average nutritional level of black slaves not only exceeded that of free peasants, but even higher than the average level of Americans in 1964 a hundred years later, which is far beyond people's imagination today.
However, not all black slaves can reach this standard of living, in some miserly plantations, especially in the deep south of the United States, plantation owners in order to reduce costs, generally only provide corn bread to black slaves, at most give a radish, a bowl of pumpkin soup to eat.
Deep South State
The black slaves did not eat long at noon, usually 10 to 15 minutes, so they had to hurry up and stuff food into their stomachs, then take time to solve their physiological needs, and then be driven by the overseers to continue working, and wait until dusk was over before they could eat dinner. And the black slaves' dinner was also eaten in the cotton fields, because they had to continue to work until the night when they could not distinguish between cotton and weeds.
In order to maximize the value of the black slave's labor, during the cotton-picking season, the black slaves had extremely short rest and long working hours, working eighteen to twenty hours a day. According to literature, black slaves in Mississippi in the United States worked eighteen hours a day during the cotton-picking season, and black slaves in Georgia were even more miserable, working for nineteen hours.
Only the female slave in the childbirth period can be relatively reduced in workload and less whipped in the 3 to 4 weeks before the birth of the child, and after the child is born, the mother can also get extra clothes and rations, but usually after the child reaches 4 weeks, the female slave will be driven into the field to work again, and her unbashed baby will be cared for by the old slave and the older little slave, the memory of a former slave:
"The bell rang at four o'clock in the morning and they had half an hour to prepare... Women had to do the same work as men, to do the same amount of work, and if the plantation was far from home and the uncut babies stayed on the ground all day, if they were close to home, then women were allowed to go back two or three times a day to look after their babies. ”
At work, black slaves would be beaten by overseers if they were left behind, and in order to ensure the imposition of discipline and prevent passive sabotage, the punishments that black slaves might be subjected to, including whipping, hanging, burning, starvation, and imprisonment, the most representative of which was flogging.
The overseer on his horse would supervise the slaves all the time, and if he found that a black slave was obviously behind, he would inevitably give him a few lashes. Novices who came to work in the fields for the first time often picked cotton as quickly as possible, driven by the overseer's stormy whip. A black female recalls that there was once a black slave who was some distance behind his compatriots at work, and the foreman tried to keep him up with a whipping, and he resisted, only to have the other overseers rush up, push him down, and then pull out a pistol and shoot him to death, while the other black slaves continued to work without lifting their heads:
"Not a single slave spoke, no one turned their heads to look, and they continued to work as if nothing had happened."
The slaves knew they had to adapt to oppression and endure barbaric treatment or face more unpredictable, but highly likely, extreme violence.
To maximize the potential of black slaves, plantation owners and overseers devised a rigorous quota algorithm that determined the cotton they turned in each slave according to their usual efficiency. Every once in a while, the Overseers would also adjust quota numbers to match the slaves' progress in proficiency.
After the Negro had finished his day's labor, the overseers would weigh the cotton bag or basket picked by each Negro slave, and if the Negro slave could not complete the standard workload set by the plantation owner, he would be beaten or punished by the overseer for continuing to work hungry, and he would live worse than the livestock every day, because although the white man would drive his livestock to work, they would at least not torture their cattle and horses.