What was everyday life like for enslaved African Americans in the South?

In the rural South, the main staple crop grown was cotton. Northern shippers depended on the profits from the cotton trade with Europe, and the cotton industry greatly expanded during the early 1800s. By 1840, cotton accounted for nearly half of all U.S. exports, and the South produced more than half of the world’s supply of cotton. As a result, the men who owned the land where cotton was grown held a powerful influence over the U.S. economy. The intensive work of growing cotton relied on the labor of enslaved African Americans. They cleared the land, planted the seeds, picked the cotton, and cleaned the cotton fibers by removing the seeds, all by hand. As landowners in the South gained more profits from the cotton industry, they bought more enslaved people to work the land. Because these men and women brought wealth to landowners, not only for the work they did, but also their value in the slave market, they were treated as investments in property. Enslaved people were bought and sold at auctions, and families were separated for economic reasons, such as when the landowner’s property was divided among his heirs or if he went bankrupt. Because the businesspeople involved in the cotton industry viewed enslaved people as assets, or valuable things that could be owned, they were not granted the democratic freedoms of citizens. Instead, the majority of enslaved people spent their lives on farms, performing manual labor that contributed to the economic success of the land owner and his family.

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