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Essay On Slave Life

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Introduction of laws granting whites and slave-owners the right to beat, whip, and kill bondsmen indicate that violence was the first that masters recognized as a means of controlling slaves. The Slave Code of South Carolina enacted in 1740 that slaves who “shall refuse to submit or undergo the examination of any white person, it shall be lawful for any such white person to pursue, apprehend, and moderately correct such slave; and if any such slave shall assault and stricke such white person, such slave may be lawfully killed.” Similarly, the Virginia “Acts concerning Servants and Slaves” enacted in 1705 that “if any slave resist his master, or owner, or other person, by his or her order, correcting such slave, and shall happen to be killed …show more content…

Indeed, I doubt, if there is a great diversity in the modes of life, in the several families of any white village in New York, or Pennsylvania, containing a population of three hundred persons, as there was in several households of our quarter” (Charles Ball, Fifty Years in Chains). This quote is revealing because it shows that there was some animosity among slaves. It seems that the differences in slave-master relationships was conducive to differences in slave’s status. A South Carolina planter wrote that, “Like the white people, the negroes, though slaves, had their petty jealousies.” He continued, “two or three men on the plantation who did not like Unc’ Essick [a foreman], for no other reason than that he was promoted over them. They could not understand how the reformed runaway deserved more at my father's hands than they

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