How many hours enslaved

Sugar agriculture was very profitable and it quickly spread throughout the Caribbean and to Louisiana and Mississippi in North America. Hundreds of thousands of enslaved men, women and children were brought from Africa to the Caribbean and America so that Europeans could have sugar and rum, the main products of sugar cane.

Sugarcane was an unusual crop. Europeans were used to growing crops such as wheat, which they then harvested and sent to other people who would turn the crop into flour.

But on Caribbean and American plantations enslaved labourers had to do everything. They sowed, tended and harvested the crop, and then worked to extract the juice from the sugar cane and boil and process the juice in order to turn it into sugar and molasses, and later they might work to distil some of the waste products into rum. The sugar plantation was both a farm and a factory, and enslaved men, women and children worked long days all year round. There are picture from this period, showing sugar agriculture and production.

Therefore we cannot take these pictures at face value, and must always remember how terribly hard this work was. Young men and women joined the First Gang in their late teens, once they were strong enough, but within ten or twelve years the hard work had wrecked their bodies and they were relegated to the Second Gang, which worked hard but not as hard as the First Gang. Overseers and drivers had whips, and they used them to force enslaved people to work harder.

In the early summer the First and Second Gangs prepared the fields for planting, turning over the soil with hoes. Then in the late-summer and early-autumn the First Gang would plant the sugar cane, often using the cane-holing process. Cane-holing was back-breaking work. First Gang slaves marked out squares of between 4 and 6 feet square, then dug out each square to a depth of 6 to 9 inches. They used only hoes, not spades, making this work even harder.

A First Gang slave was expected to dig out between 60 and squares each day, which involved moving as much as 1, cubic feet of soil. The soil taken out was built up as a bank around each square. On cotton, sugar, and tobacco plantations, slaves worked together in gangs under the supervision of a supervisor or a driver. There is a tendency to think of slavery as an economically backward and inefficient institution. In fact, sugar and cotton plantations were the most innovative economic unit of their time in terms of labor management and organization.

They anticipated the assembly line and the factory system in their reliance on such as close supervision and division of tasks.

Slave masters extracted labor from virtually the entire slave community, young, old, healthy, and physically impaired. Children as young as three or four were put to work, usually in special "trash gangs" weeding fields, carrying drinking water, picking up trash, and helping in the kitchen.

Young children also fed chickens and livestock, gathered wood chips for fuel, and drove cows to pasture. Between the ages of seven and twelve, boys and girls were put to work in intensive field work. Older or physically handicapped slaves were put to work in cloth houses, spinning cotton, weaving cloth, and making clothes.

The life of a slave was hard and often cruel, and their religion was an important way to remind them that their lives had meaning and dignity. Many found ways to resist the hardships of slavery. Prolonging their work, breaking or hiding tools or pretending to be sick, were safe and effective ways to resist the authority of their masters.

Some enslaved people ran away to find family in other parts of the country or attempted to escape to the wilderness to begin a new life. Ads printed in the Virginia Gazette describe these runaways, and they were often captured and returned to their masters. Such actions were usually met with harsh punishment or death.

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