Existing comment:
[continued] post-tobacco plantations was considered "less bad" than elsewhere in the country. Here, African captives endured fewer severe physical demands and often benefitted from a task-based system that allowed them to work at their own pace and without supervision. Enslaved people could usually marry, raise families and hire themselves out as laborers although such privileges were left to the discretion of their masters.
However, African captives sent to the Lower South -- Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas -- experienced much harsher conditions. The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 greatly increased the productivity of the cotton industry and created a massive demand for hands to plow, tend, and harvest the fields. Throughout the Lower South, cash crops, such as cotton, sugar and tobacco, claimed every inch of arable land; consequently, enslaved Africans were not given plots on which to grow their own vegetables, nor were they given the time to build adequate shelters. Gangs of African captives worked from "first light till full dark" as a condition of enslavement under the ready whip of white and black overseers, ruthlessly driven to plant, cultivate and harvest these lucrative crops.
Intended to connect the tidewaters of the James River with the navigable stretches of the Ohio River, the Kanawha canal began as an ambitious project that required the back-breaking effort of thousands of laborers. Between 1836 and 1837 the workforce more than doubled, rising from 1,440 to 3,330 men, the majority of whom were white Irish immigrants. However the summer of 1838 brought with it unusually high temperatures and many of the Irish laborers died of hyperthermia, creating a panic -- and subsequent northern migration -- of two-thirds of the remaining workforce. Regarded essentially as chattel and therefore thought impervious to uncomfortable conditions, "slaves on the James River toiled through the unpredictable Virginia winter, in all but torrential downpours and on through the summer fever season for which the James River was notorious." Enslaved workers were in the majority by 1839. By 1850, enslaved Africans were becoming stonemasons. |