Field slaves
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Field slaves were African American people who did the hard manual labor in the fields of plantations. They commonly picked cotton, sugar, rice and tobacco.
There were two types of slaves, lower class slaves, and higher class slaves. Lower class slaves would be considered the field slaves, and the upper class slaves being the house slaves. Just as the name suggests, house slaves were slaves that worked in the great house and field slaves worked in the fields of the plantation. The conditions for field slaves were a lot worse than house slaves.
First of all, being a field slave was much more grueling than being a house slave. Field slaves would be up from sunup until sun down in the hot fields working. Many times, field slaves would be in the fields 10–18 hours a day. During the course of their day, field slaves were monitored by an overseer. An overseer made sure that the work the slaves were doing did not slow down or cease until the work day was over. If things were not running smoothly or someone was not working enough, they would be whipped by the overseer.
Even pregnant enslaved women could not escape duties on the field. She would have to work up until the delivery of the baby and right after the delivery of the baby. The clothing that the field slaves were given were terrible. Field slaves received the bare minimum to cover their bodies and were usually allowed just one winter pair of clothes and one summer pair of clothes. Field slaves often lived in one room shacks with mud floors. Field slaves were fed once a day. Their meal generally consisted of cornmeal and fatty meat given to them by the slave master.
Many times, there was animosity between the field slaves and the house slaves. One of the reasons for this is that house slaves acted as the slave master's spy on occasion, they would report to the slave master on runaway plans and even who was slacking in the field when they should be working.
The most usual crop in the south was cotton, which is a very prickly bush. Often, the bushes would cut their hands but they had to keep working despite the bleeding. At times the field slaves were worked until sundown or death. They were fed whatever their master chose to give them for the day and had to make dishes out of things they could find. The slaves lived in one-room cabins with their whole family and slept on straw filled mattresses. The cabin roofs were usually leaky and in the winter the cabin filled with smoke because of the fireplace.
Over time the slave masters found out that they can make more money by keeping and selling the slaves to other white people.
