46
the slightest infraction. In addition, slaves are made to feel like
unthinking machines and are forced to work relentlessly most of
their waking hours. Northup describes typical demands made on
slaves who pick cotton. The workers, he says, “are required to
be in the cotton field as soon as it is light in the morning, and,
with the exception of ten or fifteen
minutes, which is given them at noon
to swallow their allowance of cold
bacon, they are not permitted to be
a moment idle until it is too dark to
see.”
34
If a slave fails to pick the daily
quota of cotton, Northup adds, the
person is whipped until blood soaks
his or her clothes.
The Pitiless Breakup of Slave Families
Abolitionists rightly focus on such cruelties. Yet they are even more
angered by what one writer has called “the greatest perceived sin
of American slavery.” It is, he says, the fact that many slavehold-
ers have “undermined the same family structure that [they] simul-
taneously encouraged.”
35
On the one hand, these slave owners
push their adult slaves to have children. Later, however, they often
sell those children or the parents. The results are the same: fami-
lies are torn asunder, and most members of those families never
see one another again.
Northup witnessed such a family tragedy in New Orleans,
where a man bought a female slave but showed no interest in
purchasing her young daughter. Northup recalled that the girl was
sensible of some impending danger, instinctively fas-
tened her hands around her mother’s neck, and nestled
her little head upon her bosom. [The seller] sternly or-
dered [the mother] to be quiet, but she did not heed him.
He caught her by the arm and pulled her rudely, but she
“[The field slaves] are
not permitted to be a
moment idle until it is
too dark to see.”
34
—Former slave Solomon Northup
