Introduction
Just before the Civil war, about four million African American people who were under slavery stayed in the southern part of the United States of America. Most of them worked on the plantations of tobacco, sugar, and rice. These slaves were of African descent. Their ancestors had been forcibly taken from Africa and moved across the Atlantic Ocean in the Americas. Most of these people who survived the journey had the West Indies (the Caribbean) as their destination or they settled in south and Central America. Such forced migration is referred to in the current times to as the African Diaspora. This is among the biggest tragedies encountered by human being in the world’s history.
In general terms, the slaves were given food, clothes, and shelter on a very minimal level just to make sure that these people survive and can work. However, the level of comfort for the slaves depended on whether they were living in rural areas or urban areas. It is believed that those slaves that stayed in the urban areas, especially in the nineteenth century that were approximately six percent of the total number of slaves, in general lived under the conditions that were more conductive than those who lived in the rural areas (Boston 2004). This paper is going to establish this claim by making a comparison of the lives of the slaves who lived in the urban areas such as the New Orleans and Charleston with those slaves that lived in the Key West in the rural plantations.
The Urban Slaves
Many of the African American slaves got their ways of putting up with slavery to go beyond the every day experience of captivity by the year 1860. The strategies they put in place to realize this was dependent in part on the kind of the job they engaged in and in part on the place where they lived as slaves. Whereas on one hand most of the slaves worked on sugar, cotton, and rose plantations in the rural areas, a substantial number worked in industries in the southern region and even some took service jobs in the urban centers (Davis, N.d).
A great number of the industrial slaves stayed in the urban centers, in the southern cities as well as towns, together with other slaves who carried out other jobs other than working in the industries. The estimates indicate that by the year 1860, more than 140, 000 slaves who were of the African American descend stayed in the urban centers of the southern region. The cities with the biggest share of the slaves living there were the city of New Orleans and Charleston. These cities were followed by Richmond. Charleston was leading with a population of fourteen thousand slaves followed by New Orleans which carried about thirteen thousand four hundred slaves. Richmond carried a population of about eleven thousand seven hundred slaves.
It was in the southern urban centers that the slaves encountered the biggest opportunities to carry on with life in a manner that was not within the confines of slavery. The kind of life in these cities and towns enabled the slaves to partially avoid the close monitoring of the masters and the white authorities. The meeting places for the blacks that were under slavery came up in many of the southern urban centers. More so there was coming up of the independent churches of the people under slavery and all-black societies. This enabled the urban slaves to lead a life beyond the absolute control of their masters.
Even if the white people were worried about this level of freedom that the urban slaves enjoyed, there was nothing much they could do about this since most of the whites who possessed slaves obtained much profit from hiring out their enslaved people who were skilled and being paid in return. And also, nothing much could be done since these white masters needed the slaves to freely move in the city in order to run errands on behalf of the white people (Casuscelli 2010).
Conclusion
Based on the discussion, it can be concluded that the enslaved people who lived in the urban centers led a life that was more favorable than their rural counterparts. They had some substantial level of freedom. A practical and energetic underworld came up in the urban world and more specifically in cities like New Orleans and the upper south. This world that was set up was quite much different from the world of the rural south. This new industrial and urban world was greatly out of control of the white authority. Consequently, the enslaved people in the cities and towns were able to carry on with their lives in one way or the other beyond bondage at the time when the civil war was just about to start, may be rising about the bondage in the ways that were quite significant in their private lives.
Reference
Boston, N. (2004). The Slave experience: Living Conditions. Web.
Casuscelli, E. (2010). Antebellum Slavery: Non-plantation slavery. Web.
Davis, R.L.F. (N.d). Slavery in America: Historical Overview. California State University, Northridge. Web.