field slave
Outdoor bondage worker
A field slave was an enslaved person who performed agricultural labor on plantations, as distinguished from house slaves who worked in the slaveholder's dwelling.
Field slaves typically endured harsher conditions—long hours under overseers, exposure to weather, and more brutal punishment.
The term appears in historical accounts and discussions of American slavery's internal hierarchies: The field slaves worked from sunup to sundown during harvest.
- bondmanMale held in servitude
- serfBonded agricultural laborer
- plantationLarge-scale farming operation
- indentured servantContract-bound unpaid laborer
- laborerPhysical task performer
chattel · forced labor · tobacco · servitude · cotton · toil · Middle Passage · farmworker · fieldworker · agriculture · antebellum South · fieldman · folk songs · sugar cane · cash crop · farmhand · oral histories · work songs
- Roman servantsfreedman, household manager, doorkeeper, cupbearer, chambermaid
- unfree laborersbondsman, bondswoman, bondservant, bondman, bondwoman
- colonial ranksviceroy, colonial administrator, lieutenant governor, resident
field slavehouse slave
Enslaved indoor worker
domestic slave · domestic servant · body servant · lady's maid · valet
field slavefreedman
Released former slave
freedwoman · freeman · yeoman farmer · landowner · slaveholder
field slaveslaveholder
Owner of enslaved persons
master · enslaver · plantation owner · overseer · slaveowner
field, slave, fields, fielded, fielding, fielder, slaves, slaved, slaving