field slaves
Outdoor agricultural bondspeople
Field slaves were enslaved people assigned to agricultural labor on plantations—planting, cultivating, and harvesting crops like cotton, tobacco, and sugar.
The term distinguished them from house slaves, who worked as domestic servants.
Field work was typically harder and more brutal, performed under overseers from dawn to dusk.
The field slaves worked the cotton rows in the August heat.
- servitudeCompulsory labor under masters
- plantationLarge-scale farming operation
- big houseInformal term for prison
- toilStrenuous, prolonged effort
- cottonPlant fiber for textiles
day's work · overseer · chattel · picking · labor · whip · backbreaking work · manumission · freedom papers · harvesting · cash crops · antebellum South · forced labor · bondage · sharecropping · agriculture · hoe cake · auction block
- slaverybondage, chattel, thrall, Middle Passage, slaveholders
- colonial slaveryplantation system, bondage, servitude, manumission, plantation labor
- labor systemsbonded labor, child labor, compulsory labor, contract labor, convict labor
field slaveshouse slaves
Enslaved people working indoors
domestic slaves · domestic servants · mammies · valets · cooks
field slavesfreedmen
People released from slavery
freemen · slaveholders · plantation owners · masters · sharecroppers
field, fields, fielded, fielding, fielder, fielders, slave, slaves, slaved