During the antebellum (pre-Civil War) years slavery expanded aggressively along with the United States (see population statistics, below). Fueled by a surging world demand for cotton, slavery spread quickly into the new states of the Southwest; by the 1830s Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana formed the heart of a new "cotton kingdom," together producing more than half of the nation’s supply of the crop (see Cotton Production in the United States).
The great bulk of this cotton was cultivated by slaves. Between 1790 and 1860 about 1 million slaves (almost twice the number of Africans shipped to the United States during the whole period of the transatlantic slave trade) moved west, some together with their masters and others as part of a new domestic trade in which owners from the seaboard states provided "surplus" slaves to planters in the Southwest.
As slavery grew, so too did its diversity. Slavery varied according to region, crops, and size of holdings. On farms and small plantations most slaves came in frequent contact with their owners, but on very large plantations, where slave owners often employed overseers, slaves might rarely see their masters. Some owners left their holdings entirely in the care of subordinates, usually hired white overseers but sometimes slaves. A few slave owners were even black themselves: a small percentage of free blacks owned slaves, in some cases essentially as a fiction so that they could protect family members, but more often to profit, like other slaveholders, from unfree labor.
Most slaves on large holdings worked in gangs, under the supervision of overseers and (slave) drivers. Some, however, especially in the coastal region of South Carolina and Georgia, labored under the "task" system: assigned a certain amount of work to complete in a day, they received less supervision than gang laborers and were free to use their time as they wished once they had completed their daily assignments. In addition to performing fieldwork, slaves served as house servants, nurses, midwives, carpenters, blacksmiths, drivers, preachers, gardeners, and handymen.
Despite such variations, there were a number of dominant trends. First, slavery was overwhelmingly rural: in 1860 only about 5 percent of all slaves lived in towns of at least 2500 persons. Second, although some slaves lived on giant estates and others on small farms, the norm was in between: in 1860 about one-half of all slaves lived on holdings of 10 to 49, with one-quarter on smaller and one-quarter on larger units. (Holdings tended to be bigger in the Deep South than in the upper South.)
Third, most slaves lived with resident masters; owner absenteeism was most prevalent in the South Carolina and Georgia low country, but in the South as a whole it was less common than in the Caribbean. Fourth, most able-bodied adult slaves engaged in fieldwork. Owners relied heavily on children, the elderly, and the infirm for "nonproductive" work (such as house service); only the largest plantations could spare healthy adults for exclusive assignment to specialized occupations. The main business of Southern farms and plantations—and of the slaves who supported them—was to grow cotton, tobacco, rice, corn, wheat, hemp, and sugar.
Southern slaveholders took an active role in managing their human property. Viewing themselves as the slaves’ guardians, they stressed the degree to which they cared for their "people." The character of such care varied, but in purely material terms—food, clothing, housing, medical attention—it was generally better in the antebellum than in the colonial period and (judging by measurable criteria such as slave height and life expectancy) better in the American South than in the Caribbean or Brazil. Although young children were often malnourished, most working slaves received a steady supply of pork and corn which, if lacking in nutritional balance (about which antebellum Americans knew nothing), provided sufficient calories to fuel their labor, especially when supplemented with produce that slaves raised on the garden plots that they were often allotted.
Clothing and housing were crude but functional: slaves typically received four coarse "suits" per year (pants and shirts for men, dresses for women, long shirts for children) and lived in small wooden cabins, one to a family. Wealthy slave owners often sent for physicians to treat slaves who became ill; given the state of medical knowledge, however, such treatment—which could range from providing various concoctions to "bleeding" a patient—often did as much harm as good.
Masters intervened continuously in the lives of their slaves, from directing their labor to approving (and disapproving) marriages. Some masters made elaborate written "rules" and most engaged in constant meddling—directing, nagging, threatening, and punishing. Many took advantage of their position to exploit slave women sexually. What slaves hated most about slavery was not the hard work to which they were subjected (most people in the rural United States expected to engage in hard physical labor), but the lack of control over their lives—their lack of freedom. Masters may have prided themselves on the care they provided for their "people"; the slaves, however, had a different idea of that care. They resented the constant interference in their lives and struggled to achieve whatever autonomy they could.
