Richmond, VA October 27 1840

Dear Husband-

This is the third letter that I have written to you, and have not received any from you; and don't know the reason that I have not received any from you. I think very hard of it. The trader has been here three times to Look at me. I wish that you would try to see if you can get any one to buy me up there. If you don't come down here this Sunday, perhaps you wont see me any more. Give my love to them all, and tell them all that perhaps I shan't see you any more. Give my love to your mother in particular, and to mamy wines, and to aunt betsy, and all the children; tell Jane and Mother they must come down a fortnight before Christmas. I wish to see you all, but I expect I never shall see you all-never no more.

I remain your Dear and affectionate Wife,

Sargry Brown

Charllotesville Oct 8th 1852

Dear Husband

I write you a letter to let you know of my distress my master has sold albert to a trader on monday court day and myself and other child is for sale also and I want to you let hear from you very soon before next cort if you can I dont know when I dont want you to wait till christmas I want you to tell dr Hamelton or your master if either will buy me they can attend to it know and then I can go after wards I dont want a trader to get me they asked me if I had got any person to buy me and I told them no they took me to the court houste too & they never put me up a man buy the name of brady bought albert and is gone I dont kow whare they say he lives in Scottesville my things is in several places some is in staunton and if I should be sold I dont kow what will become of them I dont expect to meet with the luck to get that way till I am quite heart sick nothing more

I am and ever will be your kind Wife Maria Perkins

To Richard Perkins

I said to him, ". . . Have you bought my wife?" He said he had. When I asked him what she had done, he said she had done nothing, but that her master wanted money. He drew out a pistol and said that if I went near the wagon on which she was, he would shoot me. I asked for leave to shake hands with her which he refused, but said I might stand at a distance and talk with her. My heart was so full that I could say very little.... I have never seen or heard from her from that day to this. I loved her as I love my life.

Never knew who massa done sold. I remember one morning ol' white man rode up in a buggy and stop by a gal name Lucy that was working in the yard. He say, "Come on. Get in this buggy. I bought you this morning." Then she beg him to let her go tell her baby and husband goodbye, but he say, "Naw! Get in this buggy! Ain't got no time for crying and carrying on." I started crying myself, 'cause I was so scared he was gonna take me, too.

My brothers and sisters were bid off first, and one by one, while my mother, paralyzed with grief, held me by the hand. Her turn came and she was bought by Issac Riley of Montgomery County. Then I was offered.... My mother, half distracted with the thought of parting forever from all her children, pushed through the crowd while the bidding for me was going on, to the spot where Riley was standing. She fell at his feet, and clung to his knees, entreating him in tones that a mother could only command, to buy her baby as well as herself, and spare to her one, at least, of her little ones.... This man disengag[ed] himself from her with ... violent blows and kicks.... I must have been then between five and six years old.

Charles Ball wrote this in 1854. It can be found in A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, A Black Man. He had been separated from his family and shares his experience of forming a new family with other slaves:

returned to the quarter in the evening, Dinah (the name of the woman who was at the head of our family) produced at supper, a black jug, containing molasses, and gave me some of the molasses for my supper.

I felt grateful to Dinah for this act of kindness, as I well knew that her children then regarded molasses as the greatest of human luxuries, and that she was depriving them of their highest enjoyment to afford me the means of making a gourd full of molasses and water. I therefore proposed to her and her husband, whose name was Nero, that whilst I should remain a member of the family, I would contribute as much towards its support as Nero himself; or, at least, that I would bring all my earnings into the family stock, provided I might be treated as one of its members, and be allowed a portion of the proceeds of their patch or garden. This offer was readily accepted, and from this time we constituted one community, as long as I remained among the field hands on this plantation. After supper was over, we had to grind our corn; but as we had to wait for our turn at the mill, we did not get through this indispensable operation before one o'clock in the morning. We did not set up all night to wait for our turn at the mill, but as our several turns were assigned us by lot, the person who had the first turn when done with the mill, gave notice to the one entitled to the second, and so on. By this means, nobody lost more than half an hour's sleep, and in the morning every one's grinding was done.

We worked very hard this week. We were now laying by the cotton, as it is termed; that is, we were giving the last weeding and hilling to the crop, of which, there was on this plantation, about five hundred acres, which looked well, and promised to yield a fine picking.

Here is another excerpt from his experiences:

My new master, whose name I did not hear, took me that same day across the Patuxent, where I joined fifty-one other slaves, whom he had bought in Maryland. Thirty-two of these were men, and nineteen were women. The women were merely tied together with a rope, about the size of a bed-cord, which was tied like a halter round the neck of each; but the men, of whom I was the stoutest and strongest, were very differently caparisoned. A strong iron collar was closely fitted by means of a padlock round each of our necks. A chain of iron, about a hundred feet in length, was passed through the hasp of each padlock, except at the two ends, where the hasps of the padlock passed through a link of the chain. In addition to this, we were handcuffed in pairs, with iron staples and bolts, with a short chain, about a foot long, uniting the handcuffs and their wearers in pairs. In this manner we were chained alternately by the right and left hand; and the poor man to whom I was thus ironed, wept like an infant when the blacksmith, with his heavy hammer, fasted the ends of the bolts that kept the staples from slipping from our arms. For my own part, I felt indifferent to my fate. It appeared to me that the worst had come that could come, and that no change of fortune could harm me.

Peter Randolph lived from 1825-1897 and grew up as a slave in Virginia.  He was freed when his owner died.  He later settled in Boston, where he became a preacher.  He wrote about his experiences as a slave – this excerpt comes from Sketches of a Slave Life, a book he wrote in 1847.

For whipping the slaves in Virginia, there are no rules. The slave receives from the slaveholder from fifty to five hundred lashes . . . Men, women, and children must be whipped alike on their bare backs . .  . The slaves are placed in a certain position when they are [whipped], with sufficient management to hold them very still, so they cannot work their hands or feet . . .

Some of the slaves have to lie down on their stomachs, flat on the ground, and stretched out so as to keep their skin tight for the lash . . . if they move, they must receive so many lashes extra. When the slaveholder expects to give his slave five hundred lashes, he gives him about half at a time; then washes him down with salt and water, and then gives him the remainder of what he is to have. At such times, the slave-owner has his different liquors to drink, while he is engaged in draining the blood of the slave. So he continues to drink his rum and whip his victim. When he does not [whip] his victims on the ground, they are tied by their hands, and swung up to a great tree, just so the end of their toes may touch the ground. In this way, they receive what number of lashes they are destined to.

This was written in 1861 and can be found in the book Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl:

As the months passed on, my boy improved in health. When he was a year old, they called him beautiful. The little vine was taking deep root in my existence, though its clinging fondness excited a mixture of love and pain. When I was most sorely oppressed I found a solace in his smiles. I loved to watch his infant slumbers; but always there was a dark cloud over my enjoyment. I could never forget that he was a slave. Sometimes I wished that he might die in infancy. God tried me. My darling became very ill. The bright eyes grew dull, and the little feet and hands were so icy cold that I thought death had already touched them. I had prayed for his death, but never so earnestly as I now prayed for his life; and my prayer was heard. Alas, what mockery it is for a slave mother to try to pray back her dying child to life! Death is better than slavery. It was a sad thought that I had no name to give my child. His father caressed him and treated him kindly, whenever he had a chance to see him. He was not unwilling that he should bear his name; but he had no legal claim to it; and if I had bestowed it upon him, my master would have regarded it as a new crime, a new piece of insolence, and would perhaps, revenge it on the boy. O, the serpent of Slavery has many and poisonous fangs!

"Massa have a great, long whip platted out of rawhide and when one the slaves fall behind or give out, he hit him with that whip. It take the hide every time he hit a slave. Mother, she give out on the way, 'bout the line of Texas. Her feet got raw and bleedin' and her legs swoll plumb out of shape. Then massa, he jus' take out he gun and shot her, and whilst she lay dyin' he kicks her two, three times . . .  you know that man, he wouldn't bury mother. Jus' leave her lay in' where he shot her at. You know, then there wasn't no law 'gainst killin' . . . slaves."

This was written in 1858

We lodged in log huts on the bare ground. Wooden floors were an unknown luxury. In a single room were huddled, like cattle, ten or a dozen persons, men, women, and children... Our beds were collections of straw and old rags, thrown down in the corners and boxed in with boards, a single blanket the only covering... The wind whstled and the rain and snow blew in through the cracks, and the damp earth soaked in the moisture till the floor was miry as a pigsty. Such were our houses.

In ordinary times we had two regular meals in a day: breakfast at twelve o’clock, after laboring from daylight, and supper when the work of the remainder of the day was over. In harvest season we had three. Our dress was of tow cloth; for the children nothing but a shirt; for the older ones a pair of pantaloons or a gown. Besides these, in the winter a round jacket or overcoat, a wool hat once in two or three years for the males, and a pair of coarse shoes once a year.

Solomon Northrop was a free black man living in the North. He was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the South. This comes from his book, Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northrup, which was written in 1853.

The hands 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, and when the moon is full, they often times labor till the middle of the night. They do not dare to stop even at dinner time, nor return to the quarters, however late it be, until the order to halt is given by the driver.

The day's work over in the field, the baskets are "toted," or in other words, carried to the gin-house, where the cotton is weighed. No matter how fatigued and weary he may be – no matter how much he longs for sleep and rest – a slave never approaches the gin-house with his basket of cotton but with fear. If it falls short in weight –if he has not performed the full task appointed him, he knows that he must suffer. And if he has exceeded it by ten or twenty pounds, in all probability his master will measure the next day's task accordingly. So, whether he has two little or too much, his approach to the gin-house is always with fear and trembling. Most frequently they have too little, and therefore it is they are not anxious to leave the field. After weighing, follow the whippings; and then the baskets are carried to the cotton house, and their contents stored away like hay, all hands being sent in to tramp it down. If the cotton is not dry, instead of taking it to the gin-house at once, it is laid upon platforms, two feet high, and some three times as wide, covered with boards or plank, with narrow walks running between them.

This done, the labor of the day is not yet ended, by any means. Each one must then attend to his respective chores. One feeds the mules, another the swine, another cuts the wood, and so forth; besides, the packing is all done by candle light. Finally, at a late hour, they reach the quarters, sleepy and overcome with the long day's toil. Then a fire must be kindled in the cabin, the corn ground in the small hand-mill, and supper, and dinner for the next day in the field, prepared. All that is allowed them is corn and bacon, which is given out at the corncrib and smoke-house every Sunday morning. Each one receives, as his weekly allowance, three and a half pounds of bacon, and corn enough to make a peck of meal. That is all – no tea, coffee, sugar, and with the exception of a very scanty sprinkling now and then, no salt...

An hour before daylight the horn is blown. Then the wake up, prepare their breakfast, fill a gourd with water, in another deposit their dinner of cold bacon and corn cake, and hurry to the field again. It is an offense invariably followed by a whipping, to be found at the quarters after daybreak. Then the fears and labors of another day begin; and until its close there is no such thing as rest...