ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the history of slave labors in North America. Much of the discussion of slave work patterns, the economics of slavery, and the life of the slave community must remain centered on slavery in its maturity, at what proved to be its historical peak in the antebellum South. The proportion of slave to white population varied greatly from area to area, with the heaviest concentrations in the Deep South. This picture of slavery is largely borne out by James Oakes in his study of Southern slaveholders, The Ruling Race. He divides the slave owners into a few categories. For members of all these classes, slave ownership was an indication of status and a vehicle of upward mobility. But they invested in slaves, and yet more slaves, chiefly for their labor, and it is appropriate that any more detailed consideration of the South's peculiar institution should begin with the work slaves were required to undertake.
