ABSTRACT
According to the 1850 US Census, 1.8 million slaves, worked on cotton farms or plantations. Thus the cotton plantation was the typical locale for the enslaved African American. The slaves' labor the exploitation of which provided the economic foundation for the Old South was the primary concern of the slave owner. Whippings were common in an attempt to extract more work from field slaves. Planters justified this practice with racism: African Americans, they reasoned, were a child like race and required strict punishment. Hopeton Plantation in Glynn County, Georgia, provides an example of the complex microcosm of the plantation. Most plantation slaves lived in tiny, rude huts behind the slave owner's 'big house'. Enslaved people depended on a wide network of kin relationships to provide emotional support. Owners often encouraged slave marriages because they made life on the plantation more productive and peaceful.
