I’m watching 12 years a slave, most of the slaves look like their in their 40s. But you’d assume most people are barely healthy enough to be productive by that age back before modern medicine and doing lives of hard labor.
So were the average slaves people in their teens and 20s? When did people get so old they weren’t really productive anymore? I would assume that happened in their 30s and 40s in history. What happened to older slaves? I believe southern states had laws against letting a slave be freed when they were too old (to make the slaveowner have to pay for the slaves when they got older).
I know in the south in the US, less than 5% of slaves lived to their 60s. But I’d assume many died in their 40s or 50s.
Would most people working in slavery be under 30, or were there still lots of slaves in their 30s, 40s and 50s?
They would have gotten the most work out of slaves in their teens and 20s, because that’s when they would be at the peak of their physical strength, whether they were male or female.
And they may well have looked like they were middle-aged at that age due to being forced to overwork, on top of multiple pregnancies in many of the women.
I figure they would be quite young. Many people were born into slavery. Given the kind of work they did, many probably did not make it past middle age.
The “rules” of slavery varied from one place to another, which would muddle the ages.
From what I learned in a Greek history course, the slaves of Greece were treated very badly (by the standards of slavery, which was already very bad) and in Athens many got worked to death in the silver mines.
Among the Romans, by contrast, slaves were often paid a “salary” which they would eventually use to buy themselves out of slavery. (Of course, the slavemaster would use the money to buy another slave.) I imagine that “valued” slaves were either freed or at least not treated as badly as other slaves. Freedmen became clients of their former masters, so there was still an obligation. Their children were citizens, and I’m not entirely sure if they remained clients or not. The Romans didn’t control their slaves the way the Greeks did, so they feared slave revolts, and essentially set up this “buy yourself out of slavery” system to keep the peace. There were three Servile Wars, but it appears the system largely avoided violence by slaves until the practice was banned. (I wish I had a better source than a story told by a professor, but one told me about a suggestion by a wealthy Roman to give all slaves a uniform, which was shot down because the slaves would realize their numbers and revolt. While only male citizens wore togas, they did not do so most of the time, so it might not always be clear if someone was a slave or not.)
Among some South American nations, long ago, native Indians were made into “indentured servants”, which effectively meant they were slaves for a set period, apparently seven years. They were treated so horribly that surviving that period was theoretical.
The US census figures can give you some ideas on this.
For example, in the 1860 census of Mississippi, there were 417,300 slaves enumerated, of whom 50,000 or so were over the age of 40 (versus 70,000 under the age of 5).
Meanwhile, of the white population of 349,300, approximately 50,000 were over the age of 40 and 55,000 were under 5.
I know a man who did some graduate research in the Amazon Basin, and said that the gold miners in that region often get their labor from kidnapping orphans, both boys and girls, from the favelas in the big cities, like Rio or Sao Paulo. He said that it’s almost unheard-of for those “workers” to live beyond the age of 30, in large part due to mercury poisoning suffered while extracting the gold from ore (gold dissolves in mercury, which is then burned off, leaving the gold behind). They rope the kids in by promising to feed them, and of course people will do almost anything if they’re hungry enough.
I read some discussion of the slave trade which mentioned that the Caribbean slaves were worked to death in a matter of years, hence the need for many replacements.
OTOH, slaves probably didn’t eat as well as my family so probably had worse health. Apparently cotton was 10 months of doing nothing and 2 months of hard labour harvesting cotton. During those 10 idle months, what are the odds the slaves ate adequately?
In the days before modern medicine, it would not be unusual for people to die in their 60’s even with adequate diet. My grandfather and two great uncles born around 1900 had scarlet fever and died of weak hearts at about 70, my dad was healthy and died in his 90’s, my uncles are still going strong in their 90’s. plus without good care, a lot of children died before the age of 5.
In Mississippi 2.7% were under 1, 13.8% were 1-5, 14% 5-10, 13.3% 10-15, 11.8% 15-20, 19.5% 20-30, 11.6% 30-40, 7% 40-50, 3.14% 50-60, 2% 60-70, .5% 70-80, .24% 80+.
Mississippi was one of the worst state for slave conditions because it was mostly cotton plantations and had a bad climate.
Interestingly, the age distribution for slaves and whites in Mississippi isn’t all that different (nowhere near as different as I was expecting):
Age Range Whites Slaves
0 to 9 31.24% 30.63%
10 to 19 25.35% 25.16%
20 to 29 17.69% 19.52%
30 to 39 11.10% 11.68%
40 to 49 7.32% 7.02%
50 to 59 4.35% 3.17%
60 to 69 2.07% 2.02%
70 to 79 0.69% 0.55%
80 + 0.19% 0.26%
Thats really interesting. It implies that 59% of slaves were age 5-30. With another 17% who were under 5. Interesting to know that even a few centuries ago, so many people were in their teens and 20s and so few were over age 40. Nowadays those people are considered young.
Most people in the South were still working hard labor at the time. Plantation owners were a small percentage of the white population so it’s not like the whites were mostly sitting around doing nothing.
If a slave didn’t work hard, he’d be beaten. If a subsistence farmer didn’t work hard, he’d starve. Depending on how much of a penny pincher a slave owner might have been, the slaves might have starved too.
My grandma worked on a farm before the great depression, her father leasing land from a land owner to whom he had to pay back most of what he grew (in essence, serfdom).
My grandma says that there’s nothing whatsoever quaint or positive about that sort of lifestyle. It’s just back breaking labor, very little sleep, and hungry stomachs. I’d imagine that that’s about the lifestyle of your average person throughout the South in the 1800s.
In Rome? There are hot springs around Rome, but my information is that Rome itself isn’t built on that kind of geology, took water in aqueducts, and is hollowed out underneath by aqueduct, sewerage, and mining for the material of Roman cement. the catacombs, as I understand it, were a result not the cause.
I was, and the Caracalla thermal baths are really an impressive sight, even now that all that is left are ruins and partial buildings. The entire complex measures ca. 330x330 meters.
Rome, different from Naples and many other locations specifically preferred by the Romans for that reason, did and does not have hot springs as there is no volcanism etc. in the area. 100 slaves had to keep the 49 ovens in the thermal baths fired up at all times using an estimated 10 metric tons of wood per day
One should assume that working there would at least not meet modern health standards. Whether it was an incarnation of hell is hard to judge from today.