# Were slaves ever allowed to “retire” **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [October 10, 2020, 6:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-slaves-ever-allowed-to-retire/922647 "2020-10-10T18:07:24Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Moriarty](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/moriarty/32/49_2.png) [@Moriarty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Moriarty)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2020, 6:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-slaves-ever-allowed-to-retire/922647/1 "2020-10-10T18:07:24Z")
The life of an American slaves was undoubtedly brutal, even if the abuse wasn’t considered. Field work must have been exhausting, and I imagine that stress fractures or pulled muscles were common. Even house work offered little reprieve, since chores in those days often involved laborious work. For that reason, it is my understanding that most slaves did not live exceptionally long. But some surely did. And as things like arthritis or cataracts develop over time, I bet that even mundane tasks like peeling potatoes or sewing become impossible. So, what became of these people. Were they ever allowed to while away their time around the slave quarters in their final years? ---
**Author:** ![Arkcon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/96bed5/32.png) [@Arkcon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Arkcon)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2020, 6:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-slaves-ever-allowed-to-retire/922647/2 "2020-10-10T18:36:24Z")
For a reference source, you can read what Booker T. Washington wrote about his youth as a slave. Basically, an elderly slave watched him when he was a toddler, and a little older. (He saw infants strapped to enslaved mother’s backs, during field labor, for ease of nursing, and older slave children were send to work as needed.) There’s also the concept of injured, or crippled slaves, being sold “by the dozen”, so any slave in that condition would be one of the dozen, from that “the dozens” or snaps, or ‘yo mama’ jokes arise. [Dozens (game) - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dozens#Origins) But yes, everyone at this time, worked to their capability. Even those who were enslaved. If you can’t perform field work, there is housekeeping, cooking, childcare, crafting and other things to do. I can’t find a non-paywalled reference, but its widely reported that Jack Daniel learned to make whiskey, not from a Lutheran preacher as the myth went, but from a crippled black slave. ---
**Author:** ![mhendo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mhendo/32/3159_2.png) [@mhendo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mhendo)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2020, 7:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-slaves-ever-allowed-to-retire/922647/3 "2020-10-10T19:58:00Z")
Here’s how Frederick Douglass, in his [autobiography](https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/douglass/douglass.html), describes the situation faced by his grandmother in her old age: > [@](#): > > If any one thing in my experience, more than another, served to deepen my conviction of the infernal character of slavery, and to fill me with unutterable loathing of slaveholders, it was their base ingratitude to my poor old grandmother. She had served my old master faithfully from youth to old age. She had been the source of all his wealth; she had peopled his plantation with slaves; she had become a great grandmother in his service. She had rocked him in infancy, attended him in childhood, served him through life, and at his death wiped from his icy brow the cold death-sweat, and closed his eyes forever. She was nevertheless left a slave–a slave for life–a slave in the hands of strangers; and in their hands she saw her children, her grandchildren, and her great-grand children, divided, like so many sheep, without being gratified with the small privilege of a single word, as to their or her own destiny. And, to cap the climax of their base ingratitude and fiendish barbarity, my grandmother, who was now very old, having outlived my old master and all his children, having seen the beginning and end of all of them, and her present owners finding she was of but little value, her frame already racked with the pains of old age, and complete helplessness fast stealing over her once active limbs, they took her to the woods, built her a little hut, put up a little mud-chimney, and then made her welcome to the privilege of supporting herself there in perfect loneliness; thus virtually turning her out to die! Not exactly retirement as we understand the term. ---
**Author:** ![smilingbandit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/4491bb/32.png) [@smilingbandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smilingbandit)\ **Post date:** [October 11, 2020, 2:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-slaves-ever-allowed-to-retire/922647/4 "2020-10-11T02:21:05Z")
While personal recollections may be vivid, they also may be inaccurate. And even at best, they do not clarify what was usually done. The firs thing to understand is that retirement wasn’t really a phase of life for most people, slaves or otherwise. People would often work less as they passed their 50’s, but they generally didn’t stop entirely until they were disabled or, well, _dead_, or if they were were wealthy enough to deal. That being said, slaveowners ran their slaves far harder than necessary, because, well, they were trying to get the maximum work for the minimum expense. Statistically, even overall healthy adult slaves rarely hit age 65. This was due as much to bad diet and medical knowledge as anything else, but few owners were in the habit of providing for older slaves as a matter of charity. They would end up doing work, and given the relatively cheap cost of maintaining a slave (compared to purchasing one) they were likely still profitable. ---
**Author:** ![Melbourne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b5e925/32.png) [@Melbourne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Melbourne)\ **Post date:** [October 11, 2020, 10:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-slaves-ever-allowed-to-retire/922647/5 "2020-10-11T22:47:06Z")
> [@mhendo](#): > > built her a little hut, put up a little mud-chimney, The traditional ‘Marxist’ view of the American Civil War was that it represented a stage in the inevitable ‘scientific’ progression from a slave economy – where you were responsible for the slave from birth through death – to the more economically efficient ‘capitalist’ economy, where you old paid wages for work – and had no responsibility at all other than working wages. We scarcely need to discuss the morality of slavery, but it’s not always clear that emancipation made things better for old people. From “Life and Labour of the People in London” > “The street-sellers of boot and stay-laces and of such things as sewing cotton, threads and tapes, when sold separately from more valuable articles, are children and old people, some of whom are infirm, and some blind. The children have, in some instances, been bred to the streets; the old people probably are worn out in street-trades requiring health and strength, and so adopt a less laborious calling, or else they have been driven to it, either from comparatively better circumstances, or by some privation or affliction, in order to avoid the workhouse.” > [@mhendo](#): > > Not exactly retirement as we understand the term. Booth’s report and ‘Poverty Maps’ were largely responsible for that change: > Year after year, Booth promoted his pension scheme, in articles and books and speeches, citing always the volumes of statistics he had collected on the relation between old age and poverty. Vigorously opposing him were the spokesmen of the charity organizations who argued that a state “dole” was no substitute for personal guidance by social workers, that the poor simply lacked the strength to be independent. But the demand for pensions mounted, especially from the burgeoning trade union movement, and by the turn of the century, the Liberal Party had incorporated Booth’s proposal into its platform. In 1908, two years after the smashing Liberal victory which ushered in the British welfare state, Parliament passed the Old Age Pensions Act. [Charles Booth’s London](http://digamoo.free.fr/booth1969.pdf) ---
**Author:** ![DocCathode](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/doccathode/32/18773_2.png) [@DocCathode](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DocCathode)\ **Post date:** [October 11, 2020, 11:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-slaves-ever-allowed-to-retire/922647/6 "2020-10-11T23:48:24Z")
Before I read the thread, my thought was ‘Slave owners worked them until they were unprofitable then cast them out under guise of freeing them’. Douglas’ account jibes perfectly with that. When her owner decided that she was not worth the cost of food, he cast her out. Semi Hijack The original zombie stories come from Haiti. The fear was not of being attacked by zombies. It was of becoming a zombie. A slave could at least dream of freedom in the afterlife. A zombie is a slave FOREVER. ---
**Author:** ![MandaJo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ac91a4/32.png) [@MandaJo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MandaJo)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2020, 12:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-slaves-ever-allowed-to-retire/922647/7 "2020-10-12T00:34:51Z")
It’s worth mentioning that slaveowners often claimed that their cradle-to-grave relationship with their slaves was morally superior to the “wage slavery” of the North. This is not supported by the sources, but the story still lingers. The story of Mammy, passing peacefully in her old age, surrounded by the white children she loved more than her own kids, was a powerfully reassuring myth for the Sputh. ---
**Author:** ![mhendo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mhendo/32/3159_2.png) [@mhendo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mhendo)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2020, 12:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-slaves-ever-allowed-to-retire/922647/8 "2020-10-12T00:50:00Z")
> [@MandaJo](#): > > It’s worth mentioning that slaveowners often claimed that their cradle-to-grave relationship with their slaves was morally superior to the “wage slavery” of the North. This is not supported by the sources, but the story still lingers. Yep. One of the primary sources I have my college US History students read is a selection from George Fitzhugh’s _Sociology for the South, or, The Failure of Free Society_, where he describes the Southern slave system as “a form, and the very best form, of socialism,” one that eliminates all of the nasty competition and insecurity of northern capitalism. You can see something similar in this 1850 image, “Slavery as it exists in America; Slavery as it exists in England,” which contrasts happy and healthy and grateful black slaves with the poor and weak and downtrodden English working classes. > **[Slavery as it exists in America. Slavery as it exists in England](https://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/ds.12543/)** > > 1 print : lithograph on wove paper ; 44.8 x 27 cm. (image) | A challenge to the Northern abolitionist view of the institution of slavery, favorably contrasting the living conditions of American slaves (above) with the lot of the industrial poor in... ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2020, 12:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-slaves-ever-allowed-to-retire/922647/9 "2020-10-12T00:52:10Z")
> [@Melbourne](#): > > We scarcely need to discuss the morality of slavery, but it’s not always clear that emancipation made things better for old people. Free people had the right to sell their own labor and keep the money, setting aside some for their old age when they could no longer work. Slaves had owners who took all of their labor for their own ends and gave nothing to the slave to put aside. The other social network of the era was families. People raised children in the expectation that those children would provide for their needs in turn when they grew old. But again, slaves didn’t have this; their owners sold off their children. ---
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2020, 4:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-slaves-ever-allowed-to-retire/922647/10 "2020-10-12T16:46:07Z")
> [@Arkcon](#): > > I can’t find a non-paywalled reference, but its widely reported that Jack Daniel learned to make whiskey, not from a Lutheran preacher as the myth went, but from a crippled black slave. No reference to him being crippled that I can find… > **[Nathan "Nearest" Green](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_%22Nearest%22_Green)** > > Nathan "Nearest" Green (c. 1820 – unknown), incorrectly spelled "Nearis" in an 1880 census, was an American head stiller, more commonly referred to as a master distiller. Born into slavery and emancipated after the American Civil War, he taught his distilling techniques to Jack Daniel, founder of the Jack Daniel's Tennessee whiskey distillery. Green was hired as the first master distiller for Jack Daniel Distillery, and he is the first African-American master distiller on record in the Uni So... > **[NEAREST GREEN](https://www.nearestgreen.com/about-nearest-green/)** > > The story of Nathan “Nearest” Green is one of the most remarkable yet forgotten stories of our lifetime. ---
**Author:** ![DPRK](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4491bb/32.png) [@DPRK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DPRK)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2020, 6:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-slaves-ever-allowed-to-retire/922647/11 "2020-10-12T18:33:11Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > Free people had the right to sell their own labor and keep the money, setting aside some for their old age when they could no longer work. Slaves had owners who took all of their labor for their own ends and gave nothing to the slave to put aside. > > The other social network of the era was families. People raised children in the expectation that those children would provide for their needs in turn when they grew old. But again, slaves didn’t have this; their owners sold off their children. One interesting fact about Roman slaves is that some of them were somehow able to save money and/or buy their freedom, even though legally speaking everything belonged to the master. And that, as patron, the former owner had some responsibility for his freed slaves and was not supposed to allow them to become destitute. All this was, presumably, not simply out of the kindness of their hearts; perhaps they did not want old slaves and freedmen to become public wards. ---
**Author:** ![Kropotkin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kropotkin/32/18045_2.png) [@Kropotkin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kropotkin)\ **Post date:** [October 15, 2020, 12:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-slaves-ever-allowed-to-retire/922647/12 "2020-10-15T00:21:23Z")
And Fitzhugh seems unaware of the notion of “socialism” as “the social, not individual, ownership of the means of production” ---
**Author:** ![md-2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9d8465/32.png) [@md-2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md-2000)\ **Post date:** [October 15, 2020, 3:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-slaves-ever-allowed-to-retire/922647/13 "2020-10-15T15:45:34Z")
One discussion I recall mentioned that the life of a coton plantation slave was firstly, a horrible job when it was time to pick cotton - the buds where sharp and pricked the fingers, making them complete callused - hence the term cotton pickin’ hands. But the other interesting aspect was that apart from some maintenance, there was nothing to do for 10 months of the year. Hired hands would not wait around getting no pay, and plantation owners could not afford to pay workers to do nothing. Hence, slavery was the economic choice - and during those down times, the only expense was a minimal amount of food to keep them alive until the next harvest. A lifetime of starvation and minimal health care in the days of regular epidemics probably contributed to most dying early. (Reminds me also of the Malcolm Gladwell description of the life of overtaxed French peasants, who other than planting and harvest, simply lay around doing almost nothing as the nobility left them barely enough food to survive) ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [October 15, 2020, 5:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-slaves-ever-allowed-to-retire/922647/14 "2020-10-15T17:26:56Z")
> [@md-2000](#): > > One discussion I recall mentioned that the life of a coton plantation slave was firstly, a horrible job when it was time to pick cotton - the buds where sharp and pricked the fingers, making them complete callused - hence the term cotton pickin’ hands. But the other interesting aspect was that apart from some maintenance, there was nothing to do for 10 months of the year. I’ve heard otherwise. I’ve read that while harvest time was the busiest time of the season, cotton plants needed a lot of ongoing care throughout the year. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [October 15, 2020, 5:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-slaves-ever-allowed-to-retire/922647/15 "2020-10-15T17:31:51Z")
Cotton fields had to be plowed, and [they also had to be hoed to control weeds.](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/4a/f4/e4/4af4e401b2b0645d7e20b973b1135157.jpg). It seems like there would be significant work through the growing season. ---
**Author:** ![mhendo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mhendo/32/3159_2.png) [@mhendo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mhendo)\ **Post date:** [October 15, 2020, 6:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-slaves-ever-allowed-to-retire/922647/16 "2020-10-15T18:04:40Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > I’ve heard otherwise. I’ve read that while harvest time was the busiest time of the season, cotton plants needed a lot of ongoing care throughout the year. Yep. Absolutely. There was, as **Colibri** states, a lot of heavy and arduous plowing and hoeing work to be done before the picking season started. The narratives of slaves like Solomon Northup and Charles Ball, among others, talk about this in some detail, and northerner Frederick Law Olmstead also talked about hoeing in his accounts of traveling through the slave South, written in the 1850s. Here’s Charles Ball [talking about hoeing cotton](https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/ballslavery/ball.html): > [@](#): > > We walked nearly a mile through one vast cotton field, before we arrived at the place of our intended day’s labour. At last the overseer stopped at the side of the field, and calling to several of the men by name, ordered them to call their companies and turn into their rows. The work we had to do today was to hoe and weed cotton, for the last time; and the men whose names had been called, and who were, I believe, eleven in number, were designated as captains, each of whom had under his command a certain number of the other bands. The captain was the foreman of his company, and those under his command had to keep up with him. Each of the men and women had to take one row; and two, and in some cases where they were very small, three of the children had one. The first captain, whose name was Simon, took the first row,-- and the other captains were compelled to keep up with him. By this means the overseer had nothing to do but to keep Simon hard at work, and he was certain that all the others must work equally hard. Simon was a stout, strong man, apparently about thirty-five years of age; and for some reason unknown to me, I was ordered to take the row next to his. The overseer with his whip in his hand walked about the field after us, to see that our work was well done. Here’s Olmsted’s [account of cotton hoe gangs:](https://books.google.com/books?id=aHIYAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA81#v=onepage&q&f=false) > [@](#): > > Throughout the Southwest the negroes, as a rule, appear to be worked much harder that in the eastern and northern slave States. I do not think they accomplish as much daily, as agricultural laborers at the North usually do, but they certainly labor much harder, and more unremittingly. They are constantly and steadily driven up to their work, and the stupid, plodding, machine-like manner in which they labor, is painful to witness. This was especially the case with the hoe-gangs. One of them numbered nearly two hundred hands (for the force of two plantations was working together), moving across the field in parallel lines, with a considerable degree of precision. I repeatedly rode through the lines at a canter, without producing the smallest change or interruption in the dogged action of the laborers, or causing one of them, so far as I could see, to lift an eye from the ground… I think it told a more painful story than any I had ever heard, of the cruelty of slavery. It was emphasized by a tall and powerful Negro who walked to and fro in the rear of the line, frequently cracking his whip, and calling out in the surliest manner, to one and another, ‘Shove your hoe, there! Shove your hoe!’ But I never saw him strike anyone with the whip. And in one of Olmsted’s [other works](https://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/olmsted/olmsted.html): > [@](#): > > I saw women working again, in large gangs, with men. In one case they were distributing manure–ditch scrapings it appeared to be–and the mode of operation was this: the manure had been already carted into heaps upon the ground; a number of the women were carrying it from the heap in baskets, on their heads, and one in her apron, and spreading it with their hands between the ridges on which the cotton grew last year; the rest followed with great, long-handled, heavy, clumsy hoes, and pulled down the ridges over the manure, and so made new ridges for the next planting. I asked a young planter who continued with me a good part of the day, why they did not use plows. He said this was rather rough land, and a plow wouldn’t work in it very well. It was light soil, and smooth enough for a parade ground. The fact is, in certain parts of South Carolina, a plow is yet an almost unknown instrument of tillage. And cotton was not the only thing that needed tending on cotton plantations. Yes, the slaves were provided with food, but that had to do most of the work related to raising and processing that food themselves. Newer or expanding cotton plantations, especially in the Mississippi delta region, and in Texas, also required extensive and back-breaking tree-clearing operations in order to open new land up for cotton production. Growing up in Australia, I went to an agricultural high school, and had a few friends whose families owned cotton farms. While cotton production is largely mechanized, in the 1980s these farmers still hired people to walk up and down the rows with hoes, making sure that there were no weeds or thistles that would be picked up by the harvester and mixed in with the cotton. I spent some time hoeing cotton as a summer job, and it is incredibly hard work, even for a fit and well-fed 17- or 18-year-old, as I was at the time. ---
**Author:** ![Odesio](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/odesio/32/20003_2.png) [@Odesio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Odesio)\ **Post date:** [October 15, 2020, 6:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-slaves-ever-allowed-to-retire/922647/17 "2020-10-15T18:24:40Z")
> [@MandaJo](#): > > It’s worth mentioning that slaveowners often claimed that their cradle-to-grave relationship with their slaves was morally superior to the “wage slavery” of the North. This is not supported by the sources, but the story still lingers. The story of Mammy, passing peacefully in her old age, surrounded by the white children she loved more than her own kids, was a powerfully reassuring myth for the Sputh. There’s probably a grain of truth to this somewhere. Human beings being what they are, I imagine it’s very easy for a black servant charged with raising white children to develop some affection for them and for that affection to be genuinely returned. During the Haitian revolution, there are accounts of slaves saving their masters’ lives by warning them that angry crowds were approaching and they needed to GTFO to the mountains while they could. I don’t believe any of those slaves yearned for freedom any less than other Haitians, but they didn’t want to see their masters, mistresses, or their children killed. Anyway, I don’t mean to imply that the social dynamics weren’t fucked up. The institution of slavery here in the United States was brutal. ---
**Author:** ![smilingbandit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/4491bb/32.png) [@smilingbandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smilingbandit)\ **Post date:** [October 15, 2020, 10:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-slaves-ever-allowed-to-retire/922647/18 "2020-10-15T22:40:04Z")
I have written, and am writing, quite about about the war and the Antebellum period, and the more I learn the less I know. (Rimshot!) Nonetheless, **Odesio** , you are correct. Most of the stories that slave masters, however self-serving they were, told had a grain of truth to them. Sometimes only a grain but the element of truth made the lie go down far easier. In addition, they were aided by a complete lack of any kind of systematic or coherent thought about it, which allowed for all sort of hypocrisy as long as the mind could be wonderfully distracted from it. (Also, the fact that it would really, _really_ hurt their income and social power.) ---
**Author:** ![Pantastic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/3bc359/32.png) [@Pantastic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pantastic)\ **Post date:** [October 16, 2020, 4:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-slaves-ever-allowed-to-retire/922647/19 "2020-10-16T16:10:03Z")
> [@DPRK](#): > > One interesting fact about Roman slaves is that some of them were somehow able to save money and/or buy their freedom, even though legally speaking everything belonged to the master. Romans (and most other ancient cultures) didn’t view slavery as a permanent condition of a category of people; they saw it as a temporary condition applied to captives, criminals, debtors, and the like, and their view of what justified it was ‘might makes right’ or ‘don’t commit crimes’ or ‘worship better gods that can protect you’. Post-Enlightenment slavery had to get around the ‘all men are created equal’ concept, so came up with the narrative of races and the idea that some were superior to others. That’s also a big reason why Romans were happy to have educated people as slaves (often as tutors for their own children) while Americans generally forbade teaching enslaved people to read and write. > [@](#): > > All this was, presumably, not simply out of the kindness of their hearts; perhaps they did not want old slaves and freedmen to become public wards. Romans (and most slaveowners) were primarily scared of slave revolts, where they might die, and even if they won their precious property would lose it’s value by dying in the revolt or being executed as an example to others. ---
**Author:** ![Melbourne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b5e925/32.png) [@Melbourne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Melbourne)\ **Post date:** [October 17, 2020, 7:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-slaves-ever-allowed-to-retire/922647/20 "2020-10-17T07:22:59Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > The other social network of the era was families. Here’s Winston Churchill talking about the women who cared for him when he was a child: > At this time Mrs. Everest died. As soon as I heard she was seriously ill I travelled up to London to see her. She lived with her sister’s family in North London. She knew she was in danger, but her only anxiety was for me. There had been a heavy shower of rain. My jacket was wet. When she felt it with her hands she was greatly alarmed for fear I should catch cold. The jacket had to be taken off and thoroughly dried before she was calm again. Her only desire was to see my brother Jack, and this unhappily could not be arranged. I set out for London to get a good specialist, and the two doctors consulted together upon the case, which was one of peritonitis. I had to return to Aldershot by the midnight train for a very early morning parade. As soon as it was over, I returned to her bedside. She still knew me, but she gradually became unconscious. Death came very easily {87}to her. She had lived such an innocent and loving life of service to others and held such a simple faith, that she had no fears at all, and did not seem to mind very much. She had been my dearest and most intimate friend during the whole of the twenty years I had lived. I now telegraphed to the clergyman with whom she had served nearly a quarter of a century before. He lived in Cumberland. He had a long memory for faithful service. We met at the graveside. He had become an Archdeacon. He did not bring little Ella with him. > When I think of the fate of poor old women, so many of whom have no one to look after them and nothing to live on at the end of their lives, I am glad to have had a hand in all that structure of pensions and insurance which no other country can rival and which is especially a help to them. However, there was the [Governesses’ Benevolent Institution](https://chestofbooks.com/food/household/Woman-Encyclopaedia-2/Societies-Which-Help-Women-And-Children-The-Governesses-Benevolent-Institution.html) > "To many, if not most, of the women who are obliged to earn a livelihood as governesses the prospect of an unprovided-for old age is an ever-present nightmare. The Governesses’ Benevolent Institution, which has been in existence for some sixty years, was founded for the purpose of giving relief to ladies in this position. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-slaves-ever-allowed-to-retire/922647.md?page=2)