Escaped slaves faced a life of hardship, with little food, infrequent access to shelter or medical care, and the constant threat of local sheriffs, slave catchers or civilian lynch mobs. Plantation owners whose slaves ran away frequently placed runway slave advertisements in local newspapers.

A Dangerous Path to Freedom. Traveling along the Underground Railroad was a long a perilous journey for fugitive slaves to reach their freedom. They did this with little or no food and no protection from the slave catchers chasing them. Slave owners were not the only pursuers of fugitive slaves.

Typically, slaves escaped by themselves or in small groups and hid from authorities for up to several weeks. Many often returned to their owners after suffering hunger and other hardships on their own. If escaped slaves were captured, owners had to pay fees to free them from jail.

During the winter, slaves toiled for around eight hours each day, while in the summer the workday might have been as long as fourteen hours. Throughout the year slaves were also given a few holidays off, including Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost.

Slaves working household tasks they were often given bonnets of a traditional European maid style, while slaves in the field wore hand-tied sunbonnets. These head bonnets were preferred by the masters for hygiene, while also offering protection from the sun.

The laundry was boiled in these huge iron pots, beaten to remove some of the soap, and then boiled again before being hung out to dry. Since field hands were allotted as much as one hundred and fifty pounds of pork per year, slaves on even a modestly sized estate would be required to process several tons of meat.

The usual diet for slaves was cornbread and pork. Washington wrote that he did not see very much of his mother since she had to leave her children early in the morning to begin her day’s work.