Enslaved cotton workers endured brutal all-day labor regimes from dawn past dusk

Evidence

Enslaved Black workers picked in long rows, bent bodies shuffling through cotton fields white in bloom. Men, women, and children picked, using both hands to hurry the work but careful not to snap a branch. Some picked in Negro cloth, their raw product having returned to them by way of New England mills. Some picked completely naked. Young children ran water across the humped rows, while overseers peered down from horses. “Hands are required to be in the cotton field as soon as it is light in the morning,” wrote Solomon Northup in his 1853 memoir, Twelve Years a Slave, “and, with the exception of ten or fifteen minutes, which is given them at noon to swallow their allowance of cold bacon, they are not permitted to be a moment idle until it is too dark to see, and when the moon is full, they often times labor till the middle of the night.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 555