Sugar plantations organized slaves into rigidly stratified work-gangs laboring from dawn to dusk

Evidence

For plantation owners and managers, the slaves were laboring machines, cogs in a system meant to produce as much sugar or coffee as possible. “It is in the time and strength of the negroes that the fortune of the planter resides,” wrote one contemporary commentator. The majority of slaves spent their entire lives doing harsh and difficult labor in the fields. On sugar plantations they were organized into several ateliers, or work-gangs, each under the command of a driver. The strongest slaves were assigned the hardest agricultural tasks: digging canals, tilling the soil, planting cane, and harvesting it. A second group of children and older slaves, as well as new arrivals from Africa who were often weak from the middle passage and more prone to disease, took on more varied tasks, such as growing provisions, fertilizing planted cane, or trimming cane plants. Field laborers started work at five, stopped for a few hours at midday, then returned to their labor until sundown. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 165

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the atelier work-gang organization central to plantation production.