Also slaves lived in such bad conditions that they caught diseases such as Yaws, measles, whooping cough, dropsy and dysentery.
Food/diet.
Slaves usually received a monthly allowance of corn meal and salt-herrings and about eight pounds of pork or fish. Some plantation owners gave their slaves a small piece of land, a truck-patch, where they could grow vegetables. If you were a house slave you would receive better food then people who work in the fields. In some cases every Monday morning you would have a certain quantity of Indian corn handed out to you; this they grind with a hand mill, and boil or use the meal as they like. The evening dinner that was severed at two or three consists generally of black-eyed peas soup, as it is called. About a quarter of the peas were boiled in a large pan, and a small piece of meat, just to flavour the soup, is put into the pan. At dinnertime the children would eat like pigs out of troughs, and being supplied sparingly, invariably fight and quarrel with one another over their meals. .
Punishments.
Being whipped punished people and made sure that they would not do it again; after they whipped them they would be put in the smoke house. The bigger the offence the more times you would be whipped, sometimes they whipped you to death. People would be whipped for little reasons. Sometimes they would be whipped for not working hard enough at their job or for talking to another slave. This is what someone would look like after occasionally being whipped. The whips were sliced into little strips so that when they get whipped the little bits slit you and made you bleed.
Religion.
In the South, black people were not usually allowed to attend church services. Black people in the North were much more likely to attend church services.
One of the main reasons why masters did not want their slaves to become Christians was because the Christian belief involved the Bible. They feared that slaves might interpret the teachings of Jesus Christ as being in favour of equality.