Property and Freedom

Inevitably the relations between slaves and owners took many forms. One salient feature was the interdependence that grew from the lives of owners and slaves—lives both shared and parallel reflecting their respective goals. Owners defended their property interests or simply their survival. Slaves worked toward manumission (those who had the ingenuity to bring their hopes to fruition) by gradual degrees from within an oppressive system whose flexibility or weakness they were often able to exploit, using accumulated experiences passed down from their grandparents or established through other social connections. So the members of both groups lived, in the countryside and in the city. To highlight the specific interactions we need to focus on the elements and opportunities that owners perceived as the weakness of the slave system and the unruliness of the slave population, and that slaves experienced as both misery and openings for negotiation.