What We Don’t Usually See: My Thoughts on the Day-to-Day Life of Enslaved People

By Ian Portuondo
Talking About Freedom Blog — December 2025

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A Perspective We Rarely Focus On

After watching my classmate’s video on the day-to-day life of enslaved people, I realized how little we usually talk about the daily realities of slavery. In class, we focus on big events—laws, rebellion, abolition—but not the ordinary routines people lived through every single day. This project made those experiences feel more personal and human.

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Life Defined by Exhaustion and Survival

The video showed how enslaved people woke up before sunrise and worked until they were completely exhausted. They slept in overcrowded shacks with dirt floors and had almost no time to rest. Clothing was basic and scarce. In the winter, many had nothing more than a single blanket to keep warm.

Seeing these details laid out made me understand the constant physical and emotional strain enslaved people lived with. Their homes weren’t places of comfort—they were places of survival.

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Inside the Slave Market

Another section that stood out was the description of the antebellum slave market. Enslaved people were inspected, priced, and sold like commodities. Families were separated without warning. Everything was recorded in ledgers as if they weren’t human beings at all.

But even within this system, the video emphasized how enslaved people resisted. They preserved their culture, protected family ties, and showed incredible resilience.

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Risking Everything for Freedom

The video also explained how enslaved people attempted escape. They followed the stars at night while bounty hunters used dogs and footprints to track them down. Strangers sometimes hid them, risking their own lives to help. This part of the video showed how desperate and brave someone had to be to even attempt escaping slavery.

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A Wider View: Slavery Beyond the U.S.

I also learned about slavery in Britain. The story of James Somerset, whose court case ruled that slavery wasn't supported by common law, was interesting—especially because the British slave trade still continued after. It wasn’t until people like William Wilberforce pushed Parliament that Britain passed the Slave Trade Act of 1807 and eventually the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.

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My Final Takeaway

Overall, the video helped me understand the human side of slavery—the exhaustion, the trauma, the resilience, and the small everyday moments that history books usually skip over. It gave me a deeper appreciation of just how hard life was for enslaved people, and how strong they had to be just to survive each day.

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Ai Dislaimer: In class I watched a video made by one of my fellow students. During which I took good notes. I then uploaded the notes to ChatGPT and gave it this promt. "Write a reactionary blog post around 300 words. In my class I took notes on a video and captured my reactions and the info shared in the video. Use these notes to write the post."