Another way southern slave drivers used fear to make slaves work was by separating them from their families. If a slave was not working to his maximum potential or was being difficult, the driver could sell the slave to a different plantation further south. Being sent further south was always a great fear of the slaves for a few reasons. One, it took them further away from their family as well as from the free north. Secondly, it was rumored that slavery in the deeper south was much crueler and harder work. Virginian plantation owners and North Carolinian plantation owners often threatened to send their slaves down to the excruciatingly hot southern state of Alabama, while the Alabama slave owners threatened to send their slaves to the swamps and hard labor of New Orleans. Another method southerners used to get slaves to cooperate was to let them eventually buy their freedom. This proved to be a successful method and involved the slave making a very small amount of money for extra work that he did for the landowner. He would be awarded a very small amount of money that, if saved, after many years could eventually buy his freedom. This system did have a few problems, often after ten or twenty years of saving the slave's owner would die and his contract for freedom would no longer be valid. Another problem was that even after the slave bought his freedom he would not be recognized as free and would be made a slave by some other plantation owner.
The lives the slave lived was by no means an easy one, often slaves ran away. Most of these slaves were caught and killed. This was because there was no clear code or law stating the punishment for a runaway slave, or the punishment for killing a slave. Each southern state eventually came up with its own doctrines but they were hardly distinguishable from one another. All of the states adopted the same moral principles regarding slavery. Slaves were given essentially no rights and the respective punishments for white and slave murderers was very reflective the peculiar institution and the ante-bellum south.
