One thing it is very important to remember is that life expectancy for enslaved people in colonial America and the United States was low. Their rations were, on average, meager (Landon Carter, who kept unusually detailed notes on the running of his 18th century Virginia plantation, records a weekly ration of a peck — two gallons — of dried corn and a pound of meat a week, half that for children under the age of 16. A later 19th century slaveholder, James Henry Hammond, records similar allowances of meat and meal). Their labors were intense and brutal, whether they were growing tobacco, hemp, indigo, rice, sugar, or cotton. They, for the most part, did not have the ability to vacate swampy, subtropical plantations during the “sickly season” as their wealthy white enslavers did. Medicine was crude, even when white doctors weren’t using their as a canvass for testing various quack medical theories. This means that on most large plantations, particularly in the deeper south, the death rate for enslaved workers was appallingly high. On Hammond’s plantation for example, 74 enslaved people died between 1842-46, with only 55 people born in that same time period. Life expectancy was significantly lower for enslaved people than free whites from the 18th century onward.

So what of the few who did make it to advanced age? What of Succordia, a woman who was in her late 60s when her enslaver. President of the Continental Congress Peyton Randolph, died in 1775? She’s listed as “infirm” in the inventory made of Randolph’s estate after his death, and it seems she lived in Randolph’s urban household in Virginia’s then capital, Williamsburg. Were her labors over because in her advanced years she was considered “infirm?” In short, probably not. There was always work to be done in a household like hers, and the fact that she may have been unable to grind corn or make it up and down stairs did not mean there wasn’t labor her enslavers may have expected from her. She may have been mending clothes, she may have been tending to the younger children enslaved on the property, she may have been helping to prepare meals for the 27 people enslaved on that property while the enslaved cook prepared meals for the white family. That is to say, even very elderly enslaved men and women were not necessarily exempt from labor, though the character of their labor likely changed.

In some very very rare cases, a particularly trusted enslaved person might “retire.” On Landon Carter’s property for example, a man named John who had been Landon’s gardener spent the last few years of his life in a cabin on the far side of the property, tending to a garden of his own. Slaveholders night bestow this sort of retirement as a gift every now and then, though it certainly wasn’t freedom. The enslaver could still demand labor whenever they wanted to, and Landon sometimes demanded John give up some of the produce of us s garden. John could not leave, he could not own property, he remained enslaved to Landon, even if his labor eased in his final years.

In the years leading up to the Civil War, slaveholders, increasingly fanatical in their defense of slavery, claimed that their paternalistic labor relations carried a guaranteed retirement for the people they enslaved, in contrast to the brutal labor relations of the north. But while this happened very rarely, far too many enslaved people in America died young and, of those, very few received true respite from their labors or their “obligation” to their enslaver for retirement of any kind to be widespread.