evidence: Enslavers used enslaved people for a wide range of labor, though the largest number of enslaved people labored on large plantations to harvest agricultural commodities such as cotton and sugar. But slavery was not limited to plantations, and people who resided in urban areas also held enslaved people and required them to labor in a number of different roles. [...] Facing this legal apparatus, as well as the violence that enslavers routinely meted out, enslaved people nonetheless managed to defiantly survive, build families, and create communities. Enslaved people on plantations and elsewhere often organized their own religious practices and operated their own systems of exchange and commerce. In other words, even against the reality of laws and violence that tried to erase their humanitiy, enslaved people strove to control their daily lives as much as possible. [...] Of the other presidents who owned slaves, Zachary Taylor benefited the most from slave labor. He had inherited two slaves from his father, but later purchased a plantation in Mississippi that included a large number of enslaved persons. Taylor served only two years as president before dying in office, but he had enslaved servants in the White House while also supervising his Mississippi plantation’s operations from the nation’s capital. Like Jackson, Taylor demanded that his overseers treat enslaved people with care in order to protect his financial investment, rather than out of humanitarian concerns.