After the colonies started to thrive with the new crop exports, there was a very high demand for field workers to cultivate those crops. There were two ways that the colonists met this demand: the use of indentured servants and the use of black slaves. Indentured servants were, by definition, “persons who agreed to serve a master for a set number of years in exchange for the cost of transport to America. ” Our textbook also goes on to add that “indentured servitude was the dominant for of labor in the Chesapeake colonies before slavery.
” The use of slaves started after 1700 when the supply of indentured servants began to diminish. A slave, also by definition, is “(especially in the past) a person who is the legal property of another and is forced to obey them. ” Between 1619 and 1622, approximately 3,750 individuals were sent to the colony of Virginia. During this time, people rarely moved to Virginia as a family because the voyage was too expensive. The individuals that came were most likely indentured servants who exchanged their labor over a predetermined time for transportation to the new world.
The time that the person served was partly based on their age; the younger the servant, the longer they served. To make the bargain a fair trade, the master promised to give the workers proper care and, at the end of their service, provide them with tools and clothes according to “the custom of the country. ” However, powerful Virginians corrupted the system. The servants were promised land when they were freed, but were often cheated and became members of a growing, landless class in seventeenth-century Virginia.
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Whenever it was possible, Virginia planters bought able-bodied workers capable of hard labor, and the preference of male workers skewed the gender ratio in the colony almost six to one. This imbalance meant that, even if the servant lived to the end of his indenture, it was unlikely that he would be able to start his own family. Despite apparent legal safeguards, masters could treat their dependent workers in whatever manner they pleased; after all, these people were legally considered property.
While you start working for one person, you could end up working for a lot more after being traded or sold to another master. This early mentality of buying and selling humans makes it clear how the society could accept slavery. While some people wanted to make the trip to the new world, many of the people that landed on the shores did not. After the number of new indentured servants started to shrink, Africans were taken as slaves to cultivate the crops.
Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, this human commerce transferred over 11 million blacks to the Americas. The decision to bring African slaves to the colonies was economic and benefitted their economy greatly. The settlers of the colonies all started to associate blacks in Africa with evil itself and argued that the Bible condones slavery and that, if the slaves converted to Christianity, they would have benefitted from their loss of freedom. The first Africans arrived to the colonies as cargo from a stolen Spanish ship in 1619.
Several Africans were made slaves for life, but many were only slaves for a set period or actually purchased their own freedom. By the end of the seventeenth century, the legal status of Virginia’s black population was no longer in doubt; they were slaves for life, and so were their children. As the black population grew, lawmakers made even stricter slave codes. At this point, blacks fell into the status of slave purely because of the color of their skin. A vicious pattern of discrimination had been set in motion.
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I've discovered the real roots of America these past few days and decided that writing about it was better than killing an innocent victim to soothe the hostility I feel towards my heritage. I picked up a pen because it was safer than a gun. This was a valuable lesson I've learned from my forefathers, who did both. Others in my country react on instinct and choose not to deliberate the issue as I ...
With the new slave codes, white masters were excused to treat his black property as he saw fit. The slave owners were even excused in murdering the slaves because no person would intentionally “destroy his own estate. ” Black women constantly feared sexual violation by the owner or his sons. Life of a slave went from purely working to fearing for their lives on a daily basis. While the switch from indentured servants to slaves began as an economic venture, it seems to me that it turned into a social institution.
