Essay on African Slaves and Indentured Servants

Other Europeans, Native Americans and West Africans were the groups thought to be most suitable for the economic demand of labor. Many of the early views of West Africans were received through the bible until written accounts of encounters with these people were made. These written accounts of the encounters of West Africans led to the idea West Africans could be brought over and sold in the Americas to work in chattel slavery. This in turn made them the ultimate choice for the labor force of the English. However the famous sale of twenty Africans to the colonists at Jamestown in 1619 by Dutch slave traders did not equate to the introduction of chattel slavery just yet. Many early African slaves were treated similarly to indentured servants brought in from England. They could work the land for a set number of years then after their term was up be freed and given a piece of land. Indentured servitude was not hereditary but their contract could be sold, bartered, given away or gambled away. These contracts gave away the servant’s labor but it did not give away the servant’s person. Despite this African presence, slavery was slow to arrive in Virginia because the mortality rate for indentured servants was so high during the first decades of the Virginia colony. Indentured servitude remained the primary source of labor in Virginia through the 1680s, until economic considerations made slaves the cheaper alternative.

The founding of the majority of American colonies was either for an economic profit or for religious freedom. To make the colonies founded for an economic profit, a large work force was needed. For many religious colonies that turned into huge economic powers, they used the Protestant work ethic. Other colonies decided to use indentured servants originally, but this ended up turning into a large use of slaves for their work force in some colonies. Despite slavery in Britain’s North American colonies originally pertaining to only the economic aspects of the society, it actually developed into an essential part of

A plantation economy, an economy founded on an agricultural mass production like tobacco, sustained the source of income of the Chesapeake regions, consisting Virginia, Maryland, and northern North Carolina. The early settlers soon realized the urgent need for labor in the New World. Due to the fact that many potential immigrants could not afford an expensive trip across the Atlantic, the Virginia Company developed the system of indentured servitude to attract common laborers. Since tobacco required intensive hand labor all year round, indentured servants have become vital to the colonial economy. "Virginia Servant and Slave Laws" represent the elaborate efforts of masters' to profit from indentured servants and slaves against runaway and

Often, people became indentured slaves due to hardships that were inevitable during their time. Two examples of such people are John Harrower and Richard Frethorne. While John Harrower lived a somewhat respectable and comfortable life as and indentured servant, Richard Frethorne had a much more difficult time. One reason for this may be because of their time differences; Jon Harrower is from the late 1700s, while Richard Frethorne is from the mid 1600s. Between John Harrower and Richard Frethorne , there are several similarities and contrasting differences which classify them both as indentured slaves living very different lives. Both men experienced similar hardships, different home lives and

Economically, slavery allowed for an increased source of income that indentured servitude could not compete with. Shortly following the founding of Jamestown, indentured servants paid their way to the colonies with the promise of a designated time of labor upon arrival.

Slavery was created in pre-revolutionary America at the start of the seventeenth century. By the time of the Revolution, slavery had undergone drastic changes and was nothing at all what it was like when it was started. In fact the beginning of slavery did not even start with the enslavement of African Americans. Not only did the people who were enslaved change, but the treatment of slaves and the culture that each generation lived in, changed as well.

In the 1600's, tobacco became the main source of income for most of the colonists. The economic prosperity of the colonies was primarily dependent on the amount of tobacco produced. The growing of tobacco needed large amount of land, with a large stable work force. The increased demand for a large, stable work force combined with the availability and low price of African slaves, led to the use of slavery in the colonies. To the planter, slavery was the ideal form of labor that would be most beneficial to productivity of his crop.#

Slavery and indentured servitude were the primary means of help for the wealthy in America. Either as a slave or as an indentured servant a person was required to work in the fields maintain crops, as a house servant or as the owner of debtor so chooses. The treatment of both was very similar, but the method and means to which they came to America were uniquely different as the following examples will illustrate.

Slave as defined by the dictionary means that a slave is a person who is the property of and wholly subject to another; a bond servant. So why is it that every time you go and visit a historical place like the Hampton-Preston mansion in Columbia South Carolina, the Lowell Factory where the mill girls work in Massachusetts or the Old town of Williamsburg Virginia they only talk about the good things that happened at these place, like such things as who owned them, who worked them, how they were financed and what life was like for the owners. They never talk about the background information of the lower level people like the slaves or servants who helped take care and run these places behind the scenes.

Before the 1680's, indentured servitude was the primary source of labor in the newly developed colonies. There

Indentured servants were used in early colonial times as a means of passage to the new world. The cash crops of the early settlers were exhaustingly labor intensive. In fact, U.S. History (2015) indicated that “the growth of tobacco, rice, and indigo and the plantation economy created a tremendous need for labor in Southern English America” (p. 1). The technology did not exist at the time for machinery that clears the ground and works the land as it does today. The work had to be done by hand; from clearing and prepping the fields to harvesting the crops, it was all manual labor for which the new land did not have ample supply of.

Slavery has a lot of effects on African Americans today. History of slavery is marked for civil rights. Indeed, slavery began with civilization. With farming’s development, war could be taken as slavery. Slavery that lives in Western go back 10,000 years to Mesopotamia. Today, most of them move to Iraq, where a male slave had to focus on cultivation. Female slaves were as sexual services for white people also their masters at that time, having freedom only when their masters died.

           Chesapeake and the other Southern colonies were agrarian societies. The main crop in Chesapeake and North Virginia was tobacco, while in the Deep South, mainly in Georgia and South Carolina, the main crops were rice and cotton. The expansion of these crops led to an increased demand of a large force labor. At the first they hired indentured servants. These were young people who paid for their passage to the American Colonies by working for an employer from five to seven years. Unlike slaves, Indentured servants could look forward to receiving payment known as "freedom dues" upon their release (Foner 2005). These freedom dues included things like new clothes and perhaps a bit of land. However, many died before the end of the.ir terms, and freedom dues were so meager that did not enable recipients to acquire land (Ibid.). Despite the hard conditions of work, a high death rate and

In 1607, the colony of Jamestown, Virginia was founded and was severely unstable due to the lack of knowledge of survival in the new world. By the time the colony of Jamestown, Virginia became stabilized, they were solely dependent on slave labor in order to farm their sole cash crop, tobacco. Since Native Americans were of no use as slave laborers due to their decreased population size and lack of immunization to European diseases, indentured servants were used for labor instead. This continued until 1619, when the first documented slaves from Africa arrived in Jamestown by the assistance of a European trade company. African slaves soon became their main work force because of their affordability and immunization to diseases.

From the outset, the issue of labor in the Chesapeake was a dominant force in the creation of colonial society. The origins of colonial labor rested on the shoulders of indentured servants, often unemployed laborers from England sent to the colony by the Virginia Company. After serving a term of seven years, each servant was then entitled to freedom and the opportunity to work in the colony to best achieve individual benefits and the success offered by the New World. The early generations of these servants turned freemen posed little problem to their former masters as they constituted to small a segment of the population to