Indentured Servitude to Slavery in Colonial Virginia The first two centuries of colonial Virginia exhibit a significant transformation of the workforce that occupied the land. The beginning of the 17th century was marked by the first settlements in the colony, such as Jamestown, that ushered in an era of indentured servitude. In the end of the 17th century through the start of the 18th century, this labor transitioned to racial slavery. As the American tobacco industry prospered for the rich, the number of indentured servants began to fall, causing the direct development of slavery in colonial Virginia. The production of tobacco in Virginia was the first factor in the transition to racial slavery. After 1617, when the first shipment of …show more content…
Extremely difficult and tedious effort was required to grow the crop, but it made high profits due to the demand arising in Europe. Fortunately for the Virginian landowners who could not manage the high workload themselves, lower class members of the English social class were in search of a promising future and looked to the Americas as a sign of hope. They were met with the opportunity to sign away the next few years of their lives to labor, in exchange for transportation across the Atlantic Ocean and land ownership after their completed term. Known as indentured servants, many experienced unbearable natural and physical conditions that would ultimately take their lives, and few saw their terms to completion and gained land in the New World (Lecture, Hacker). Demands for tobacco and the use of indentured servants …show more content…
The question of class inequity and the dwindling amount of English servants arriving in Virginia amounted to the second factor in the transition from indentured servants to slaves. The owners of farmable land in the booming tobacco industry grew richer than they could have hoped for in the New World, while indentured servants remained poor and hardly got land worth more than themselves. This eventually caused a class divide in Virginia. As the divide grew, tensions worsened until they culminated in Bacon’s Rebellion. In 1676, Nathaniel Bacon led a rebellion made of indentured servants, slaves, and freemen against the elite class after they would not support their efforts to fight the Native Americans (p. 56, Chapter 3). Although the rebellion begins on a racist fight against the natives for land, it becomes an outward class struggle originating from the disgruntled and poor (Lecture, Hacker). To top it off, in 1682 an English law was passed to keep “spirits” from sending English citizens to the Americas as indentured servants for their own profit (p.57, Chapter 3). The struggles between the Virginian class system, and the horrendous types of work the indentured servants were being forced to complete resulted in less of the English population willingly immigrating to the Americas. After the law was passed, servants did not come unwillingly either. The lack of indentured servants
Slavery during the periods of 1607 to 1776 had a drastic change in Britain's North American Colonies. During the time of the African Diaspora, Africans were spread all over the New World. This led to an adapting and different type of workability in the colonies. The developments started with the use of indentured servitude, Bacon’s Rebellion, and slavery.
Indentured servants, were by all accounts, the main source of labor in the seventeenth century. The labor force was mainly needed for the newly discovery of the cash crop that was tobacco. It was a plant that need a lot of man power to be harvested and transported to port to be shipped back to England. “At first they turned to their overpopulated country for labor, but English indentured servants brought with them the same haphazard habits of work as their masters.” Indentured service being described as haphazard is an understatement; uprising.
Nat Turner’s Impact on Slavery The History of slavery in Virginia can be traced to 1619, soon after the founding of Virginia as an English colony by the London Virginia Company. The company established a headright system to encourage the colonists to transport indentured servants to the colony for labor. The indentured servants would sign a contract committing to work a set number of years in return for passage to the country and their freedom. Once the contract was fulfilled the servants would be released from the contract and allowed the same opportunities as whites to live on the land.
In Virginia, people mostly focused on growing of staples and exotic crops for cash. The crops that they grew in their colony were rice, indigo, and tobacco. But in Virginia, tobacco was the crop that they focused on, in fact, tobacco was the first most famous staple crop grown and became their economic foundation. As far as working in the fields, Virginia started off with indentured servants to perform the labor, but as they became expensive they shifted to purchasing slaves. Mortality rates were higher because of diseases that many of them came in contact with, men were expected to live to forty and women weren’t expected to live past their thirties.
“Slavery Comes to Early Maryland: A Brief Look.” Exploring Maryland's roots: Slavery in Early Maryland, Karen Kane, mdroots.thinkport.org/interactives/slaverytimeline/slavery.pdf. Accessed 27 Sept. 2017. As tobacco being the leading crop in the colony it provided countless hours of brutal work and sacrifice, and indentured servants couldn’t do the job, so they converted to slaves.
Ch4.1 In Britain’s mainland colonies, there were three deeply entrenched slave systems that included group system, task system, and wage laborer system. Tobacco came from the fieldworks in the Chesapeake region. In Virginia, about half of the white families in this location, owned at least one slave. By 1770, there was about two hundred and seventy thousand slaves.
The early 1620’s called upon desperate measures for the Virginians, surges of hunger so violent that it caused some to go mad and eat anything- the corpses of loved ones took a large popularity on the menu- they became despondent to grow food and stay alive, human nature beginning to take over. The Virginians had finally developed a “better” system that differed from their starvation of the time. Having had just recently committed the first few acts of slavery, Jamestown kicked off a big bang for the journey of slavery for the average dark, non-leisure men of the world. Aside from the Indians, all people in the newly discovered United States were unaware of how to grow food and prosper greatly in the new world. The fact that the Indians knew how to succeed in the new land angered all the white men, soon most of the Indian population had been killed off, and the white men were still struggling, just no longer in comparison to the Indians.
The need for slaves would continue to rise as tobacco took time, hard work, and money to grow. It allowed economy for both parties, slaves and masters’, to flourish and thrive until the beginning of the 18th century. What tobacco farmers were not aware of was the soil and the land were effected negatively from growing too much of the same type of crop. Towards the beginning of the 18th century, Tobacco became one of the many crops that plantations grew.
The treatment of both slaves and indentured servants steadily declined from the British settling the Americas to the founding of the country, and early years of the nation (Kennedy). Colonial America relied heavily on the labor of
The process of black slavery taking route in colonial Virginia was slow. Black slavery mostly became dominant in the 1680s. Slaves became the main labor system on plantations. The amount of white indentured servants declined so the demand for black slaves became necessary in the mid-1660s. The number of white indentured servants that Virginia had up until the mid 1660s, was enough to meet white peoples labor needs.
Times were much simpler, yet worse, in March 1610 as there were only about sixty of us colonial men left standing and we were lucky to even still be alive due to the high mortality rate. Fast forward forty years later, and now families have been shipping in by the thousands, although some do not last long due to lingering diseases. I have made an assumption that the water we have been drinking may be a cause of all the disease that is continuously being spread amongst the people, but people seem to be more focused on tobacco and the natives. However, priorities were not always based on tobacco, because before John Rolfe blessed the colony with his discoveries there was the issue of maintaining a stable society on this
In 1607, the first wave of colonial settlers arrived in Virginia and began to establish Jamestown. Many of the new settlers came from wealthy families never performing a day of manual labor. With agricultural farming, being the revenue source of the new colonial settlers there would soon be a great demand for labor. Contracts of indentures were expiring and with much devastation in England, there was a shortage of English servants.
Bacon gained the support of common planters and slaves by speaking out against Governor William Berkeley’s nepotistic policies and his refusal to settle Native American land disputes. Berkeley also increased taxes on common planters, which infuriated them. Bacon and his followers burned Jamestown to the ground in September of 1676, after Berkeley refused to comply with Bacon’s requests for more power. The rebellion came to an end when Great Britain sent troops to Virginia to aid the Great Planter Class in subduing the rebels (Bacon’s Rebellion). Bacon’s Rebellion is significant because it united both blacks and whites who were relatively in the same position in society.
Those in Massachusetts were puritans and looking for a place where they would be free from religious persecution. Wealthy people who could afford the boat journey and did not have to become indentured slaves went for a more settled life. In 1616 John Rolfe imported tobacco seeds to Virginia, as the plants needed long and hot humid seasons. The first people who were granted the right of possessing land authorized the people to cultivate worn out land and grow better crops, as tobacco depletes minerals and nutrients from the ground.
The Virginia colony intended to reproduce into an English society when they settled. With tobacco becoming a huge crop in Virginia, they invested heavily in servants to help with the plantations, “Our principal wealth…. consisteth in servants.” (Takaki 53). Whites