Indentured Servitude Definition

A great shift occurred within Virginia during the seventeenth century. The system of indentured servitude was being replaced by racial slavery. With the emergence of racial slavery, class and gender began changing. In order to understand the changes within the class structure, one must realize that racial slavery created a division between races thus resulting in a newfound class structure. All Whites had superiority over African Americans but only a few whites benefited financially from slavery. Having more land and slaves resulted in being very rich. Thus creating great divisions within the white race. Bacon’s Rebellion was a great example of this new class division because it showed how small white farmers were angry enough about not getting

During class, it was made known that racial slavery was a social or chattel construct. This meant that an enslaved person was seen as property. Indentured servants were those who bonded themselves to another person for a period of four to seven years in order to gain passage to the new world (C.D. 09-09-16). Indentured servitude did not focus on any type of race while racial slavery did, specifically blacks. In the seventeenth-century, black and white indentured servants had much in common and would often ally themselves together to escape bondage. But during the transition from indentured servitude to racial slavery, distinguishing factors were created between whites and blacks by the authorities of that time. These supposed “differences” made life harder for blacks and gave whites a sense of superiority over those who were

Males and females were separated even further. White women especially became more dependent on their male counterparts and were expected to keep their femininity intact. While the men dominated the public sphere and dealt with business. By being a woman, free or indentured, more restrictions were put in place to establish what you could and could not do. For example, a law was created in 1691 which “legislated that white women [would] be punished for having a biracial child” (The Laws of Slavery 117). This type of law instilled white superiority and kept the slave population from going down. Men, on the hand, were able to do whatever they wanted and suffered no consequences. They even took a step further and asserted “their authority over the progeny of enslaved women” and declared that matrilineal lines would determine if a child was free or enslaved (The Laws of Slavery 115). No one would question a plantation owner for having sexual relations with his slave. With this new system a greater amount of slaves would born to work the land which would generate an even greater amount of