Role Of Indentured Servants

According to the accounts of Olaudah Equiano, a survivor from the journey, he wrote that the journey was terrifying and led to the death of millions Africans. It was due to the barbaric conditions inside the ships, the dissemination of diseases and the brutality treatments, which caused some slaves to desperately escape from such situations by committing suicide. African slaves were treated disastrously, they were crowded together in a limited space and lying in a pool of excrement. Dysentery was the biggest killer. Cruel means, such as whippings were used by the ship crews to control a large amount of slaves.

The growth of the plantations required labor, hence African slaves were bought from Africa, to provide labor. As the Europeans set up colonies in America, they brought the plantation ideas with them, which led to the need for labor hence they tried to enslave the Native Americans to work in their mines and fields. The Native Americans were prone to diseases hence most of them died as a result of diseases and overworking. Apart from the ones who died, a number rebelled and formed alliances forcing the Europeans to look for other sources of labor. They settled on acquiring African slaves due to a number of reasons; The African slaves were more stronger and immune to a number of diseases in Europe and America, the Africans had no friends and family in America hence it was not easy for them to form alliances or to escape, they provided a permanent and a cheap source of labor, and most of them had worked on farms before in their native lands.

One writer describes the terrible conditions that African slaves had to endure, “In the voyage, one of every three Africans died from dysentery, smallpox, or suffocation and was thrown overboard to the sharks, who reportedly followed the slave ships from the coast of Africa all the way to the New World.” Also, the ship’s crew often treated the Africans badly; they often whipped them because many of the people resisted and tried to escape from the cargo ship. On the cargo ships, there were people from various African tribes. According to Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy, there were many different ethnic groups among them, the Congo, the Edo and the Yoruba/Nago, just to name few.

Since it was becoming a profitable crop in the Americas. The rise of the “demand for African slaves” (Hine 36) grew. Growth of the Atlantic Slave Trade caused for the transformation of a “harsher form of slavery” (Hine 36) were race was the basis of enslavement of people. The ones who suffered out of this form of slavery was the “Africans and American Indians” (Hine 36). Due to their color of skin and culture they were discriminated and seen as chattel to their masters.

In the seventeenth century, slaves became the major focus of trade between Africa and other parts of the world, namely the Americas and Europe. This was known as the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The trans-Atlantic slave trade was an involuntary voyage of Africans from their homeland, across the Atlantic Ocean, to the New World. The trans-Atlantic slave trade caused the deportation of millions of Africans to the Western hemisphere of the world. Millions of captives were shipped to their destinations performing hard labor under terrible conditions.

It opened opportunities for Indentured servants and masters but not all of it was good. Indentured servants did not work entirely from Bacon’s rebellion. Bacon’s rebellion brought a lot of trouble and violence to towns making England look for other types of slaves. Africans were expensive for slavery but Africans ended up to be the best slaves for the New World as to misbehaving. The New World learned that Africans were easy to capture and trade.

Different as they were indentured servants and slaves became an integral part of the colonies. As a result of depopulation of the locals and increased productivity, the colonies adopted the use of indentured servants from Europe and slaves from Africa as labor. Journeys from these places were plagued with disease and miserable conditions that were difficult for the slaves and indentured servants. Indentured servants were considered a higher class and given rights while slaves were treated as property. While the indentured servants voluntarily entered contracts to work off their fare to the colonies and eventually earned their freedom, slaves were in servitude permanently.

The Slave Trade and Its Effects on Early America Slavery played an important role in the development of the American colonies. It was introduced to the colonies in 1619, and spanned until the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. The trading of slaves in America in the seventeenth century was a large industry. Slaves were captured from their homes in Africa, shipped to America under extremely poor conditions, and then sold to the highest bidder, put to work, and forced to live with the new conditions of America. There was no mercy for the slaves and their families as they were captured from their homes and forced onto slave ships.

In the 17th century the basis of the work force, in mainly the Southern colonies were Europeans labourers, who as indentured servants, offered landowners a solution to their labour shortage. Beginning in the 1680s, the mainland colonies underwent a massive shift, from indentured servants to slave labour, due to requirement of labour in the South. From the early 17th century Africans were shipped to North America to be sold as slaves, against their freewill. Slavery continued to expand even after 1808, when it was declared illegal. African slave trading became the main problem dividing Americans, and could even of been a factor of many, which led to the American Civil War.

The treatment of slaves was dependent upon the region because different crops required differing needs for cultivation. Slaves in the Cotton South, concluded traveler Frederick Law Olmsted, worked “much harder and more unremittingly” than those in the tobacco regions.1 Since the birth of America and throughout its expansion, African Americans have been fighting an uphill battle to achieve freedom and some semblance of equality. While African Americans were confronted with their inferior status during the domestic slave trade, when performing their tasks, and even after they were set free, they still made great strides in their quest for equality during the nineteenth century. As the United States continued to expand, the thirst for slave labor heightened. Once Congress outlawed the Atlantic slave trade, and thus the import of slave labor, planters created the domestic slave trade by looking to the Upper South and Eastern seaboard regions for slaves.