The New World grew dramatically after the arrival of European. Their expansion into the New World resulted in the exploitation of the natural wealth in America. The colonists make use of the abundance resources of land to build plantations; hence, the agriculture industry was created. Seeing the potential benefits from the planting of commercial crops, most English laborers came to the New World as indentured servants. However, the labor sources of the indentured servant were later shifted to the slave, especially the African slave. These African slaves were victims of the particularly brutal slavery institution that was established during the English colonial era. As they played an important role in developing the English colonies, …show more content…
Due to the economic success of commercial crops, such as sugar, rice, and tobacco in the English colonies, the Virginia Company offered land to attract more laborers (“American Yawp”). Therefore, most immigrants came to Virginia as indentured servants in exchange for the free passage, board, foods, lands and freedom dues (“American Yawp”). Indentured servants were not considered as slaves because they worked under contract for an agreed-upon period of time, usually seven years. Once the indentured servants survived from their work and released from their contract, they would receive land and food supplies (“American Yawp”). Realizing the expense of owning indentured servants, most owners felt worried about losing their properties and threatened by the fastest-growing groups of freed servants in competing for economic benefits. It was especially true as the Bacon’s Rebellion (a class-based rebellion) against the colonial elite happened in Virginia in 1676 (“American Yawp”). This incident increased the desire for African slaves. Landowners turned to African slaves, as it was a more profitable source. It is because most Africans were more likely to get immunized from diseases, which make the colonists believed that they were suited to work in the plantations; whereas, the native …show more content…
The Atlantic slave trade, also known as the trading cycle, which “involved the human trafficking of black people to the colonies” became vital to the colonial economy (“American Yawp”). Those slaves were mainly captured from “the western coast of Africa, the Gulf of Guinea, and the west-central coast” (“American Yawp”). Millions of African slaves were forced to the New World across the Atlantic in a horrifying voyage, named as “the Middle Passage” (“American Yawp”). On the first part of the trip, traders brought goods to Africa in exchange for slaves; it was an “overland journey” of delivering slaves to the coast. On the “middle” part, slaves were transported to America on an ocean trip. 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 of Africans. It was due to the barbaric conditions inside the ships, the dissemination of diseases and the brutal treatments, which caused some slaves to escape from such situations by committing suicide (“American Yawp”). According to Alexander Falconbridge, 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 in this journey. Cruel means, such as whippings were used by the ship crews to
They preferred African slaves to European or Native American slaves because they "could be held for unlimited terms, and there was no means by which word of harsh or arbitrary treatment could reach their homelands" (Wood, 43). The ability of the Englishmen to hold slaves for an unlimited amount of time and to use any methods of punishment gave them all the power. The indentured servant only worked to fulfill the previous contract as part of the headright system. Colonists "complained of the 'servants that dayley become free"(41). Since the servants had varying terms of service, it made it difficult to keep enough workers. Native Americans were cheap and did not have to be imported, but knew the land better than the Englishmen and could easily escape. There was also a language barrier and they died relatively quick, which made them not worth the investment. This shows some insight into how the African population started to become
In the Chesapeake region, Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676 led to major changes. This rebellion involved indentured servants revolting against the system, which put an end to indentured servitude and nearly annihilated the city of Jamestown. The servants believed their natural rights had been violated, so they rose up in revolution. As landowners began to fear mutinous servants, the plantation system expanded significantly. This relied heavily on the use of slaves from Africa, and greatly sped up the production of cash crops in the region.
Physical abuse by plantation owners towards both their servants and slaves was common. One account by Thomas Gates in a General Court of Colonial Virginia document about Elizabeth Abbot, an indentured servant, stated that “she had been sore beaten and her body full of sores and holes very dangerously raunckled and putrified both above her wast and uppon her hips and thighs” (General Court of Colonial Virginia). In fact, such abuse towards servants and slaves was so common that the state of Virginia had to make laws for such cases. Unfortunately, colonial governments did not consider corporal punishment illegal. Thus adding to the brutality endured by persons in captivity and servitude during the colonial era. “Moderate corporal punishment inflicted
They were pieces of property that quickly transformed into required elements of plantation machinery. African slaves were regarded as a large, dependable, and permanent source of 'cheap labor' because slaves rarely ran away and when caught they were severely punished. The creation of the plantation system of farming were essential factors in maintaining the idea of slavery. Ironically, the New World was created to find political and religious freedom and escape oppression.
Frustration with the system of indentured servitude and lack of labor resulted in the English implementing a similar system of African slavery in the Chesapeake like the Caribbean sugar colonies. (Lect. 5, 2/1). The rise of chattel slavery was another factor that served to buttress the ideology of enslaving Africans, where people were seen as property to be bought and sold. The most prominent example is in 1662, where a law was passed stating that a child’s freedom was derived from the mother. The ruling class utilized this for their own benefit, so that the child of an unfree woman would always be a slave, translating to a continuous source of labor. Furthermore, laws stating that slavery was the natural condition of black people in the 1660s were passed, neither achievement nor aptitude mattered. (Lect. 5, 2/1). Slave codes were enacted throughout time in different Southern colonies, gathering all laws regulating slavery and consolidating it into a set of rules. It was an ideological tool to figure out how to regulate and uphold slavery, transforming the white population into a surveillance force (Lect. 5, 2/1). With the establishment of such laws, it coerced black slaves to behave inferiorly and this is the way the white population became acclimated to seeing them. It became a self-perpetuating concept of sorts and over time the condition of black people was seen as this universal truth, when the reality was far from it, they were forced into their condition. The discord left by Bacon’s Rebellion was taken advantage of by the ruling class that feared future rebellion; they sought to quell the angst of the white population by redirecting their tension towards the black population. The task of the ruling class was to implement an ideological change, since indentured servitude was fundamentally different from owning a person for life. To sow division,
There is no other experience in history where innocent African Americans encountered such a brutal torment. This infamous ordeal is called the Middle Passage or the “middle leg” of the Triangular Trade, which was the forceful voyage of African Americans from Africa to the New World. The Africans were taken from their homeland, boarded onto the dreadful ships, and scattered into the New World as slaves. 10- 16 million Africans were shipped across the Atlantic during the 1500’s to the 1900’s and 10- 15 percent of them died during the voyage. Millions of men, women, and children left behind their personal possessions and loved ones that will never be seen again. Not only were the Africans limited to freedom, but also lost their identity in the process. Kidnapped from their lives that throbbed with numerous possibilities of greatness were now out of sight and thrown into the never-ending pile of waste. The loathsome and inhuman circumstances that the Africans had to face truly describe the great wrongdoing of the Middle Passage.
Slavery became of fundamental importance in the early modern Atlantic world when Europeans decided to transport thousands of Africans to the Western Hemisphere to provide labor in place of indentured servants and with the rapid expansion of new lands in the mid-west there was increasing need for more laborers. The first Africans to have been imported as laborers to the first thirteen colonies were purchased by English settlers in Jamestown, Virginia in 1619 from a Dutch warship. Later in 1624, the Dutch East India Company brought the first enslaved Africans in Dutch New Amsterdam.
During the 1860s, the African Americans were forced to migrate across the Atlantic. The reason behind this was slavery, and it lasted between middle of the sixteenth century until 1980, making it the largest movement across the Atlantic before the 19th century (Lovejoy, 2002, pg. 141). The origin of the name ‘Middle Passage’ came about the crossing from Africa to America, and it acquired the name since it was the central point of the trade routes taken by many of the ships. This passage took imprisoned Africans from their motherland. The economies of the colonies in America such as the Carribean and Latin America were making development progress.
In British colonial America, indentured servitude was borne from the Virginia Company out of a need for cheaper labor, and was gradually replaced by African slaves in the 17th and 18th centuries for the same reason. The growth of slavery in America was not a result of racism or intent, but of economic opportunism. Both were exploited for profit to the maximum of the free planters ability, which in the slave’s case, was much more, because there were little to no laws protecting them, and sometimes even laws targeted against them.
The typical life of an indentured servant was not a convenient one. Their journeys to the Americas were miserable. The servants were packed into large ships carrying thousands of people as well as, tools, food, etc. Not only were the people densely packed, there were various diseases flooding the ships, and many people would die from them. “I witnessed . . .
Some of the earliest records of slavery date back to 1760 BC; Within such societies, slavery worked in a system of social stratification (Slavery in the United States, 2011), meaning inequality among different groups of people in a population (Sajjadi, 2008). After the establishment of Jamestown in 1607 as the first permanent English Chesapeake colony in the New World that was agriculturally-based; Tobacco became the colonies chief crop, requiring time consuming and intensive labor (Slavery in colonial America, 2011). Due to the headlight system established in Maryland in 1640, tobacco farmers looked for laborers primarily in England, as each farmer could obtain workers as well as land from importing English laborers. The farmers could then use such profits to purchase the passage of more laborers, thus gaining more land. Indentured servants, mostly male laborers and a few women immigrated to Colonial America and contracted to work from four to seven years in exchange for their passage (Norton, 41). Once services ended after the allotted amount of time, th...
First of all it is important to examine how many African slaves were brought to the New World. The Middle Passage is infamous route of the ships that carried slaves to the Americas. After the arrival to the New World, the slaves were sold or exchanged for the valuable goods. The term Middle Passage might sound somewhat romantic, but in reality it stands as a one of the most terrible events in history. The Middle Passage is the passage of bonded slaves from West Africa to the Americas. In the beginning, there was a trade between Europeans and African leaders who sold their enemies and disabled people in exchange for unique gifts such as guns, tobacco, iron bars and etc. But at the later stages of slavery, Europeans often kidnapped Africans at the costal area of Western Africa and then sent to ships that sailed them to the New World where this new free work force was needed to help stabilize the new nation.
The development of slavery in the Americas began as early as 1500, after the arrival of the Spanish, and first centered around the Caribbean. However, a lucrative triangle trading system between England, Africa and North America greatly increased the slave trade during the 1600’s (Foner, 38). At the time, slavery was driven by market forces, and largely defined by geographical necessity. Landowners had large plantations, located in areas with small populations and did not have access to the cheap labor necessary to cultivate lucrative crops like tobacco and sugar. They needed slaves to economically survive and prosper. Later, in the American colonies of the south, the entire economic and social structure
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. Losing their rights as human beings and becoming property of
The Middle Passage (or Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade) was a voyage that took slaves from Africa to the Americas via tightly packed ships. The trade started around the early 1500s, and by 1654 about 8,000-10,000 slaves were being imported from Africa to the Americas every year. This number continued to grow, and by 1750 that figure had climbed to about 60,000-70,000 slaves a year. Because of the lack of necessary documents, it is hard to tell the exact number of Africans taken from their homeland. But based on available clues and data, an estimated 9-15 million were taken on the Middle Passage, and of that about 3-5 million died. While the whole idea seems sick and wrong, many intelligent people and ideas went in to making the slave trade economically successful.