Development of the System of Slavery

345 Words1 Page

Slavery was introduced to the Americas through the popularity of sugar. As soon as Christopher Columbus introduced the sugar cane to Europe, European countries such as Spain, were establishing sugar-producing colonies in the Americas. Indian labor was first used in these colonies for the production of sugar, but because Indians were drastically dying off by the hundreds and thousands, due to European diseases and harsh labor, African labor was soon sought. Numerous West Africans were being transported to various European colonies in North America to work the sugar plantations. As the market for sugar began to increase, so did the number of Africans transported across the Atlantic to North America. This means of transportation is noted in history as the African Slave Trade. According to scholars, 76 percent of the 11 million Africans that unwillingly partook in the African Slave Trade arrived in North America between 1701-1810 (Out of Many, 83). The sugar boom that took place in the middle of the 17th century may have had a great impact on those numbers.

The different forms of slavery in the North American colonies greatly depended on the economy of that colony and the type of commodity that it was capable of producing. In the British Chesapeakean colonies of Virginia and Massachusetts, tobacco was the main cash crop. Since it required extensive hand labor and skill, slaves were needed for it's development and that meant slaves had to work the harsh conditions of the tobacco plantations. In the Georgia and South Carolina colonies, slaves were used for indigo and rice cultivation. Slave labor was preferred over Indian labor in this colony because slaves were thought to be better rice workers due to their agricultural experience in Africa (Out of Many, 90).

Since commodity crops are what basically made an economy successful, the dependence and necessity for slaves increased. Before slaves became so needed, in some parts, slaves could look forward to their freedom, through Christianity. However, as more slaves started becoming Christians, and the demand for labor grew, laws changed and in 1662 Virginia passed two laws that would make slavery a permanent condition.

Show More
Related

  • Differences Between Chesapeake And Southern Colonies

    578 Words  | 2 Pages

     The four groups of colonies were distinct from one another in the labor systems that they used.  In New England, there were small farms that allowed a much bigger manufacturing and merchant class to arise.  This was very different even from the middle colonies, where larger family farms and indentured servitude were prefered.  In the Chesapeake and southern colonies, plantations were the most profitable economic choices.  However, in the Chesapeake colonies these plantations were smaller and relied more on indentured servants than the slave heavy large

    Read More

  • The Evolution of Slavery in Colonial America

    594 Words  | 2 Pages

    In my essay, “The Evolution of Slavery in Colonial America” author Jon Butler explains the reasons of the traces of the evolution of slavery. Butler describes the differences of the African experience in America and the European experience in America in detail. The African experience are focus on themes of capture, enslavement, and coercion but the history of Europeans in America concentrated on themes of choice, profit, and considerable freedom. The African and European experiences were never duplicated and paralleled they were powerfully intersecting the decline of the Indian population to become the American future thats what they want, but the Africans wants to end the evolution of slavery and not get murdered or be slaves for the Europeans.

    Read More

  • Essay On Trans-Atlantic Interactions

    526 Words  | 2 Pages

    After Virginia, Maryland was the second plantation colony formed in 1634 and it also prospered economically from growing tobacco. In the West Indies, they flourished by growing sugar, and the Carolinas with rice. Countless African slaves were brought over in large numbers to provide labor in the growing plantations since the demand for cash crops rose. Slavery was used in all the plantation colonies.

    Read More

  • Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox by Edmund Morgan

    1667 Words  | 4 Pages

    The use of labor came in two forms; indenture servitude and Slavery used on plantations in the south particularly in Virginia. The southern colonies such as Virginia were based on a plantation economy due to factors such as fertile soil and arable land that can be used to grow important crops, the plantations in the south demanded rigorous amounts of labor and required large amounts of time, the plantation owners had to employ laborers in order to grow crops and sell them to make a profit. Labor had become needed on the plantation system and in order to extract cheap labor slaves were brought to the south in order to work on the plantations. The shift from indentured servitude to slavery was an important time as well as the factors that contributed to that shift, this shift affected the future generations of African American descent. The history of colonial settlements involved altercations and many compromises, such as Bacons Rebellion, and slavery one of the most debated topics in the history of the United States of America. The different problems that occurred in the past has molded into what is the United States of America, the reflection in the past provides the vast amount of effort made by the settlers to make a place that was worth living on and worth exploring.

    Read More

  • The History of Slavery in the United States

    1435 Words  | 3 Pages

    Following the success of Christopher Columbus’ voyage to the Americas in the early16th century, the Spaniards, French and Europeans alike made it their number one priority to sail the open seas of the Atlantic with hopes of catching a glimpse of the new territory. Once there, they immediately fell in love the land, the Americas would be the one place in the world where a poor man would be able to come and create a wealthy living for himself despite his upbringing. Its rich grounds were perfect for farming popular crops such as tobacco, sugarcane, and cotton. However, there was only one problem; it would require an abundant amount of manpower to work these vast lands but the funding for these farming projects was very scarce in fact it was just about nonexistent. In order to combat this issue commoners back in Europe developed a system of trade, the Triangle Trade, a trade route that began in Europe and ended in the Americas. Ships leaving Europe first stopped in West Africa where they traded weapons, metal, liquor, and cloth in exchange for captives that were imprisoned as a result of war. The ships then traveled to America, where the slaves themselves were exchanged for goods such as, sugar, rum and salt. The ships returned home loaded with products popular with the European people, and ready to begin their journey again.

    Read More

  • Slavery in American Society: Impact and Evolution

    1631 Words  | 4 Pages

    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...

    Read More

  • New England Colonies Essay

    1822 Words  | 4 Pages

    The plantation industry was the most important economical factor in the Southern colonies because they used indentured servants to help with there products. Indentured servants were people who agreed to work without pay for a certain amount of time in exchange for passage to America. Plantations relied on indentured servants to help with the agriculture. The good farmland allowed the servants to produce cattle, fish, grain, indigo, iron, rum, lumber, rice, and tobacco on the plantations. Tobacco was the leading export which was a wonderful cash crop, and it’s still a major industry

    Read More

  • Slavery In The United States

    1484 Words  | 3 Pages

    Throughout this course we learned about slavery and it's effects on our country and on African Americans. Slavery and racism is prevalent throughout the Americas before during and after Thomas Jefferson's presidency. Some people say that Jefferson did not really help stop any of the slavery in the United States. I feel very differently and I will explain why throughout this essay. Throughout this essay I will be explaining how views of race were changed in the United States after the presidency of Thomas Jefferson, and how the events of the Jeffersonian Era set the stage for race relations for the nineteenth century.

    Read More

  • Slavery In Colonial America Essay

    791 Words  | 2 Pages

    Before the American Revolution, slavery existed in every one of the colonies. But by the last quarter of the 18th century, slavery was eventually abandoned in the North mainly because it was not as profitable as it was to the South (where it was becoming even more prevalent). Slavery was an extremely important element in America's economy because of the expanding tobacco and cotton plantations in the Southern states that were in need of more and more cheap labor. At one point America was a land of 113, 000 slaveholders controlling twenty million slaves.

    Read More

  • The Economic Exploitation of African Americans

    1299 Words  | 3 Pages

    Economic conditions, including soil and climate determined the number of slaves in a given locality. The majority of the black population were found in the colonies that produced the greatest agricultural staples, such as sugar, rice, tobacco and cotton. The land most suitable for cotton production became the land where plantation slavery was most concentrated. Since picking cotton was relatively simple, it was a powerful stimulant for exploitation, providing year-round employment for men, women, children and the elderly.

    Read More

  • Life in Early America

    1243 Words  | 3 Pages

    Agriculture was tremendously valuable to the lives of early Americans and the development of the country. It was among one of the top two most important aspects of American life, but was not quite as primary as the social and economic life. Some of the main crops grown by the earlier settlers included wheat, peas, corn, and tobacco. Farms were developed first in the Chesapeake region. Due to the abundant land and numerous streams in this region, the farm soil was richer and more ideal for farming. Farms in the northern colonies, especially New England, tended to be smaller due to smaller amounts of fields and land. Southern colonies were able to have much larger plantations and areas to plant crops. White indentured servants were sometimes hired in the earlier part of the 17th century, but black slaves became a common use of labor in the later decades of the 1600s. The New England and middle colonies in opposition, rarely hired slaves. The most abundant and common crop in every region was corn. “Every...

    Read More

  • Slavery In Colonial America

    1702 Words  | 4 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • the development of slavery in America

    1202 Words  | 3 Pages

    Colonists started to import slaves from South America in hopes that they would live longer and be more manageable to control. The slaves that were imported were trained past their first year of slavery, so that they would not die as fast. The first imported slaves came to America in the early 17th century. When they received the slaves, they found out some of them were baptized, and were under the Christian religion. So they could not be treated as slaves under the religion, so they were turned into indentured servants.

    Read More

  • The Need For Slavery In The American Colonies

    894 Words  | 2 Pages

    One of the largest uses of slave labor was in the southern plantations. Virginia's economy depended greatly on the production of tobacco. However, the problem being that tobacco plants required thousands of workers to produce the extensive amount that was being exported . Without the use of slave labor, there would not have been enough man power to fuel the plantations.

    Read More

  • Slavery In North America

    1374 Words  | 3 Pages

    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

    Read More

More about Development of the System of Slavery

Open Document