History 1050: Chapter 3.2 and 3.3.

The first African immigrants arrived in Virginia in

-1619 -Brought by a Dutch merchant ship, most—if not all—were probably slaves. Yet slavery did not fully take hold in Virginia until the end of the seventeenth century, at which point Africans comprised a significant portion of the population. -For decades, tobacco planters saw no reason to stop using white indentured servants. -Servants (because they worked for masters only for a period of years rather than for life) cost less than slaves, were readily available, and were familiar. -For most of the seventeenth century, by contrast, slaves were expensive, difficult to obtain, and exotic. By the 1680s, however, planters in Virginia and Maryland began to shift from servants to slaves.

Another major revolt, the Stono Rebellion, struck South Carolina in 1739.

-About twenty slaves—including several recently arrived Angolans—broke into a store and armed themselves with stolen guns. -Marching southward along the Stono River, their ranks grew to perhaps a hundred. Heading for freedom in Spanish Florida, they attacked white settlements along the way. -White troops (with Indian help) defeated the rebels within a week, but tensions remained high for months. The death toll, in the end, was about two dozen white people and perhaps twice as many black rebels.

Far fewer slaves lived north of the

-Chesapeake, although they were present in every British colony. -They were too expensive for most northern farmers—who mainly produced food for their families, not staple crops for an international market—to use profitably. -This was not true, however, for farmers with larger properties in parts of Long Island, the Hudson Valley, Rhode Island, northern New Jersey, and southeastern Pennsylvania, where commercial wheat farming and livestock raising prevailed. In the eighteenth century, these landowners acquired significant numbers of slaves.

The harshness of the slaves' condition could be relieved somewhat by the formation of close ties with others who shared their

-Circumstances -For such ties to be created, however, several developments had to occur. -Slaves had to become sufficiently numerous in specific localities so that black people could have regular contact with one another. Ethnic and language barriers carried over from Africa had to erode so that slaves could communicate. And for families to be formed, there had to be enough slave women as well as men. -Because these conditions were slow to develop, occurring at different rates in different colonies, the formation of African American families and communities was delayed until well into the eighteenth century.

Purchasing slaves, servants, or convicts did not make sense for everyone.

-Colonists who owned undeveloped land faced many tasks—cutting trees, clearing fields, building fences and barns—that brought no immediate profit. Rather than buy expensive laborers to accomplish these ends, landowners rented undeveloped tracts to families without property. -Both tenants and landlords benefited from this arrangement. -Tenants enjoyed greater independence than servants and could save toward the purchase of their own farms. -The landlord secured the labor necessary to transform his property into a working farm, thus increasing the land's value. -He also received an annual rent payment and eventually profited from selling the land, often to the tenant family who had rented it.

The rise of a creole slave population in the Chesapeake and in Carolina set off a chain of related events that fostered family and community life.

-Creoles lived longer than African immigrants, and creole women usually bore twice as many children as African-born mothers. -This circumstance allowed the slave population to grow by natural increase and more closely resemble a normal population of men and women, children and elders. -At the same time, creole slaves grew up without personal memories of Africa, and thus African ethnic differences receded in importance.

Running away from a master was a desperate act, but thousands of slaves did just that. Deciding where to go posed a problem.

-Escape out of the South did not bring freedom, because slavery was legal in every colony. -After 1733, some runaways went to Florida, where Spanish officials promised them freedom. Others tried to survive on their own in the woods or join the Indians—a choice that carried the risk of capture or death. -Perilous as it was, escape proved irresistible to some slaves, especially young males. In a few isolated areas on the South Carolina frontier, runaways formed outlaw "maroon" settlements.

The development of slavery in the colonies was not inevitable.

-Europeans had owned slaves (both white and black) long before the beginning of American colonization, but slaves formed a small—and shrinking—minority of European laborers. -By the fifteenth century, slavery had all but disappeared in northern Europe except as punishment for serious crimes. English laws in particular protected the personal freedom of the king's subjects.

Community life forged ties between slave families and single slaves on the plantations and offered further opportunities to preserve elements of African heritage.

-Since Christianity offered little competition to African religious practices during most of the colonial period, and few masters showed much interest in converting their slaves before the Revolution, traces of African religious practices endured in America. -Magical charms and amulets have been found buried in slave quarters, indicating that spiritual ceremonies may have been conducted out of sight of white masters. -Reflecting their West African background, slaves placed great emphasis on funerals, in the belief that relatives remained members of kin communities even after death.

Bad as the situation of free black people had grown, the condition of slaves was far worse.

-Slave codes, laws governing slavery, essentially reduced an entire class of human beings to property. -In Virginia, from the middle of the seventeenth century on, new laws added to slaves' oppression. A 1662 measure defined slavery as a lifelong and inherited status that passed from slave mothers to their children—even children with white fathers. -Masters who might have felt uneasy about holding fellow Christians as slaves were relieved in 1667 when another law stated that baptism would not release slaves from bondage. -Two years later, the House of Burgesses gave masters the power of life and death over their slaves, decreeing that masters would not be charged with a felony if their slaves died during punishment. These and other measures were gathered into a comprehensive slave code in Virginia in 1705.

African influences shaped aspects of slaves' recreational activity and material life.

-Slave musicians used African-style instruments, including drums and banjos, to accompany traditional songs and dances. -Where slaves were allowed to build their own houses, they incorporated African elements into the designs—for instance, by using mud walls and roofs thatched with palmetto leaves. -Their gardens frequently contained African foods, such as millet, yams, peppers, and sesame seeds, along with European and Native American crops.

Chesapeake planters eventually found reasons besides availability to prefer slaves to servants.

-Slaves were a better long-term investment. -Because slave status passed from slave mothers to their children, buying both men and women gave planters a self-reproducing labor force. -Runaway black slaves were more easily recaptured than escaped servants, who blended into the white population. And unlike indentured servants, slaves were slaves for life. They would never compete as planters with their former masters or, like Nathaniel Bacon's followers, pose a threat to order if they failed to prosper.

Many slaves chose less perilous ways to resist their bondage.

-Slaves worked slowly, broke tools, and pretended to be ill in order to exert some control over their working lives. -When provoked, they also took more direct action, damaging crops, stealing goods, and setting fires. -Slaves with knowledge of poisonous plants occasionally tried to kill their owners, although the penalty for being caught was to be burned to death.

The most serious, as well as the rarest, form of resistance was organized rebellion.

-South Carolinians and coastal Virginians, who lived in regions with slave majorities, had a particular dread of slave revolt. But because rebellions required complete secrecy, careful planning, and access to weapons, they were extremely hard to organize. -No slave rebellion succeeded in the British colonies. Rumors usually leaked out before any action had been taken, prompting severe reprisals against the alleged conspirators.

Most of a slave's life was structured by work.

-The vast majority of southern slaves were field hands. -On large plantations, masters selected some slave men to be trained as shoemakers, weavers, or tailors and chose others as drivers or leaders of work gangs. -With the exception of nurses and cooks, few slave women avoided the drudgery of field labor. If they had families, the end of the day's work in the fields only marked the start of domestic duties back in the slave quarters. -But no matter how onerous, work did not absorb every minute of the slaves' lives, and in the intervals around their assigned duties many slaves nurtured ties of family and community that combined African traditions with New World experience.

By the late eighteenth century, more than half of Chesapeake and Carolina slaves lived in family groups.

-These were fragile units, subject to the whims of masters who did not recognize slave marriages as legal, broke up families by sale, and could take slave women as sexual partners at will. -Many slave husbands and wives resided on different plantations, although on larger Carolina estates two-parent slave households grew increasingly common. -Over time, dense kinship networks formed, reflecting West African influences. -Slaves placed great emphasis on kin connections, even using familiar terms such as "aunt" and "uncle" to address friends. Some slave husbands, as was customary in West Africa, took more than one wife. -In naming their children, slaves mingled old and new practices, sometimes giving them the African names of distant kin and sometimes using English names.

Once captured, slaves

-marched in chains to the coast, to be confined in cages until there were enough to fill a ship. -Captains examined them to ensure their fitness and branded them like cattle with a hot iron. -The slaves then boarded canoes to be ferried to the ships. -Desperation overwhelmed some of them, who jumped overboard and drowned rather than be carried off to an unknown destination. -Even before the ships left African shores, slaves sometimes mutinied, though such rebellions rarely succeeded.

European traders did not themselves enslave Africans. Instead, they relied on

-other Africans to capture slaves for them, tapping into and expanding a preexisting internal African slave trade. -With the permission of local rulers, Europeans built forts and trading posts on the West African coast and bought slaves from African traders. -African rulers occasionally enslaved and sold their own people as punishment for crimes, but most slaves were seized in raids on neighboring peoples. -Attracted by European cloth, liquor, guns, and other goods, West Africans fought among themselves to secure captives and began kidnapping individuals from the interior.

Chesapeake planters had already come to see white servants as

-possessions, people whose labor could be bought and sold like any other commodity. -This attitude doubtless eased the transition in the 1680s and 1690s to the much harsher system of slavery. -In Carolina, of course, slaves were there from the start, brought in the 1670s by colony founders accustomed to slavery in Barbados. -By 1720, slavery was firmly embedded in all the southern colonies except sparsely settled North Carolina. In that year, one-third of Virginia's settler population, and nearly three-quarters of South Carolina's, were black.

Slavery persisted longer in southern Europe and the Middle East. In both regions,

-religion influenced the choice of who was enslaved. -Because neither Christians nor Muslims would hold as slaves members of their own faiths, Arab traders turned to sub-Saharan Africa to find slaves. -Eventually, the Arabic word for slave—'abd—became a synonym for "black man." By the fifteenth century, a durable link between slave status and black skin had been forged in European minds.

Slavery was one of several responses to the

-scarcity of labor in the New World. -It took hold mainly in areas where the profits from export crops such as sugar, rice, and tobacco offset the high purchase price of slaves and where a warm climate permitted year-round work. -Elsewhere European masters and employers found various ways to acquire and manage European laborers.

Slave codes appeared virtually everywhere, North and South, but were particularly harsh in the

-southern colonies. -White colonists in the Tidewater Chesapeake and South Carolina feared the consequences of a growing black population. -One South Carolina planter predicted in 1720 that slaves would soon rise up against their masters because black people were "too numerous in proportion to the White Men there."

Eighteenth-century Chesapeake planters also availed themselves of another unfree labor source:

-transported English convicts. -Lawmakers in England saw transportation as a way of getting rid of criminals who might otherwise be executed. -Between 1718 and 1775, nearly 50,000 convicts were sent to the colonies, 80 percent of whom ended up in the Chesapeake. -Most were young, lower-class males forced by economic hardship to turn to crime. A few convicts eventually prospered in America, but most faced lives as miserable as those they had known in England.

In the wake of these rebellions, colonial assemblies passed laws requiring stricter supervision of slave activities. In South Carolina, other measures encouraged more

-white immigration to offset the colony's black majority. -Planters in the southern colonies in particular considered slavery indispensable to their economic survival, even though this labor system generated so much fear and brutality. -Their slaves, in turn, obeyed when necessary, resisted when possible, and kept alive the hope that freedom would one day be theirs.

Slaves replaced

-white indentured servants in Chesapeake tobacco fields during the eighteenth century. -Masters continued to import servants for a while to fill skilled jobs but in time trained slaves to fill those positions. Thus, by the middle of the eighteenth century, white servitude, although it still flourished in some places, was in decline as a dominant labor system.

Race relations in the mainland colonies were less rigid in the seventeenth century than they would later become.

Before 1700, slaves did not form a majority of the population in any colony, a situation that may have made them seem less threatening to white people. In some areas, free black people—often slaves who had bought their own freedom—prospered in an atmosphere of racial tolerance that would be unthinkable by the eighteenth century.

Even as family ties made a life in bondage more tolerable, they made it more difficult for slaves to attempt escape or contemplate rebellion.

Slaves who resisted their oppression ran the risk of endangering families and friends as well as themselves. But the powerful desire for freedom was not easily suppressed, and slaves found ways to defy the dehumanization that slavery entailed.

Europeans in the New World, beginning with Columbus, first enslaved Indians as a way of addressing the labor shortage.

Spaniards held Indian slaves in all their New World colonies, as did the Portuguese in Brazil. French Canadians enslaved Fox and other Great Lakes area Indians captured in wars in the North American interior. English colonists condemned Indian war captives to slavery as punishment for their opposition to English rule.

Three major slave revolts did occur, and they

instilled lasting fear in white colonists.

In 1712 in New York City, where black people made up 20 percent of the population, about twenty slaves

set a building on fire and killed nine white men who came to put it out. The revolt was quickly suppressed, with twenty-four rebels sentenced to death.

But Johnson's descendants, and the generations of slaves and free black people who came after them, encountered much harsher conditions.

-Once slavery became the dominant labor system in the Chesapeake, tobacco planters no longer welcomed free black people, fearing that they might encourage slaves to escape. -In 1691, Virginia's legislature prohibited individual masters from freeing their slaves. -Lawmakers passed another measure in 1699 requiring newly freed black people to leave the colony altogether. Black families like the Johnsons, who were already free, suffered under increasing discrimination.

Streams of emigrants flowed to places where land was cheap and labor most in demand

-Few went to New England, where descendants of the first settlers occupied the best land. -They also avoided areas where slavery predominated—the Chesapeake Tidewater and lowland South Carolina—in favor of the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, from western Pennsylvania to the Carolinas. -There, one emigrant declared, a "poor man that will incline to work may have the value of his labour." -This observation, though partly true, did not tell the whole story. -Any person who came as a servant, redemptioner, or tenant learned that his master or landlord received much of "the value of his labour." -Not all emigrants realized their dreams of becoming independent landowners. The scarcity of labor in the colonies led as easily to the exploitation of white workers as of slaves and Indians. -Even so, for many people facing bleak prospects in Europe, the chance that emigration might bring prosperity was too tempting to ignore.

Two related developments caused this change.

-First, white indentured servants became harder to find. Fewer English men and women chose to emigrate as servants after 1660 because an improving economy in England provided jobs at home. -At the same time, Virginia's white population tripled between 1650 and 1700, increasing the number of planters competing for a shrinking supply of laborers. Planters also faced competition from newer colonies such as Pennsylvania and New Jersey, which had more generous land policies for immigrants. -Second, as white servants grew scarcer, changes in the slave trade made African slaves more available. -Before the 1660s, the Dutch and Portuguese merchants who dominated the trade mainly supplied their own colonies and the profitable West Indian market. But beginning in 1674, England's Royal African Company began shipping slaves directly to English buyers. -The supply of slaves surged after 1698, when the Royal African Company lost its special trading rights, and many English merchants and New Englanders entered the fiercely competitive trade.

The Spanish and Portuguese first brought Africans to the Americas to replace or supplement the dwindling numbers of

-Indian slaves toiling in silver mines and on sugar plantations. -The Dutch, who scrambled for a share of the lucrative slave trade, quickly followed suit. -English colonists, less familiar with slavery, adopted it more slowly. West Indian planters were the first English settlers to do so on a large scale in the 1640s. In most other English colonies, however, different economic conditions either postponed or prevented slavery's widespread adoption.

The career of an ambitious black Virginian named Anthony Johnson, for example, resembled that of many white settlers—a remarkable achievement, given that he arrived in the colony in 1621 as a slave.

-Johnson's master allowed him to marry and start a family while he was still a slave and may even have allowed Anthony to purchase his and his family's liberty. -Once free, the Johnsons settled in eastern Virginia, where Anthony and his sons eventually acquired substantial plantations. -Like white settlers, Johnson occasionally took his neighbors to court and even successfully sued them. He and his sons also owned slaves. -Anthony Johnson belonged to the first or what one historian has called the "charter" generation of American slaves, and his experience reveals how much slavery changed over time. This generation of slaves mainly came from African port towns, where Europeans and Africans had mingled for generations, or by way of the West Indies or New Netherland. -Familiar with European ways, often fluent in European languages, they acquired skills and knowledge that enabled them to bargain with their masters in ways their descendants would not be able to replicate. They came in small groups, cultivated their masters as patrons, negotiated for their own property, and often gained their freedom. They enjoyed such advantages because they came to colonies where slavery had not yet become firmly embedded, where the meaning of bondage was still being worked out.

Continental Europe contributed another stream of emigrants.

-Many German Protestants left the Rhine Valley, where war, economic hardship, and religious persecution had brought misery. -Most traveled eastward, to Russia and Prussia, but perhaps as many as 100,000 journeyed to the colonies. -French Protestants (known as Huguenots) began emigrating after 1685, when their faith was made illegal in France. -Swiss Protestants likewise fled religious persecution. Even a few Poles, Greeks, Italians, and Jews reached the colonies in the eighteenth century.

Slaves who could not escape while still in Africa suffered through a horrendous six- to eight-week-long ocean voyage known as the

-Middle Passage. -Captains wedged men below decks into spaces about 6 feet long, 16 inches wide, and 30 inches high. Women and children were packed even more tightly. -Except for brief excursions on deck for forced exercise, slaves remained below decks, where the air grew foul from the vomit, blood, and excrement in which the terrified victims lay. -"The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying," recalled Olaudah Equiano, "rendered it a scene of horror almost inconceivable." -Some slaves went insane; others refused to eat. On many voyages, between 5 and 20 percent of the slaves perished from disease and other causes, but captains had usually packed the ships tightly enough to make a profit from selling the rest. -Those who survived the dreadful voyage endured the fear and humiliation of sale. -Planters generally preferred males and often sought slaves from particular African ethnic groups, in the belief that some Africans would work harder than others. -Ship captains sometimes sold slaves at public auctions, where purchasers poked them, looking for signs of disease. Many terrified Africans, like Equiano, thought they were going to be eaten.

European immigrants flooded into America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

-Nearly 250,000 Scots-Irish people—descendants of Protestant Scots who had settled in northern Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—came to the colonies after 1718, when their landlords raised rents to intolerable levels. -Tens of thousands of immigrants arrived from Scotland during the same period, some seeking economic improvement and some sent as punishment for rebellions against the king in 1715 and 1745. Thousands of Irish Catholics arrived as servants, redemptioners, and convicts.

Northern slaves could also be found in cities, especially ports such as

-Newport, Rhode Island, where newly arrived Africans landed. -At the start of the eighteenth century, one out of six Philadelphia residents was a slave; by 1740, slaves made up 15 percent of the city's workingmen. -In mid-eighteenth-century New York City, slaves comprised between 12 and 14 percent of the population. Many urban slaves were domestic servants in the homes of rich merchants and professionals. Substantial numbers also labored as artisans.

In early Carolina, English traders saw the traffic in Indian slaves as an irresistible opportunity for profit.

-They encouraged their native allies to raid Spanish missions in Florida and to make smaller incursions into French Louisiana. -Between 1670 and 1715, as many as 51,000 Indian slaves were shipped out of Carolina to Caribbean and other markets. -The profits gained in this violent trade were then invested in the development of Carolina's colonial economy. -Native American slaves, however, could not fill the colonists' labor needs. -Everywhere disease and harsh working conditions reduced their numbers. -English colonists also discovered problems with enslaving Indians. When traders incited Indian wars to gain slaves, bloodshed often spread to English settlements. Enslaved Indian men refused to perform agricultural labor, which they considered women's work. And because they knew the land so well, Indians could easily escape. -As a result, although the Indian slave trade persisted in the English colonies through the eighteenth century (and into the nineteenth century), by 1700 it had given way to a much larger traffic in Africans.

Slaves were far more numerous in the southern colonies, and it was there that African American families and communities emerged with greater success.

-This was especially true in South Carolina and parts of the Tidewater Chesapeake, where in certain localities slaves formed a majority of the population. -Even more significant, these regions witnessed the rise of a creole, or American-born, slave population by about the 1750s. This development distinguished slavery in the mainland British colonies from that in the West Indies, where disease and overwork killed so many slaves that the black population grew only because of the constant importation of Africans.

Europeans in the New World were thrilled to find that land was

-abundant and quite cheap by European standards. -They were perplexed, however, by the unexpectedly high cost of labor. -In Europe, the reverse had been true. There land was expensive but labor cheap, because competition for jobs among large numbers of workers pushed wages down. -Colonial workers commanded high wages because there were so few of them compared to the supply of land to be developed. In addition, few settlers wanted to work for others when they could get farms of their own. -The scarcity and high cost of labor led some colonial employers to turn to enslaved Africans as a solution.

An arrangement similar to indentured servitude—the redemptioner system

-brought many families, especially from German provinces, to the colonies in the eighteenth century. -Instead of negotiating contracts for service before leaving Europe, as indentured servants did, redemptioners promised to redeem, or pay, the costs of passage on arrival in America. -They often paid part of the fare before sailing. If they could not raise the rest soon after landing, the ship captain who brought them sold them into servitude. The length of their service depended on how much they still owed.

Many emigrants responded to pamphlets and newspaper articles that

-exaggerated the bright prospects of life in America. -Others studied more realistic accounts from friends and relatives who had already emigrated. -Landowners sent agents to port towns to recruit new arrivals to become tenants, often on generous terms.

Slavery was the most oppressive extreme in a spectrum of practices designed to

-exert control over workers and relieve the problems caused by the easy availability of land and the high cost of labor. Most colonial laborers were, in some measure, unfree. One-half to two-thirds of all white immigrants to the English colonies arrived as indentured servants, bound by contract to serve masters for a period of years. -But indentured servants, though less costly than slaves, carried too high a price for farmers who raised crops mainly for subsistence. -Servants could be found in every colony, but were most common in the Chesapeake and, to a lesser extent, in Pennsylvania, where they worked for farmers producing export crops.

Another slave insurrection occurred in Virginia in 1730, sparked by a

-false rumor that local officials had suppressed a royal edict calling for the emancipation of Christian slaves. -More than 300 rebels escaped into the Dismal Swamp along the border with North Carolina, attacking white settlers in the area. -Using Indians to hunt down the fugitives, Virginia authorities captured and executed twenty-four of the rebellion's leaders.

Merchants eager to develop New England's fisheries devised other means to fill their labor needs. Because it was fairly easy to get a farm, few New Englanders took on the risky job of

-fishing. -Moreover, few could afford the necessary equipment, including boats, provisions, and salt (used for preserving fish). -Merchants recruited fishermen by advancing credit to coastal villagers so that they could outfit their own boats. -Many fishermen ran up such large debts that they were obliged to continue supplying fish to their creditors, whether they wanted to or not.

In the northern colonies, the same conditions that made men reluctant to become fishermen deterred them from becoming farm laborers, except perhaps for

-high wages -Paying high wages, however, or the high cost of servants or slaves was difficult for New Englanders with farms that produced no export crops and could not be worked during cold winter months. -So northern farmers turned to the cheapest and most dependable workers they could find—their children. -Children as young as 5 or 6 years old began with simple tasks and moved on to more complex work as they grew older. -By the time they were in their late teens, girls knew how to run households, and boys knew how to farm. -Fathers used their ownership of property to prolong the time their sons worked for them. -Young men could not marry until they could set up their own households and relied on their fathers to provide them with land to do so. -Fathers often waited until their sons were in their mid-twenties, compelling them until then to invest their labor in the paternal estate.

Slavery grew rapidly in the southern colonies because it answered the

-labor needs of planters engaged in the commercial production of tobacco and rice. -The demand for slaves became so powerful that it destroyed James Oglethorpe's plan to keep them out of Georgia, the last of England's mainland colonies, founded in 1732. -Oglethorpe intended Georgia to be a refuge for English debtors, who normally were jailed until they could repay their creditors. His idea was to send debtors to Georgia to work at producing marketable goods such as silk and wine. -Slaves were initially prohibited not only to prevent them from competing with the debtors, but also to make it difficult for fugitive slaves from South Carolina to escape there. -With slavery forbidden, any black person seen in Georgia would be immediately recognizable as a runaway. But when Georgia's colonists began to grow rice, they demanded the right to have slaves. In 1750, the colony's founders reluctantly legalized slavery; by 1770, slaves made up nearly half of the colony's population.