The idea of indentured servitude was born of a need for cheap labor. The earliest settlers soon realized that they had lots of land to care for, but no one to care for it. With passage to the Colonies expensive for all but the wealthy, the Virginia …show more content…
This was appealing to plantation owners because this meant that they could essentially get free slaves from slaves he already owned. As seen in document 3 and 4 African American children born to a slave were slaves. Young women were often advertised for sale as "good breeding stock". To encourage child-bearing some population owners promised women slaves their freedom after they had produced fifteen children. One slave trader from Virginia boasted that his successful breeding policies enabled him to sell 6,000 slave children a year. It has been claimed that plantation owners were often the fathers of slave children. Slave women were forced to comply with sexual advances by their masters on a very regular basis. Consequences of resistance often came in the form of physical beatings; thus, an enormous number of slaves became concubines for these men. Most often the masters were already bound in matrimony, which caused tension and hatred between the slave and the mistress of the house. Many "mulatto" or racially mixed children also resulted from these relations. Because the "status of the child" followed that of his or her mother, the child of a white man would not be freed based upon patriarchal genealogy as seen in document …show more content…
They fled from abusive masters, to take a break from work, or in search of family members from whom they had been separated. Some servants were lured away by neighbors attempting to steal labor. The cost and the likely hood of finding a runaway servant caused plantation owners to lose money. Slaves, unlike servants, were typically much easier to find due to markings and scars found on their bodies. Document 7 clearly shows the detail kept and used in order to find slaves. Slaves were also able to be punished in a more brutal way due to the fact that they were