Indentured Servitude In Colonial America

As immigrants to the British New World, Africans had no choice in their destinations or fates. The first African Americans arrived in Jamestown in 1619 on a Dutch trading ship. They were not slaves but they were also not free. They were indentured servants and served until their duties were fulfilled. Although these somewhat “lucky” individuals lived out the rest of their lives free from a life of servitude, the next decades to come would make this a fate that ceased to exist.
Indentured servitude was gradually replaced by slavery as the principal means for plantation labor in the Old South. Virginia was the first British colony to adopt slavery in 1661. Soon after this Maryland and the Carolinas followed suit. The one southern colony to
From Massachusetts to Maryland, Africans lived in repression. The reason there were not as many slaves was because geography and economics did not encourage the need for slave importation like plantations in the south did. Therefore, the slave population in the northern and middle colonies stayed small compared to the southern colonies.
As British colonists became convinced that Africans were more valuable when used for labor, the importation for them increased. By the turn of the eighteenth century there were tens of thousands of African slaves in the British colonies. Before the first shots were fired at the start of the Battle of Lexington and Concord, the number of slaves had gone up to hundreds of thousands.
All of these hundreds of thousands of African slaves’ experiences varied quite a bit. Some might have been treated horribly with torture and cruel punishments. While others might have been treated with a little bit of respect to the fact that even though they have dark skin, they are still human. These experiences and type of life the slaves had all depended on if they lived on farms or in
Slaves living in town were employed by some shop owners and this allowed slaves the opportunity to acquire marketable skills. Some white people did not think very highly of this. U.S. History.org states, “… white craftsmen often displayed strong resentment, believing the price of their labor would suffer.” (ushistory.org 6d)
By the time the Continental Congress asked Thomas Jefferson to write the Declaration of Independence because the American colonies had broken away from Britain, there were around 500,000 slaves in America. Even Jefferson owned over 100 African slaves.
The U.S. national government started under the Articles of Confederation, which was adopted in 1781. Nothing in this document addressed anything about the slavery in the country. The government left the power of regulating the slavery to the individual states. The reason for this is because they were trying to get away from a strong central government like they experienced with the