Slavery In The 1600's

Slavery. Whenever we think of the word, our minds conjure up images of slave ships, racism, and most of all, what exactly caused Americans to start using slaves. The settlers needed clearing the newly founded country. By the time the first slaves arrived in the 1600’s, small plantations and farms had sprung up across the thirteen colonies and beyond, especially in the southern colonies. The cheapest and easiest option turned out to be slavery, but what exactly nudged slavery to its height in the 1700’s? In spite of all the other factors that influenced slavery, the social, environmental, and economical circumstances encouraged slavery the most and brought it to where it was in the 1700’s.

In the beginning, the majority of farm hands was composed of indentured servants, people who paid for their passage to the New World by working for an employer for a few years. But slaves slowly began to take the place of indentured servants because indentured servants tended to be more rebellious, as what happened in Bacon’s Rebellion. In this example, a group of servants, led by Nathaniel Bacon, held an unsuccessful uprising against the government. Slaves also were a better option for the colonists because indentured servants would only work up to seven years, and after that they could become
Although white indentured servants remained as the primary source of labor throughout the 1600’s, enslaved Africans slowly took the place of them at the turn of the century. In the mid-1600’s, about half of a few settlements’ population consisted of African Americans slaves. As time went on, more slaves were imported and in some colonies, the black population was even greater than that of the white’s. As more lands needed to be cleared and indentured servants used more rarely, slaves came into play and gave everyone but the slaves economic gain. Slavery had begun to reach its