The Relationship Between Servants And Slave Populations

Consequently, as you move through history after this point, this social wedge described between the white and black populations would only expand as time moved on. In 1676, following the backlash from Bacon’s Rebellion, a violent united effort by both slaves and servants/lower class whites towards the higher class, plantation owners, in order to avoid future acts of violence towards them by their servants and slaves, decided to attempt to separate the groups. With that being said, the separation the owners wanted was not of physical being, as they wanted both groups to continue being productive, but one mentally. To do this, the owners looked to tear the two groups apart by removing as much of their similarities as they could. Early examples
Author Abbot E. Smith, in his book Colonists in Bondage, highlighted that, “the rate of growth of the servant population dissipated in almost direct correlation with the exponential growth of the slave population” (Smith 264). With the fact that slave population was growing faster than that of the servant population while colonial culture was socially dividing the slaves from everyone else, the idea of bringing in more servants, who not only cost more but had to be trained against the slaves, made no sense. As a result, indentured servitude had faded out of use by the time of the first stages of the American
Unfortunately, even though race no longer correlates with racial slavery directly, the use of race socially hasn’t changed, as it remains a tool for the high class white population to dominate racial minorities by stereotyping them as lesser or worse then the general population, which is still, to this day, defined as white. As long as culture deems a single group of society greater then others simply due to the color of their skin, then the damage of done to our society, and our culture, will never be undone and we will never know a society that values anything above the color of one's