Settlers who could pay for their own passage, came to America as free citizens.

However,
some voluntarily surrendered their freedom for a specified time (usually five to seven years)
in exchange for a passage to America and came as indentured servants.

Servants could be
 bought and sold
 could not marry without the permission of their owner
 were subject to physical punishment
 their obligation to labor enforced by the courts.
 To ensure uninterrupted work by female servants, the law lengthened the term of
their indenture if they became pregnant.
 servants were released from bondage after a specified period of time, after which,
they would receive a payment known as “freedom dues” and become free members
of society.

Exploitation:
For most of the seventeenth century, however, the death rate for indentured servants was
high. Freedom dues were sometimes so meager that they did not enable recipients to
acquire land.

SLAVE LABOUR
Though racism as a belief that some races are inherentky superior to others, had not
developed in the 17th century, the ease with which the British enslaved Africans indicates
that there existed a sentiment of bias against them. The British had a long tradition of
viewing alien people with disdain. The Africans were different and enslavable in ways that
other Englishmen were not.

Most English also deemed Indians to be uncivilized. But the Indian

population declined rapidly, and it was easy for Indians, familiar with
the countryside, to run away, that Indian slavery never became viable.
Some Indians were sold into slavery in the Caribbean.

The first time slave labour was employed was when due to the incessant demand for
workers spurred by the spread of tobacco cultivation, eventually led Chesapeake planters to
turn to the transatlantic trade in slaves.

CHARACTERISTICS:
 slavery was based on the plantation, an agricultural enterprise that brought together
large numbers of workers under the control of a single owner.
 The imbalance btw slaves and the owner magnified the possibility of slave resistance
and made it necessary to police the system rigidly
 Labor on slave plantations was far more demanding than in the household slavery
common in Africa
 High death rate
 Slavery also entrenched in the sugar plantation of West Indies
 In the New World, slavery would come to be associated with race, a concept that
 drew a permanent line between whites and blacks. Free slaves were also, thus
subjected to contempt

Advantages of slaves from perspective of colonists:

 As Africans, they could not claim the protections of English common law.
 Slaves’ terms of service never expired, and they therefore did not become a
population of unruly landless men.
  Their children were slaves
 their skin color made it more difficult for them to escape into the surrounding society.
 African men, moreover, unlike their Native American counterparts, were accustomed
to intensive agricultural labour
 they had encountered many diseases known in Europe and developed resistance to
them, so were less likely to succumb to epidemics.

SLAVE LAWS
For much of the seventeenth century, however, the legal status of
Chesapeake blacks remained ambiguous, While the first black arrivals in Virginia in
1619, were treated as slaves, some became free after serving a term of years. racial
distinctions were enacted into law from the outset. Examples:
 the law barred blacks from serving in the Virginia militia.
 The government punished sexual relations outside of marriage between
 Africans and Europeans more severely than the same acts involving two
white persons.
 In 1643, a poll tax was imposed on African but not white women.
 In both Virginia and Maryland, however, free blacks could sue and testify in court,
and some even managed to acquire land and purchase white servants or African
slaves.

SLAVE TRADE
It was a regular, normalised feature and a vital part of world commerce. The first mass
consumer goods in international trade were produced by slaves—sugar, rice,
coffee, and tobacco. The rising demand for these products fueled the rapid
growth of the Atlantic slave trade. A series of triangular trading routes crisscrossed the
Atlantic, carrying British manufactured goods to Africa and the colonies,
colonial products including tobacco, indigo, sugar, and rice to Europe, and
slaves from Africa to the New World. Merchants in New York,
Massachusetts, and Rhode Island participated actively in the slave trade,
shipping slaves from Africa to the Caribbean or southern colonies. The
slave economies of the West Indies were the largest market for fish, grain,
livestock, and lumber exported from New England and the Middle
Colonies.

The transatlantic slave trade made Africa a major market for European
goods, especially textiles and guns. Both disrupted relationships within
and among African societies. Cheap imported textiles undermined traditional
craft production, while guns encouraged the further growth of
slavery, since the only way to obtain European weapons was to supply
slaves. By the eighteenth century, militarized states like Ashanti and
Dahomey would arise in West Africa, with large armies using European
firearms to prey on their neighbors in order to capture slaves.

The voyage across the Atlanctic from Africa was called the Middle Passage. The
vessels were crammed to the fullest to maximise profits and many Africans died in
the harsh conditions. (one out of five)
Most of the slaves were destined to Brazil and West Indies where high death rate on the
sugar plantations led to a constant demand for new slave imports. United States imported
between 400,000 and 600,000 slaves. By 1770, due to the natural reproduction
of the slave population, around one-fifth of the estimated 2.3 million
persons (not including Indians) living in the English colonies of North
America were Africans and their descendants.
By the mid-eighteenth century, three distinct slave systems were well
entrenched in Britain’s mainland colonies: tobacco-based plantation slavery
in the Chesapeake, rice-based plantation slavery in South Carolina
and Georgia, and nonplantation slavery in New England and the Middle
Colonies.

CHEASAPEAKE SLAVERY
The largest and oldest of slave systems.
Most Chesapeake slaves, male and female, worked in the
fields, but thousands labored as teamsters, as
boatmen, and in skilled crafts. Numerous slave
women became cooks, seamstresses, dairy
maids, and personal servants. Slavery was common on
small farms as well as plantations; nearly half of
Virginia’s white families owned at least one
slave in 1770. productivity—Chesapeake
plantations tended to be smaller than in the
Caribbean, and daily interactions between masters
and slaves were more extensive.
In the Chesapeake, field slaves worked in groups under constant
supervision.
Slavery consolidated the Chesapeake society. At the top stood large planters, merchants
who handled the tobacco trade and lawyers who defended the
interests of slaveholders and at the bottom a large population of convicts,
indentured servants, tenant farmers and slaves.

Because of the large number of blacks, race became an important line for social divison.
Blacks were considered undesirable and dangerous. Free blacks lost the right to employ
white servants and to bear arms, were
subjected to special taxes, and could be punished for striking a white person,
regardless of the cause. In 1723, Virginia revoked the voting privileges
of property-owning free blacks.

SOUTH CAROLINA AND GEORGIA

Initially Indian slaves wre employed on the rice plantations. The local
Creek Indians initially welcomed the settlers and began selling them
slaves, generally war captives and their families, most of whom were sold
to the West Indies. They even launched wars against neighboring tribes
specifically for the purpose of capturing and selling slaves. As the plantation
system expanded, however, the Creeks became more and more concerned,
not only because it led to encroachments on their land but also
because they feared enslavement themselves.

With the growth of rice as staple crop, African slaves began to be employed. South
Carolina was the first mainland colony to achieve a black majority. In the 1740s, another
staple, indigo (a
crop used in producing blue dye), was developed. Like rice, indigo required
large-scale cultivation and was grown by slaves.

Under the “task” system that developed in eighteenth-century

South Carolina, individual slaves were assigned daily jobs, the completion
of which allowed them time for leisure or to cultivate crops of their own.

SLAVERY IN THE NORTH

Compared to the plantation regions, slavery was far less central to the
economies ofNew England and the Middle Colonies, where small farms predominated.
Slaves made up only a small percentage of these colonies’ populations,
and it was unusual for even rich families to own more than one
slave. Nonetheless, slavery was not entirely
marginal to northern colonial life. Slaves worked as farm hands, in artisan
shops, as stevedores loading and unloading ships, and as personal servants.

Because slaves constituted such a low part of the population, they posed no threat to the
white majority so laws were less harsh. In New England
slave marriages were recognized in law, the severe physical punishment of slaves was
prohibited, and slaves could bring suits in court, testify against whites, and own
property and pass it on to their children.

Slavery existed in New York, wgere app 30% of labourers were slaves in the 1740’s.
Though most were domestic workers, slaves worked in all sectors of the economy.

Slavery was also a significant presence in Philadelphia, although the

institution stagnated after 1750 as artisans and merchants relied increasingly
on wage laborers, who could be hired and fired at will,which, according to them made more
economic sense than a long-term investment in slaves.