The Evolution of Slavery
The institution of slavery has long been in practice in the Americas but was first made common in Virginia where sailing traders would barter their “slaves” for food. Jamestown was the most notable of practicing such acts. The legend has been repeated endlessly that the first blacks in Virginia were "indentured servants," but there is no hint of this in the records. The legend grew up because the word slave did not appear in Virginia records until 1656, and statutes defining the status of blacks began to appear casually in the 1660s. The inference was then made that blacks called servants must have had approximately the same status as white indentured servants. Such reasoning failed to notice that Englishmen, in the early seventeenth century, used the work servant when they meant slave in our sense, and, indeed, white Southerners invariably used servant until 1865 and beyond. Slave entered the Southern vocabulary as a technical word in trade, law and politics. At the time that future president Thomas Jefferson was born in 1743, most black slaves were born in the arid savannahs of Africa, very few of them were Christian of faith, and very few black slaves were involved in the cotton industry. Slav
Slaves themselves found in Christianity a faith so strong and unrelenting that could give them hope in even a more than oppressive world. While Christianity has sometimes been called a "religion of passivity," it proved impossible to purge Christianity of its antislavery overtones with its promise of deliverance from bondage. Beginning in the 1740s and greatly accelerating in the early 1800s, there was a reformation once again in the Americas and many of the slaves converted to Christianity. In general, slaves refused to worship at the sides of their masters, so most became either Baptists or Methodists. The last and final revolution in the history of American bondage was a revolution in moral values and sensibility. For one of the first times in history, both religious and nonclerical associations denounced the institution of slavery as both an act of sin against man and God and as a violation of natural rights. During the 1760s, the first movements in history began to denounce slavery. The earliest groups to oppose slavery were "perfectionist" religious sects like the Quakers who challenged all traditional authorities and wanted to live free from sin. Second, the so-called "plantation revolution" not only increased the size of plantations, but made them increasingly more productive and efficient economic contributors. Plantation owners in turn immediately expanded their operations in the fields and imposed more intense supervision on their slaves. A third and latter revolution was one of a religious nature. During the earl
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Approximate Word count = 1042
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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