Growth Od Slavery In The American Colonies

Slavery was a social institution defined by law and custom as the most absolute involuntary form of human servitude. The definitive characteristics of slaves are as follows: their labour or services were obtained through force; their physical beings were regarded as the property of another person, their owner; and they were entirely subject to their owner's will. Since the earliest times, slaves have been legally defined as chattel. Therefore, they could be bought, sold, traded, given as a gift, or pledged for a debt by their owner, usually without any recourse to personal or legal objection or restraint.

With the development of the plantation system in the southern colonies in the latter half of the 17th century, the number of Africans imported as agricultural slave labourers incr

Thus, almost exactly a century after the first colonists had set foot in Jamestown, the House of Burgesses codified and systematized Virginia’s laws of slavery. These laws would be modified and added to over the next century and a half, but the essential legal framework within which the institution of slavery would subsequently operate had been put in place. It had taken the English in Virginia the best part of one hundred years to finalize their construction of a legal status quite unknown in the Common Law of England, to declare unequivocally that Africans were a form of property; that they were, and henceforth would remain, “strangers” and “outsiders” who would be required to live out their lives according to an entirely different set of laws from those that governed people of European birth and ancestry. By 1710, a racially based system of chattel slavery was firmly fixed. This area had been transformed from a slaveholding society into a slave society.

As previously noted, Africans were brought to America to replace a dwindling European labour force and soon became an important part of the economy of the Chesapeake region beginning in 1619. Initially, they were treated as indentured servants and freed after a term of service. Many black servants, however, began to lose the same rights afforded to their white counterparts. Tobacco was the Chesapeake’s regional crop. It had dominated the Chesapeake agriculture since 1618. Tobacco was a profitable crop, but its profits did not come close to those of the sugarcane. Tobacco, like sugar required a large amount of labour. As a result, ample numbers of immigrants traveled to the Chesapeake eager to work. Plunging tobacco market from the mid-1680s to 1715 forced farmers to diversify their crops, shifting to grain, hemp and flax and raising greater numbers of domestic animals. Virginia, for example, experienced a drastic growth in slave population as enslaved Africans replaced indentured servants.

eased significantly. Generally, slaves were used as domestics and in trade in the northern colonies; in the Middle Atlantic colonies, they were used more in agriculture; and in the southern colonies, where plantation agriculture was the primary occupation, most slaves were used to work the plantations. All the colonies in their early stages shared a common dependence upon the exploitation of subject people to achieve a measure of prosperity. The purpose of this paper is to explore the emergence and growth of slavery in North America. Specifically, I will examine how the occupations, working conditions and status of slaves evolved in various colonies from their arrival in 1619, through the American Revolution, to the new republic. As slavery evolved differently in the thirteen colonies, the colonial areas I will focus on are the Chesapeake region, the north, the Carolina’s and Georgia, followed by Louisiana.

As the colony grew, a need for skilled labourers to build more houses and buildings for businesses developed. Slave labour became central to the economy of Georgia as they became porters, domestics, joiners and coopers. This in turn forced the lawmakers to allow slaves to be trained in a skill and to use slave labour elsewhere besides in the cotton and rice fields.

Until 1680, about one half of the inhabitants of Southern Carolina came from Barbados, from where they brought slaves. The first colonists depended mainly on raising cattle. The use of slaves was discouraged in cattle farming, due to the fact that it required only a small labour force and provided slaves with ample opportunities to flee. Life in North Carolina was much like South Carolina. Self-sufficient white families predominated, due to the fact that their crops did not produce enough profit to warrant maintaining many slaves.

In conclusion, the idea of slavery was gained from Spanish conquistadors that had, at the beginning, enslaved Indians. African kings themsel

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