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

The transatlantic slave trade produced one of the largest forced migrations in history. The slave trade from Africa is said to have uprooted as many as 20 million people from their homes and brought them to the Americas. Slavery had existed as a human institution for centuries, but the slaves were usually captives taken in war or members of the lowest class in a society. The black African slave trade, by contrast, was a major economic enterprise. It made the traders rich and brought an abundant labour supply to the American Colonies.

The status of blacks in America quickly changed. By the 1660s, court decisions made it nearly impossible for blacks to be viewed as anything other than property and the institution of slavery took root in the new colonies. As economic conditions in European countries improved during the seventeenth century, white indentured servitude gradually disappeared from the colonial landscape. As a result, planters, who needed dependable labour, gradually began to restrict the activities of African servants.

Whipping, branding and other inhumane treatment was not uncommon. One Virginian slave, named Emanuel, was convicted of trying to escape in July, 1640, and was condemned to thirty stripes, with the letter "R" for "runaway" branded on his cheek and "work in a shackle one year or more as his master shall see cause." This was an abject slave, subject to the court's definition of him as merchantable and movable property, and to his master's virtual whim. Indeed, the general assembly of Virginia in 1662 passed an act, which directly and consciously invoked Justinian Code whereby a child born of a slave mother was also held to be a slave, regardless of its father's legal status.

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.

In 1619 a ship arrived in Jamestown, and sold twenty “Negroes” it had brought over from Africa as part of its cargo. Bound labour was common in all the colonies because of the intense labour shortage. Many settlers earned their passage to the New World, and that of their families, by indenturing themselves for a term of years, usually seven, after which they would be free. Some of the early Africans were treated as indentured servants, because there are records of free blacks in the Chesapeake area in the 1650s. During this period, however, the white colonists determined that blacks would be slaves for the term of their lives, and their children would be slaves as well.

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