While many disregard this system as cruel and unfair, in reality it helped to shape America as it is today. Without the help of this system, economies would not be as developed as they are now. Unfree labor played a very important role in shaping the economy and society of colonial American through the use of indentured servants and slavery. The system of temporary servitude in the New World was established out of practices used in New England. In short, indentured servants were mainly poor British people without jobs.
During the end of the eighteenth century African American slaves living on large plantations began creating families and communities within the plantations. In the lower south of the slave states, which were densely populated slave communities, a task system was developed that benefited slaves. This system allowed an African American slave to be assigned a task to complete, once the task was completed on many occasions the slave master treated that worker as if the job was done for the day and didn’t call on him or her to complete another task. In the northern region of the slave states the slave population was much less dense than farther south. Slaves in these northern slave communities were in contact with white Americans far more often than slaves in the lower south, which left the slaves exposed to greater scrutiny to slave
The following essay will focus on indentured servitude and slavery in seventeenth century British Colonial America. In 1619, Sir Edwyn Sandys, controller of the Virginia Company, created a system known as the head right system. This system let every settler, who went to the New World; receive 50 acres of land in the new colony. Every settler also got 50 more acres for every servant they imported from England and this led to the institution of indentured servitude. (Gallay, 2011) Indentured servants were men, women, and sometimes children from England who signed a contract with a master to serve them for four to seven years.
They depended on slave labor for economic stability. Without the slaves many whites believed they were not able or should be doing the backbreaking labor. The plantation owners also needed the support of the slaves in all areas of their lives such as: cooks, housecleaners, nannies and chauffeurs. The possibility of life without the slaves was devastating. Slaves were the support system of their owners.
Many gradations of freedom coexisted in colonial America. The majority of English settlers who crossed the Atlantic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries came as indentured servants who agreed to labor for a period of years in exchange for passage. Even after their term of labor ended, many remained poor, landless, and unable to meet the property qualifications for
They came for a variety of reasons, but all wanted a better life. Carving a better life out of the vast wilderness the early colonists found in North America challenged even the hardiest of those early pioneers. In England and in much of Europe, the poor were chronically unemployed, and opportunities to rise out of poverty were scarce; by comparison, almost any alternative might have seemed promising, Europe in 1600 had lots of push. On the other hand, conditions in early America were difficult, to say the least, but the “pull factor” was helped by what can only be characterized as propaganda. Proprietors of the companies that sponsored American colonies quickly realized that settlers were needed if their investments were to show a return, and their efforts to recruit settlers made the New World appear far more attractive than conditions warranted.
Likewise, by the 1840s, the free black population in the U.S. had expanded due to the emerging belief that slavery was immoral. Much like the newly arrived immigrant, the free black lacked skills outside of agriculture, as well as capital needed to buy land. Because of their low economic status, immigrants (especially Irish), and free blacks congregated in urban areas and racial and ethnic tensions spilled over into
It was the practice of immigrants in that time to contract to work for a fixed period of time, typically three to seven years, in exchange for transportation, food, clothing, lodging and other necessities. While most immigrants came for this cause some others were forced to come to the united states such as the African Americans who were forcefully brought here to be slaves and serve the white m an until president Lincoln put a stop to that. The United States does not consider the first British who came to America to be immigrants even though we did take the land from the natives after serving them with ultimatums saying if you don’t surrender to our
With the changing of culture and passing of time, the fallout that was (and sometimes still is) hardest to cope with in the United States was racism. As time progressed and things would move from more primitive to more sophisticated design and ideas, slavery did the same. Slavery my have just been the most primitive form of racism, and as it was abolished the idea of another race being subordinate to another didn’t seem to dissipate. Instead it would seem that the “abolitionist movement” became the “civil rights movement”. Instead of the government allowing slavery, it looked like it found a loop hole to not treat people of color equally for anything whether it was sports, school or public facilities blacks were still treated as inferior.
There were white planters -- who owned the plantations and the slaves -- and petit blancs, who were artisans, shop keepers and teachers, those who were free, those who were slaves, and those who had run away. There were about thirty thousand free black people in 1789. Half of them were mulatto and often they were wealthier and more preferred than the petit blancs. The slave population was close to give five hundred thousand. The runaway slaves were called maroons; they had retreated deep into the mountains of Saint Dominigue and lived off subsistence farming.