Slave codes were soon approved – in Massachusetts in 1641 and Virginia in 1661 –and any minor liberties that might have existed for African American were taken away (Feature Indentured Servants In The U.S , n.p.). The early colonizers soon understood that they had lots of land to settle, but no one to actually do the work. This necessity for cheap labor created indentured servitude. Indentured servants were important to the colonial growth. But as demands for labor grew, so did the cost of paying indentured servants.
African slaves were forced to move to colonial America. They did a lot of labor work when they came to America. Equiano, the first free slave to publish his own slave narrative, and many other Africans had to come to America. They were slaves of England, and weren’t wanted in England anymore so were shipped to America. William Penn wrote an appeal for immigrants to come to Pennsylvania.
First off the first slaves came from Africa in 1619 which was brought to Virginia. Slavery was system in America that made it legal for whites to buy and own blacks and use them for labor. Slavery was a state to state thing there were many slave owners and famous slave owners were the Framers also known as the founding fathers. Something interesting about the founding fathers were they were hypocrites because most of them were against slavery when they owned slaves, for example George Washington had many slaves but he was against slavery. Another thing to know is that that in the south slaves were considered as three fifths of a person.
Indentured Servant-(noun) - a person who signs and is bound by indentures to work for another for a specified amount of time especially in return for payment for travel expenses and maintenance. (Merriam-Webster.com) When the migration of immigrants first descended into the new land in 1607 they realized that there was far too much work and too much land to manage by themselves. The idea of indentured servitude was born out of necessity. They could entice people from the homeland to share in the experience of land owning by offering them indentured servitude to pay off the debt. Farmers relied on the attractiveness of the deal to attract a number of labors because this was a chance that they might never otherwise had been able to achieve.
The ships could yet return to England. The Negro slave trade became one of the most important business enterprises of the seventeenth century. The monopoly of the French slave trade was at the first assigned to the French West India Company in 1664, but yet they transferred in 1673, to the Senegal Company. The Monopoly of the Dutch Slave trade was given to the Dutch West India Company, incorporated in 1621. In the early as the 15 century, England passed from raising sheep and producing wool, an agricultural activity, to manufacturing cloth.
In the 1630’s, migrants from a country where a handful of nobles and gentry owned 80 percent of the arable land came to the New World to establish a society free of the social and economic injustices they had faced. But they brought across the Atlantic Ocean with them, the prejudices and mishaps that they had hoped to escape. By the mid 18th century, women, African Americans, and Indians faced the very same persecutions that the migrants fell under in the 17th century. By traditional customs and law, women were subordinate to men, who dominated their families. Women were expected to be dutiful helpmates to their husbands.
In the early 17th century, European settlers in North America turned to African slaves as a cheaper, more plentiful labour source than indentured servants and were treated inhumanly. African Americans had been fighting against racial discrimination for centuries; during the 1950s, however, the struggle against racism and segregation entered the mainstream of American life. A growing group of Americans spoke
Leaders of other countries weren’t happy with all the money Europeans were earning because they too wanted to make a profit. This set the precedent for other countries to set sail in search of new trade routes in order to begin making money. Greed motivated Christopher Columbus to partner up with the Spanish in order to search for a more effective trade route to China and India. During this search Columbus discovered the Caribbean, and others along with him discovered the American continents later on. He thought he was in India, that’s why he called the native people on the island, “Indians”.
Response to Slavery and The Making of America The first episode of Slavery and the Making of America discussed the beginnings of African enslavement in America and how it slowly became a “downward spiral.” In the beginning, the Dutch West India company was very dependant on the labor of their slaves, so the slaves did have room to negotiate for things like better wages and were treated much better and had more rights than we would typically imagine slaves back then to have. Many of the first eleven slave men that came to “Dutch New Amsterdam” were Christian, had mixed European and African ansestry, were Christian, literate, and spoke many different languages. It was surprising to me how such educated and literate people could have been enslaved and made to work from dawn to dusk like that. I feel that since there were so few slaves at that time, the company was always very afraid that they would loose all the fruits that came from these slave's hard labor so they had to make sure the slaves were content and had to let them negotiate. The hard work of these slaves made the early infrastructure of America.
Unfortunately because of the struggle to survive the African people adopted slave trade and started capturing and trading their people for European goods. Portugal’s started slavery in the fourteenth century with West Africa. The West Europeans developed a trading system in the sixteenth century but it was not successful as expected because the slaves tried to escape the hardship of labor. Later slavery expanded leading to the” Triangle Trade.” This was where ships left Europe went to Africa and then Americas. The Middle Massage was called “The Middle Passage,” because it was the second and longest part of a three part triangle trade that started from Africa and ended in North and South America, and the Caribbean.