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.
Businesses would not have been as successful, it would have taken a much longer time to establish plantations and begin to sell product, and planters may not have been as successful as they were without the knowledge and man power that the slaves provided. These two ideas of slavery created a meaning of race and separation of race and in the types of work that different racial groups were forced to do. Before the English made the decision to bring West African slaves to the colonies to work for them, there were indentured servants. Indentured servants are people who the English colonists forced to work for them on tobacco plantations or wherever needed, for seven years. After the seven years were up, they were promised freedom and a chance to get started on their own journey to make a life for themselves.
As mentioned by William Harper, “The cultivation of the great staple crop cannot be carried on without slaves.” (Harper, Memoir in Slavery, 1837) In a time of western expansion and the cotton boom, some slave traders were able to accumulate great wealth from the slave-trading business and sought opportunities to acquire higher social status and financial stability. A con of slavery was when slaves were driven mercilessly to plant, cultivate, and harvest the crops for market. A failed crop meant the planter could lose his initial investment in land and slaves and possibly suffer bankruptcy. A successful crop could earn such high returns that the slaves were often worked beyond human endurance. Plantation masters argued callously that it was cheaper to work the slaves to death and then buy new ones than it was to allow them to live long enough and under sufficiently healthy conditions that they could bear children to increase their numbers.
In the early 1800s, when plantation owners left almost all other crops in favour of the newly profitable cotton. To increase cotton production planters purchased more slaves from Africa and the West Indies before the slave trade was banned in 1808. Thousands of blacks were brought into the United States during these years to tend to cotton fields, the size of plantations increased from relatively small plots to huge farms with as many as several hundred slaves each. Because the entire Southern economy became dependent on cotton, it also became dependent on slavery. Although Northern factories certainly benefited indirectly from slavery, Northern social customs were not tied to slavery as Southern customs were.
Slavery was such a vital part in the cultivation of cash crops such as sugarcane that it was introduced to North America with its colonization. The availability of land combined with the growing demand of sugarcane in Europe quickly created an insatiable demand for African slaves, whom, by happenstance, tended to be suited well for work in the warm and tropical environments of the Americas. These Africans at first became indentured servants; nevertheless, the growing arrogance of the white man in his spiritual superiority and the need for even more labor led to the swift decline of the indentured servant. When other alternatives to slavery such as cheap white labor and convict laborers failed to deliver the desired results, the prevalent abstraction of a racially-based slave system finally emerged in the 1680’s. Furthermore, slave uprisings would also play a role in the shaping of the structure of slavery.
Charlestown was founded by planters whom brought along their slaves from the overpopulated sugar growing island Barbados. [2] African slaves were difficult to acquire in north america because of the Caribbean's voracious appetite for slave labor. The african population growth in north america started off very slowly. “In 1625 their were only 23 africans present in virginia.”[3] 25 years later there were only 950, 3-4% of the colonies population, and they were still treated in the same manner as an indentured servant. The main reason behind slaveries growth in america was economy based.
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
The 18th century Industrial Revolution didn’t make things easier for the Africans. The Europeans took an average of 135,000 Africans per year and sent them to other countries by the 1830’s. They also took many raw materials and resources from Africa to produce their special goods. They couldn’t sell all their items to the market in Europe, so they also made more money by selling these products in Africa. The British were interested primarily in opening markets for its manufactured goods in Nigeria and expanding commerce in palm oil.
Farming around the thirty year period of 1870 to 1900 was not a fair or successful one. One demographic that suffered immensely was the black population. Fresh out of the civil war, African Americans tried to acquire land, but had a difficult time paying off loans, which had high interest rates and took property as collateral. Black land owners were then forced to take out more loans, which thrust them into a spiraling debt (Document B). As seen in “The Farmers’ Grievances”, a skillful farmer, compared to his physicist or tailor counterparts would never terminate his financial troubles; and in contrast to other professions, advancements and pioneering in the farming field only dug the financial pit deeper (Document A).
In the 19th century, a total of 55 million migrants emigrated from their European homelands, with three-fifth choosing America as their land of destination. A variety of reasons as to why so much migration from Europe to America exists, they include the ease of transportation, homeland crises, economic incentives, demographic changes, and the “chain migrant effect”. The ease of transportation across the Atlantic during the 19th century contributed to the influx of European migrants to America. Technological revolution replaced sail with steamships as an ocean carrier, which not only increased safety but also decreased the cost of trans-Atlantic transport. By 1870, a migrant was able to cross the Atlantic “in relative safety, at a reasonable price …[and] in a scheduled time” (Hyde 1975 as cited in Hatton and Williamson, 1998).