Sarah and Angelina Grimke and the Abolishment Movement Slavery in America is older than the United States itself. Africans were first brought as laborers to colonies in 1619. By the mid 1660’s, most Africans had been made into slaves. The reason being that the southerners needed many workers to grow crops such as: tobacco, rice, and cotton. In the beginning most of these workers were know as indentured servants.
It is hard to believe a human being could have a selling price placed on them, but that is exactly what happened not so long ago during the harsh times of slavery. The definition of a slave is, “A person who is the legal property of another and is forced to obey them.” Slavery began in America after Jamestown settlers had started hiring indentured servants. Most African Americans were taken as innocent people from their homes, and put onto ships that took them to America. There were many people on one ship for the couple of months that they traveled. Rich, plantation owning men were the ones that normally owned slaves because they could afford them and needed their help to work on different areas of the plantation.
Slave entered the Southern vocabulary as a technical word in trade, law and politics. (Robert McColley in Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery, Edited by Randall M. Miller and John David Smith, Greenwood Press, 1988 pp 281)Slavery basically started in America in a small boomtown called Jamestown, Virginia. Jamestown is in the Chesapeake region which sold tons of tobacco back to England. Jamestown export business was going so well the colonists were able to afford two imports which would greatly contribute to their productivity and quality of life. 20 Blacks from Africa and 90 women from England.
Its purpose was to retrieve tobacco grown and cultivated in America. The Dutch, in return, paid for the tobacco with 20 African captives, which the Dutch had, most likely, seized from a slave trader bound for the Spanish West Indies. As soon 1700, enslaved blacks would comprise a majority of the work force in some of the southern colonies. This was one of the Americans’ first exposures to slavery which led to centuries of controversy and conflict which nearly broke the country in two. The treatment of African Americans when they first arrived in America was very similar to the treatment of indentured servants, and of course, black servants were treated hugely different than white servants.
In fact, Virginia developed into a slave society where slavery was the foundation of the economic and social order in the late seventh century. As the number of slaves, mostly African American, increased, it influenced on the social order in Virginia. The Court records about Katherine Watkins provide the information about the race relations, the development of slavery, and sexuality in colonial Virginia. In this record, four witnesses offered conflicting statements about the
One witness on a slave ship anchored off the coast of Africa in 1797 noted that the first African man and woman brought on board were always renamed “Adam” and “Eve”, new names for newly created people. Once the slaves were on a plantation in the Americas, many masters also attempted to rename them Robert “King” Carter, one of the largest eighteenth-century planters of the Chesapeake area. Enslaved people resisted this renaming practice in countless ways. The actions of resistance varied with time and place. During the early years of North American slavery, many enslaved people kept their African names among themselves, especially on large plantations on which mas¬ters could not easily maintain every action of slave life.
Gary Nash discusses the impact of black people in a white peoples colony. The first negro people to come to America in Virginia were probably indentured servants who would receive some type of reward after their time of service was over, until 1660. After 1660 though many of the “Negros” that came to America were slaves, purchased as property. By the 1800’s every colony in America had “slave codes” which stripped black people of every right they had and made them property. His biggest claim was his stating of, “More than anything else it was sugar that transformed the African slave trade.” The slave trade became an extremely profitable enterprise for European nations once the sugar plantations reached the New World.
In the 18th century, some Blacks acquired their freedom, gained property, and gained admittance to American society. Many moved to the North, where slavery, was still legal but was less of a presence. African Americans, both slave and free also made major contributions to the economy and infrastructure
SLAVERY IN AMERICA Slavery in America began when the first African slaves were brought to the North American colony of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. They were brought over to aid in the production of tobacco. Slavery was practiced throughout the American colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries, and African-American slaves helped build the economic foundations for the United States of America. Most of them worked in mines or on plantations, while some became servants or maids. The northern states developed an economy based on small farms and growing industry.
The slave trade was no longer monopolized by the Royal African Co., therefore opening up a new market of human trade to fuel the growth of the American colonies which was dependent on the cheap forced labor to oversee the cultivation of corps like tobacco in the United States, and Sugar cane in the Caribbean Islands and its Lesser Antilles. In the newly formed colonies “migrant slaves from Africa outnumbered the European migrants nearly five to one.”(Pg. 50) Over the next century and a half more than 21 million people had been enslaved in Africa and forced into slavery in the New World as described in the