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Indentured Servitude
Indentured servants made up the majority of forced laborers in the colonies until about 1676. These were people who couldn’t pay for their own passage to the New World, so they agreed to work for an investor without payment for a certain amount of time (usually four to seven years), in exchange for that investor paying for their passages to the New World. Historians estimate that between one-third and one-half of the early settlers in the colonies were indentured servants.
Indentured servants had very few rights or liberties. For example, indentured persons could not own property or engage in trade, needed permission to marry, and could be physically punished or have their indenture extended for bad behavior. Many died from disease or exhaustion. After their indentures were up, they were supposed to receive money, tools, clothing, food, and sometimes land, but this did not always happen. Most remained relatively poor afterward, which created a class of socially displaced people. As these people did not have land to farm, they often became disgruntled and caused social unrest, such as Bacon’s Rebellion.
Bacon’s Rebellion
In 1676, a group of Virginia farmers and colonists asked the royal governor, William Berkeley, for protection from Native American raids so that they could expand westward and take more Native American land. Governor Berkeley refused. Thousands of Virginians from less-privileged social groups (from indentured servants to small farmers—even some African slaves) rose up against Governor Berkeley. The rebellion was led by Virginian Nathaniel Bacon, who resolved to kill all Native Americans, so the colony could expand westward without Native American retaliation.
Bacon and his followers arrested Governor Berkeley and burned the colonial capital at Jamestown. Though they were successful at first, Bacon died from dysentery and the coalition he had built began to fracture. Eventually, Berkeley regained control and executed 23 men. The major significance of this rebellion is that it showed planters that indentured servitude could create problems because it created a volatile, landless class of people. As a result, planters began to prefer enslaved Africans for labor rather than indentured servants.
Enslaved Africans
Africans were the largest non-white ethnic group to come to British colonies. The first enslaved Africans arrived in Jamestown in 1619. At first, Africans were treated as indentured servants, but, by the 1660s, chattel slavery, or the idea of lifelong slavery, became customary. There was a great demand for enslaved labor in the West Indies (the Caribbean Island colonies) and Portuguese Brazil because of the sugar plantations. In British North America, demand for labor grew due to the increased production of cash crops in the Southern colonies. Slavery existed in all British colonies (yes, even in the North to a certain extent), but was most prevalent in Southern colonies.
About twice as many enslaved males were transported to British North America, compared to enslaved females. Most were young men between the ages of 15 and 30. These men were usually the product of warfare among African tribes (prisoners of war) and were sold to African slave traders on the West Coast. These slave traders then sold them to Europeans, who transported them to the Atlantic coast via the Middle Passage. This was the brutal trip across the Atlantic during which one in six slaves died due to disease, uprisings, or suicide. Once the surviving enslaved people arrived in North America, they were sold at “slave forts” to individual farmers or plantation owners. There, they still endured horrifying conditions, as they were mostly forced to perform exhausting manual farm labor, treated like livestock, and physically punished for transgressions.
Africans were a minority in New England (about two percent) and in the middle colonies (eight percent), where most of the enslaved lived in port cities. Family slavery, in which a family might own one or two slaves who did work such as gardening, cooking, cleaning, or driving and lived with the family, was the most common type of slavery in New England and the middle colonies. In the Southern colonies, however, the enslaved were more numerous, and most worked as field hands on farms and plantations.
As enslaved people were from diverse African tribes, often they did not share a common culture or language. Enslaved communities tried to maintain elements from their home cultures and blended them with the British culture they were subjected to in the American colonies. Religious practices were usually made up of a blend of African and Christian beliefs, especially teachings about deliverance from captivity. They created songs, stories, and sermons, which were used to circulate coded messages about their unhappiness with their state.
Slave Rebellions
As with the Native Americans, there were several slave revolts, such as the 1712 New York Revolt and the Stono Rebellion. We are going to examine the Stono Rebellion as our illustrative example.
In 1739, enslaved people in South Carolina rose to escape captivity and seized a store of weapons in the town of Stono. Seeking freedom in Florida, they marched south, burning houses and barns and killing any whites they encountered. The rebellion eventually attracted about 100 enslaved people. Finally, a battle with colonial militia ensued, leading to the rebels’ defeat and a severe tightening of South Carolina slave codes.
