Colonial Slavery

Essential Question

Who came to the colonies?

Indentured Servants

• Contracting work for a fixed period of time (3-7 years) in exchange for transportation, food, clothing, lodging, and other necessities

• Most under the age of 21• Mostly in the southern colonies

Spain vs. England• What is going on between them in the 1500s?•Spain claims a monopoly on trade in the North Atlantic

•England wants to trade in the New World

• In 1562, John Hawkins becomes 1st Englishman to carry a cargo of African slaves to the New World

Spain vs. England, cont.•Soon after, Hawkins’ fleet ran into the Spanish off of Mexico•Violent attacks; Of 400, only a handful escape

•Discouraged the English from trading slaves until 1619

The “Bottom” of the Triangle

The Middle Passage

Why Africans?• New labor supply was needed. Epidemics reduced the native population by 50% - 90%.

• Need for workers in harvesting cash crops (tobacco, cotton, sugar cane, indigo)

Question: Did the Europeans buy slaves out of some racist ideology?

•Answer: Racism came AFTER the fact. Economics and greed outweighed any initial racist ideas.

•Colonial racism was born out of a need to JUSTIFY SLAVERY AND OPPRESSION

Geography of Slavery

“Tight Packing” vs. “Loose Packing”

Onboard, Africans were restricted in their movements so that they wouldn’t combine to mutiny on the ship. In many slave ships, slaves were chained down, stacked like firewood with less than a foot between them, as this account describes:

The space was so low and they sat between each other’s legs, and stowed so close together, that there was no possibility of lying down, or at all changing their position, by night or by day. As they belonged to, and were shipped on account of different individuals, they were all branded like sheep, with their owners’ marks of different forms.

Ship Life

On the plantations, slaves were subjected to a regimen of 18-hour workdays. All members of slave families were set to work. Since the New World tobacco and sugar plantations operated nearly like factories, men, women and children were assigned tasks from the fields to the processing mills.

Slaves were denied any rights. Throughout the colonies in the Caribbean to North America, laws were passed establishing a variety of common practices: Slaves were forbidden to carry weapons, they could marry only with the owner’s permission, and their families could be broken up. They were forbidden to own property.

The planters instituted barbaric regimes of repression to prevent any slave revolts. Slave catchers using tracker dogs would hunt down any slaves who tried to escape the plantation. The penalties for any form of slave resistance were extreme and deadly.