The first African slaves in Britain’s North American colonies arrived at Jamestown in 1619. WHY?
A century and half later, with the American Revolution on the horizon, slavery had become an institution, a pillar of society, in those southern colonies which found it particularly economically profitable and soon to be extinct in the northern colonies that did not.
The Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland were the first to develop large enslaved populations, because of the labor intensity of tobacco, that region’s cash crop. At first Africans worked alongside European immigrants in indentured servitude, but as the need for plantation labor grew and more Africans were brought to Virginia’s shores new laws placed them in lifetime bondage, …show more content…
In 1739, along the Stono River in South Carolina, a band of twenty slaves rebels. After acquiring weapons they killed a number of whites, slave-owners and non-slaveholders alike before the rebellion was suppressed and forty slaves were both to death in retribution. A year later, the South Carolina legislature passed a new, more restrictive slave code designed to prevent such an event’s reoccurrence. This new stricter slave code illegalized the education of slaves and made all slaves unaccompanied by their owners subject to the examination and “correction” of any white person who came across them (South Carolina Slave Code of 1740).
The fear of slave rebellion was not a distinctly southern phenomenon, in 1741, two years after the Stono Rebellion, a series of fires in New York City were deemed to have been the work of a conspiracy of slaves and disenfranchised whites (FOMM). This event not only illustrates the fear of slave revolt’s presence in northern urban settings, but also the fear of poor whites and slaves joining together to overthrow the colonial …show more content…
The colonial era is where economically motivated slavery becomes stratified into the law and society of much of what would become the United States. Economic calculations had social consequences. In those areas of the future United States, where slavery was both economically profitable and socially institutionalized slavery would survive well into the history of the new nation, but in the northern colonies where slavery had never been particularly profitable and therefore less of a social bastion the years following the American Revolution would see mass manumissions and slavery’s
A century and half later, with the American Revolution on the horizon, slavery had become an institution, a pillar of society, in those southern colonies which found it particularly economically profitable and soon to be extinct in the northern colonies that did not.
The Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland were the first to develop large enslaved populations, because of the labor intensity of tobacco, that region’s cash crop. At first Africans worked alongside European immigrants in indentured servitude, but as the need for plantation labor grew and more Africans were brought to Virginia’s shores new laws placed them in lifetime bondage, …show more content…
In 1739, along the Stono River in South Carolina, a band of twenty slaves rebels. After acquiring weapons they killed a number of whites, slave-owners and non-slaveholders alike before the rebellion was suppressed and forty slaves were both to death in retribution. A year later, the South Carolina legislature passed a new, more restrictive slave code designed to prevent such an event’s reoccurrence. This new stricter slave code illegalized the education of slaves and made all slaves unaccompanied by their owners subject to the examination and “correction” of any white person who came across them (South Carolina Slave Code of 1740).
The fear of slave rebellion was not a distinctly southern phenomenon, in 1741, two years after the Stono Rebellion, a series of fires in New York City were deemed to have been the work of a conspiracy of slaves and disenfranchised whites (FOMM). This event not only illustrates the fear of slave revolt’s presence in northern urban settings, but also the fear of poor whites and slaves joining together to overthrow the colonial …show more content…
The colonial era is where economically motivated slavery becomes stratified into the law and society of much of what would become the United States. Economic calculations had social consequences. In those areas of the future United States, where slavery was both economically profitable and socially institutionalized slavery would survive well into the history of the new nation, but in the northern colonies where slavery had never been particularly profitable and therefore less of a social bastion the years following the American Revolution would see mass manumissions and slavery’s