Why I Went To The Chesapeake Colonies

A couple of years ago, I moved to the Chesapeake in hopes of finding a new life. A new life that would give me wealth and move me from the poor conditions like no employment, starvation, disease, and homelessness that is in England. In the Chesapeake, most of the people who came from England are mostly single men with no family at all, young people that their age ranges from 15 to 24 years old, the poor and criminals of England, and almost no wealthy people in the colony. Those people who came from England to the Chesapeake do not have any skills, they do not possess a skill that they can profit from or help them succeed in the colony. I left England for new opportunity in my life, I expected going to the Chesapeake to find a good quality …show more content…
Before we settled in the Chesapeake, the Native Americans who inhabited the colony were the Powhatan confederacy, which is a big community of different Native American villages that each have their own culture and language. The relationship hasn’t been the best since the first colonists that came to the Chesapeake in late 1560s. Early colonists of the Chesapeake used the Natives to their advantage by taking their land and food without with nothing in return. The Natives felt betrayed by the colonist for using them, since then the natives did not like to be with the colonists. The relationship got even worse is the forceful expansion of the colonists. The natives did not like how the colonists are taking over all of their lands to grow tobacco on it because they want those lands for themselves to live and plant corn. The forceful expansion of the Chesapeake lead to many warfare between the Chesapeake colonists and the Native Americans. One of the wars that the natives got involved with the colonists is the massacre of 1622. The war happened after the death Powhatan in 1618 and Opechancanough became the leader of the confederacy. Opechancanough hated the colonists because they are taking the natives lands to grow tobacco on and they are “putting bearable pressure on Indian land” which made Opechancanouge have more hatred toward the …show more content…
The labor force changed very rapidly after the introduction of tobacco in 1620. The labor force at first were the people who grew and owned the land, they used to grow and harvest tobacco every day, but with the profits coming in and the larger and larger the people land’s gets the more labor that lands needs because tobacco is a very extensive labor crop. So to get people to work they got the idea of indentured servants which are poor people from England who does not have enough money for transportation to the colony. As an indentured servant, the owner of the land would pay the price to get them to the colony and in return they would work under contract in the owner’s land for approximately 5-7 years. After the end of contract, the servant would get 50 acres of land and tools to get them started in the land. The servants were treated like property, they were given the minimum food, cloth, and healthcare. It wasn’t a normal job with normal pay, you would need to work for those years to get out to get working on your land. The indentured servants labor didn’t last through the 1600s. After the 1660s, slavery of Africans became the labor of the colonists’ tobacco lands. Since the tobacco prices are going down rapidly, the land owners wanted labors that would stay in their lands forever and that’s where slavery comes in. Slaves begun to increase by the