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Crucial turning points in history often
occur almost unnoticed. African slavery in America was
neither really African nor slavery throughout the sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries. It was, in reality,
indentured servitude (except in Spanish countries). Africans
were enslaved for a time and then released after they had
served the time. They settled in the area, usually as
farmers, and even voted in the community. If they were
serving as indentured servants, their children did not
become indentured servants. Not only was the forced labor
not full-out slavery, it wasn't specifically racial. In
fact, if anything is surprising about the early history of
American slavery it's how color-blind everyone seems to be.
Not only are released Africans allowed to join the community
as pretty much equal members, but there is no race that was
immune from indentured servitude. Most of the Europeans that
came to America in the seventeenth century were indentured
servants: criminals, debtors, prostitutes, all of whom used
indentured servitude to pay off financial or social debts.
In fact, the largest population of "slaves" were European.
Being European, however, did not protect one from being
kidnapped into indentured servitude in America; it wasn't
uncommon to have a beer with a new friend in a European city
and then wake up chained in the hold of a ship on the way to
the Virginia plantations. While we have no figures, a
significant minority of Europeans who came as indentured
servants were kidnapped, just like Africans. Native
Americans were not immune either; from Canada to South
America Native Americans were constantly kidnapped into
servitude. Europeans, however, began to give this up fairly
early because Native Americans died very quickly in European
hands due to disease.
So, what happened? How did this system,
which leaves much to be desired, evolve into a more
repressive system of African slavery? Why did it evolve into
African slavery? Racial slavery did not happen all at once.
Slowly, involuntary servitude in America became the province
of black Africans and slowly that involuntary servitude
evolved into full-scale slavery. In the process, not only
did slavery itself have to be justified, but racial slavery
had to be justified. In order to do this, Europeans and
European-Americans had to invent a new concept: race.
Perhaps more than any other event in modernity, nothing has
been so formative as the onset of racial slavery in the
seventeenth century and the invention of the concept of race
at the same time. Both of these events have placed a
monumental mortgage on modern society that we are still
paying off today.
There are two parts to the formation of
racial slavery. The first involves concentrating involuntary
servitude on only black Africans and the invention of the
concept of race to explain this concentration. The second
involves the development of indentured servitude into
full-out slavery. The latter involves re-defining the
involuntary servitude of Africans as indefinite in time,
whereas it had a fixed period in the late sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries. In other words, once enslaved,
a slave would remain with that status until death. It also
involved creating an entire slave class based on descent:
whereas the children of indentured servants were not
themselves indentured servants, in the late seventeenth
century, the children of slaves became slaves
themselves.
The first changes occurred in Maryland and
Virginia, both of which passed laws that made black
indentured servants slaves for life; these laws also
segregated free blacks from European-Americans by making
intermarriage between blacks and whites illegal. We're at
the very beginning of the concept of race. If one can be a
slave for life because of one's African descent, then
intermarriage and the production of individuals of both
African and European stock undercuts the logic of the
system;is the child of a white and a black white or
black? Slave or free? This is an important question since
being black is a criterion for being a slave.
Surprisingly, the original justification
for separating blacks, whether slave or free, and whites was
not based on race, but religion. Black Africans were
believed to be heathens and, like Native Americans, could
undercut the religion of pious Europeans. This religious
argument formed the backbone for the justification of the
lifetime slavery of Africans. In 1667, however, Virginia was
the first colony to pass a law that stated that Christian
Africans could be slaves, as well--thus one more step
towards slavery as a full-scale racial phenomenon. In
Virginia, more than any other place, we see the beginnings
of the history that would dominate the combined experience
of African and European Americans for the next three hundred
years, a great chasm of color that we still haven't crossed
to this day.
Since all this was new, why did the early
plantation owners come up with this novel form of society,
that is, a society based on racial slavery? There was no
such thing as racial slavery up until this time; why did the
English settlers of North America create it out of thin air?
Part of the answer is that they didn't know what they were
doing; they were adapting incrementally to problems and
opportunities. Indentured servitude was problematic.
Indentured servants tended to escape, and when they did they
were hard to recover if they were either Native American or
European, both of whom could easily blend in with other
Native Americans or other Europeans. Native Americans, in
particular, tended to escape with remarkable efficiency so
that Europeans gave up kidnapping them fairly early on.
Africans, on the other hand, did not escape so easily. The
African-American population was very small and the free
African-American population was smaller yet. Additionally, as part of the contractural aspect of white servitude, any European who had served out their contract initially would be given a plot of land and a weapon. Increasing numbers of armed, lower-class whites on the frontier, who had no sympathy for those plantation owners who had kept them enslaved in an oppressive system for years, eventually became a problem. After Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, when these unruly masses burned Jamestown, under the leadership of Nathaniel Bacon, plantation elites desparately sought a way to ease this situation. This leads, then, to the great paradox of racial slavery. By focusing on the difference in skin color, Virginia aristocrats were able to present the perception of a leveling of colonial society that lumped all whites into a single master class. Then too, simple
economics dictated that Africans were easier to keep in
servitude. This economic factor would establish a flood of human
life from Africa to the Americas over the next century and a
half.
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