Title Indentured Labour, Indigenous, Slaves.pdf ✅

THE MAKING OF AN EARLY COLONIAL SOCIETY IN AMERICA : Indentured Servants, Indigenous Tribes, Salve Labours Europeans had dreamed of a land of abundance, riches and ease beyond the western horizon. They envisioned America as a religious refuge, a society of equals, a source of power and glory. They searched the New World for golden cities and fountains of eternal youth. To many European settlers, America offered a far greater chance to own land and worship as they pleased than existed in Europe, with its rigid, unequal social order and official churches. The major purpose of British colonisation in North America was to acquire land and resources in order to generate exports that could be sold for a profit on the expanding Trans-Atlantic market. In colonial America throughout the seventeenth century, land access was crucial. English colonists held that economic freedom and liberty were based on land. But land wouldn't be worth anything without labor. Given that European immigrants arrived in America with no intention of working on other people's land, the need for labor grew. As a result of which the New World also became the site of many forms of unfree labor, including indentured servitude, forced labor, and one of the most brutal and unjust systems, plantation slavery. Each of this group played an important role in the making of an early colonial society in America. INDEGENOUS TRIBES: Native Americans were people who lived in North America. They were also known by other names such as American Indians and Indigenous Americans. The name Indian was given by Christopher Columbus who mistakenly believed that he had landed in the Indies. The most striking feature of Native American society before the arrival of Europeans was its sheer diversity. Each group had its own political system and set of religious beliefs, and North America was home to literally hundreds of mutually unintelligible languages. Indians did not think of themselves as a single unified people, an idea invented by Europeans and only many years later adopted by Indians themselves. Indian identity centered on the immediate social group—a tribe, village, chiefdom, or confederacy. When Europeans first arrived, many Indians saw them as simply one group among many. The share dichotomy between Indians and “white” persons did not emerge until later in the colonial era. After 1492 European exploration and colonization of the Americas revolutionized how the old and new world perceive themselves. From the sixteenth through the nineteenth century, the population of Natives sharply declined due to epidemic disease. Because of their lack of immunity to new diseases brought from Europe such as measles, chicken pox, cholera, yellow fever and many more devastating diseases. However, these diseases were rarely fatal among the Europeans. With the meeting of the two worlds, both sides traded goods that they had in surplus for those they did not. The English were happy to give up iron utensils, tools, guns, woven clothes in exchange for furs and especially foods which the Natives could easily part with because they had plenty. Additionally, the Natives also showed a strong demand for products such as glass beads and copper decorations that they might use in their ritualistic practices. However, with the coming of more Europeans, the natives had a hard time keeping up with trade. In order to keep up trade relations, the Natives men devoted more time to hunting and less to agriculture which upset the traditional gender balance in their society. Also,
European ideas about land use started to overcome the Natives traditional ways of life, and that ultimately led to conflict. The Natives idea about land were generally very different from European ideas of land. Majority of Native Americans practised communal land ownership meaning the entire community owned and shared the land whereas the Europeans generally bought and sold the land exclusively and individually. This different understanding of land led to confusion and later conflict. In fact, their main goal apart from trade, were to drive the Natives off their property and relocate them. They had little interest in coordinating their labor, getting married to them, or bringing them under the authority of the monarchy. Europeans eventually tended to view the Natives in extreme terms. They were regarded either as “noble savages,” gentle, friendly, and superior in some ways to Europeans, or as uncivilized and brutal savages. Europeans insisted that by subduing the Indians, they were actually bringing them freedom—the freedom of true religion, private property, and the liberation of both men and women from uncivilized and unchristian gender roles The colonizers tried their level best to bring the Natives under their control and enslave them, however later on they realized that the Native Americans or Indians were not suitable for “Real” work and this was when the demand for labor increased. They saw them as weak men and women. Nevertheless, the Europeans were able to find competent workers from Africa and Europe who were comparatively more skilled and better than the indigenous tribes, replacing the Native Americans as primary source of labor. INDENTURED LABOR: The notion of indentured slavery arose as a result for cheap labor. Indentured are basically agreements between two parties about long term work and their length of servitude might be a specified number of years or until the servant reached a certain age. The tobacco plantation system led to indentured servitude and eventually slavery in the areas surrounding Jamestown (founded by the Virginia company in 1670) and Chesapeake Bay. These establishments made by the Virginia colony seemed to have attracted the Europeans for employment and livelihood, since the European economy was in a slump due to the Thirty Year's War, leaving both the skilled and unskilled laborers unemployed. A glimpse of promise was provided by starting again in the New World. However, it was expensive to sail from Britain to America. This reality created incentives for indentured servitude. It was agreed upon term of unpaid labor that usually paid off the cost of the servant’s immigration to the new world. They were not paid wages but they were generally housed, clothed and fed. Majority of the immigrants especially the European settlers indentured themselves in order gain passage to America or to escape death and poverty. Skilled artisans, such as carpenters, tailors, and cobblers, were much sought after as indentured laborers in Virginia's workshops and plantations, particularly those that produced tobacco. The women laborers on the other hand, performed tasks like spinning, weaving, and even field labor in addition to serving as domestic helpers and dairy maids. Indentured laborers were unfree and ownership of their labor could be transferred from one owner to another and also, they were restricted from getting married or start a family until their term of service which lasted for seven years on average was completed. To sum up their master had full authority over them and inflicted severe punishments if they were found to be guilty. Certain of
their rights were safeguarded by legislation in fact, they had the right to sue their masters for a variety of reasons and did so on numerous occasions. Once, their term was over the indentured servants were freed and earned Freedom Dues as payment from their masters in either land or money or even other helpful goods in starting as a free person in America. A number of former indentured laborers went on to have a prosperous career as landowners, businesspeople, or politicians, enhancing the development of American culture, economy and society. But occasionally, Freedom dues were so little, that grantees were unable to get land and other resources. As a result, complaints about slaves being disorderly, scuttling, and not working hard were frequent. Throughout the seventeenth century nearly two thirds of English settlers from Europe coming to America came as indentured servants. All hope for a better life but only few found. The severe lifestyle often led to injury, illness and early death. A reality hat deterred the English from coming and pushed plantation owners to look to Africa for labor. By now the shift from indentured servants to racial slavery had begun. SLAVES: In 1619 a Dutch ship brought 20 Africans to the new British colony of Jamestown Virginia. The slaves were needed to work in the quickly growing tobacco industry. After that, slavery spread throughout the American colonies because before then indentured servitude was common. Slavery gradually replaced indentured servitude as a primary force of labor because slavery as a labor force seemed more convenient by the planters also slaves did not move out onto the frontier and become independent and rowdy when their term of indentured was over, instead they stayed in the plantation with their children, family and property. Over the next 200 years, millions more of African slaves arrived to work in large tobacco, indigo and rice plantation. During the first year of slavery in the 1600s, Africans experienced a relatively high level of racial tolerance and flexibility from their European owners. Due to which several slaves could wander freely, get married, buy land and other property or even buy their own freedom meaning that they were actually paid for their work. Until the 1650s only a handful of African slaves lived in Virginia but more and more Virginian planters concluded that black slaves were a better investment than the unruly white servants. The African skin color made it difficult for them to escape into surrounding and also, they did not succumb to epidemics as easily as Native Americans laborers did because they had developed resistance to European diseases in Africa. And it was in the last decades of seventeenth century that slavery became the predominant labor system. As slavery became more and more popular a system of laws called the Slave Codes was created to govern. They eventually began to write laws that the condition of slavery was permanent. Under the Slave Codes, Africans could never claim the protections of English common law and their terms of service never expired and according to a colonial law passed in 1660 to the children of slave mothers would also be slaves providing planters with a constant source of labor. American slavery once a temporary system of labor soon became an institution of lifelong race-based bondage. The explosion of the transatlantic slave trade accelerated the shift from servitude to slavery. It quickly became a very crucial part of the economic system of the colonies and would later take a civil war to dismantle. Slave trade eventually became a huge business and the English merchants got heavily involved in slave trade towards the end of the
seventeenth century and so the supply of enslaved people from Africa hiked up and was readily available. Most slaves worked in the Chesapeake Bay region, working on huge tobacco plantations in large farms. The works there were very hard and slaves were busy most of the year working sunrise to sunset. Initially, indentured slaves were used by Chesapeake farmers to harvest tobacco harvests. Due to the high cost of labor contracts caused by the shortage of indentured slaves, Chesapeake farmers started searching for less expensive alternatives to bonded labor. In order to satisfy their need for inexpensive labor, they consequently turned to importing African slaves. While the most back-breaking work fell to the strongest and the healthiest less physically demanding jobs were handled by older or younger slaves. To sum up there was no minimum age for working slaves. Several southern colonies personally thought slavery was wrong but when they realized how much money they were making and saving, they just couldn’t help themselves. When rice was first introduced in the south, the white planters began to purchase more African black slaves because the early English planters of South Carolina had less knowledge about rice cultivation due to which slaves began to flourish in South. As more and more slaves came to the colonies the whites seemed to separate themselves from blacks which made racism and discrimination worse. And eventually after centuries of long struggle for freedom, slavery was finally abolished with the end of American Civil war however the repercussion of this brutal sort of labor are still felt by its very own descendants.