Slavery

Abstract

Despite the accepted wisdom that “slavery” has been eradicated from the world, recent vigilance upon human trafficking discloses that violent coercion and financial exploitation of persons continues to accurate an tremendous toll upon the communal welfare of the victims and hinders communal development efforts to accomplish material progress and communal fairness in “southern colonies” of “America”.

Slavery

African slavery is so much the spectacular feature of the South, in the unthinking outlook of it that people often overlook there had been slaves in all the vintage colonies. Africans made a noteworthy input to American colonial life. Early on, as a class, they were generally treated as indentured servants, but over time their status in Colonial America evolved into that of property. While some Africans were brought directly to the colonies as victims of the "slave trade," the institution of slavery did not just happen overnight, but was a process that evolved over many years. Servitude was a common practice in England when the first 104 English settlers reached Virginia in 1607. One of the more ordinary sorts of English servitude was that of apprenticeship.

The seed of slavery likely took root in the practice of indentured servitude in early Colonial Virginia. Early statutes in the Colony were used to transform the relationship of apprenticeship into that of indentured servitude, thus permitting English servants to be bought and sold freely, used as gambling stakes, transferred by will, and even taken by the Sheriff in satisfaction of the master's debt.

Although it was common for a servant in England to have his services transferred to another master sometime during his term of servitude, the idea of selling servants en masse, was shocking to some early 17th Century Virginians. The practice as the pride, covetousness, extortion, and oppression of men who sold even men, women, and children for who will give most. The buying and selling men and boys was held in England a thing most intolerable in 1625, Thomas Weston refused to carry servants in his ship from Canada to Virginia because servants were sold here up and down like horses, and therefore he held it not unlawful to care. Nonetheless, poor English men and women steadily supplied the demand for labor in Virginia's growing tobacco economy. Many saw the exchange of a few years of labor for transportation to the New World to escape the dismal living conditions in England as a good deal.

There is little evidence to clearly show the development of slavery from indentured servitude during the first half of the 17th century. There were, however, many important decisions and events that allowed the English to adapt their civil laws to accommodate slavery 5 According to sporadic records, the first Africans recorded in Virginia arrived on a Dutch ship off Point Comfort (today Hampton, Virginia), in August, 1619. The consensus of opinion among historians seems to be that the early black immigrants to Virginia were held as indentured servants, not as slaves. Court records give historians an interesting glimpse into the life ...