Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Indentured servants could not marry without the permission of their master, were frequently subject to physical punishment, and did not receive legal favor from the courts. Female indentured servants in particular might be raped and/or sexually abused by their masters. If children were produced the labour would be extended by two years. [14]
Indentured servitude in British America was the prominent system of labor in the British American colonies until it was eventually supplanted by slavery. [1] During its time, the system was so prominent that more than half of all immigrants to British colonies south of New England were white servants, and that nearly half of total white ...
As slavery began to displace indentured servitude as the principal supply of labor in the plantation systems of the South, the economic nature of the institution of slavery aided in the increased inequality of wealth seen in the antebellum South. The demand for slave labor and the U.S. ban on importing more slaves from Africa drove up prices ...
However, The first "documented slave for life", John Punch, lived in Virginia but was held by Hugh Gwyn, a white man, not Anthony Johnson. [5] By 1830, there were 3,775 black (including mixed-race) slaveholders in the South who owned a total of 12,760 slaves, which was a small percentage of a total of over two million slaves then held in the South.
Importing indentured labour became viable for plantation owners because newly emancipated slaves refused to work for low wages. This is demonstrated in the sheer number of freed slaves in colonies that imported Indian workers. Jamaica had 322,000 while British Guiana and Barbados had about 90,000 and 82,000 freed slaves, respectively. [13]
More than one million slaves were sold from the Upper South, which had a surplus of labor, and taken to the Deep South in a forced migration, splitting up many families. New communities of African-American culture were developed in the Deep South, and the total slave population in the South eventually reached 4 million before liberation. [9] [10]
In other cases, some slaves were reclassified as indentured servants, effectively preserving the institution of slavery through another name. [ 119 ] Often citing Revolutionary ideals, some slaveholders freed their slaves in the first two decades after independence, either outright or through their wills.
The South Carolina slave-code served as the model for many other colonies in North America. [14] In 1755, the colony of Georgia adopted the South Carolina slave code. [15] Virginia's slave codes were made in parallel to those in Barbados, with individual laws starting in 1667 and a comprehensive slave-code passed in 1705. [16]