american slavery american freedom the ordeal of colonial virginia

The rebels, upset by the reluctance of Governor William Berkeley and the gentry-dominated House of Burgesses to aid their efforts to expand onto American Indians’ lands, lashed out at both the Indians and the government. These tensions exploded in 1676, when Nathaniel Bacon led a group composed primarily of former indentured servants in a rebellion against Virginia’s government. The supply of tobacco rose more quickly than demand and, as prices decreased, tensions between planters and former servants grew. By the mid-1600s, however, as the survival rate of indentured servants increased, more earned their freedom and began to compete with their former masters. Life expectancy in Virginia was short and few servants outlasted their terms of indenture. In the first few decades of settlement, as demand for the crop boomed, such arrangements usually worked in the planters’ favor. Planters normally agreed to give them, after their indentures expired, land on which they could establish their own tobacco farms. In exchange for passage to Virginia, they agreed to labor in planters’ tobacco fields for terms usually ranging from four to seven years.

Until then indentured servants, typically young and landless white Englishmen and Englishwomen in search of opportunity, arrived by the thousands. The number of slaves in Virginia remained small for several decades, however, until the first dominant labor system-indentured servitude-fell out of favor after 1670. In 1619-the same year that colonial Virginia’s House of Burgesses convened in Jamestown and became the New World’s first representative assembly-about 20 enslaved Africans arrived at Jamestown and were sold by Dutch slave traders. Others also failed to end slavery until finally, after the loss of more than 600,000 American lives in the Civil War, the United States abolished it through the 1865 ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution.Īmerican slavery and American freedom took root at the same place and at the same time. Thomas Jefferson, who in 1787 described slavery as an “abomination” and predicted that it “must have an end,” had faith that “there is a superior bench reserved in heaven for those who hasten it.” He later avowed that “there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would to relieve us from this heavy reproach in any practicable way.” Although Jefferson made several proposals to curb slavery’s growth or reduce its political or economic influence, a workable plan to eradicate slavery eluded him. It also compromised the republican dreams of white Americans, who otherwise achieved unprecedented success in the creation of political institutions and social relationships based on citizens’ equal rights and ever-expanding opportunity. For nearly 250 years, the existence of slavery deprived African Americans of independent lives and individual liberty.

American slavery american freedom the ordeal of colonial virginia