CA - Slavery in Colonial America (Lesson)

Slavery in Colonial America

Growth of the African Population

As tobacco and other cash-crop farmers prospered, they greatly expanded the size of their farms. There were never enough workers available to plant, grow and harvest the crops, so farmers turned to African slaves to do this work. Many white colonists believed every black person was a savage who needed to be taken care of by white people. When the Virginia Company founded Jamestown in 1607, there were no African enslaved people in British North America.

The first enslaved people in the Virginia Colony arrived in late August of 1619; 20-30 enslaved Africans landed at Point Comfort, today's Fort Monroe in Hampton, Va., aboard the English privateer ship White Lion. In Virginia, these Africans were traded in exchange for supplies. Several days later a second ship (Treasurer) arrived in Virginia with additional enslaved Africans. Both groups had been captured by English privateers from the Spanish slave ship San Juan Bautista. They are the first recorded Africans to arrive in England's mainland North American colonies.

By 1700, however, there were thousands of African slaves throughout the British colonies. Most of these enslaved people were located in the tobacco colonies where they supplied the labor required to support the region's agriculturally based economy. (Slavery in Carolina developed to a great extent later than in the Virginia Colony and the northern colonies.)

 

The Middle Passage

The sea voyage that carried Africans to North America was called the Middle Passage because it was the middle portion of a three-way voyage made by the slave ships. First, British ships loaded with rum, cloth, and other English goods sailed to Africa, where goods were traded for Africans originally enslaved by other Africans. Then, in the Middle Passage, the slaves would be transported to the New World. The crew would buy tobacco and other American goods from profits they made by selling the slaves in the colonies and ship the tobacco and goods back to Britain. This process was repeated for decades.

It was said that people in the colonial port cities could smell the slave ships arriving before they could see them. The slaves were packed like bundles of firewood. About two of every ten slaves died during the passage. The ships smelled of decaying bodies as well as the sweat, blood, urine, and feces of the surviving slaves.

 

African American Culture

In America, slaves attempted to make the best of their lives while living under the worst of circumstances. Slave communities were rich with music, dance, basket-weaving, and pottery-making. Enslaved Africans brought with them the arts and crafts skills of their various tribes. Indeed, there could be a hundred slaves working on one farm and each slave might come from a different tribe and a different part of Africa.

 

 

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