Although the vast land of North America offered a huge economic potential, the colonists’ efforts to capitalize on the opportunity faced a major challenge. There was a severe scarcity of labor in the New World, and free labor was either non-existent or way too expensive. Desperate for agricultural labor, the colonists resorted to various forms of bound labor: indentured European servants, captured Native Indians and imported African slaves. Over time, the use of indentured servants and Indian slaves declined whereas African slaves became the colonists’ principal source of labor. Conventional thinking has attributed this shift to the colonists’ social, cultural and racial biases against the blacks. The overriding reason for this transition, however, was the confluence of various economic forces. The variations in labor demand and supply, cost, perceptions about various ethnic groups’ suitability for commercial agricultural work, and the ease of managing labor, clearly favored the use of African slaves as the path of least resistance to making money off plantations.
The fluctuations in the demand for bound labor within the colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries were caused by the changes in many regional economies, and a sudden boom in exports of key crops. New England’s small family farms, required few agricultural workers, and that didn’t change with time. On the other hand, the Chesapeake region of Virginia and Maryland had perfect conditions for the commercial production of tobacco, and therefore needed many workers. The Chesapeake region experienced a growth in the exports of tobacco from 20,000 pounds in 1619 to 38 million pounds in 1700. Whereas Virginia experienced a gradual increase of 3% in the rate of growth of farms at the end of the 17th century, Carolina, whose agricultural economy was struggling for most of the 17th century, experienced a sudden surge in a new cash crop. Rice, introduced as a new crop in 1690, experienced tremendous growth in exports from 12,000 pounds in 1698 to 18 million pounds in 1730, generating an intense demand for labor. Although the demand and supply of the three forms of labor, indentured servants, Native Indians and black slaves, were somewhat predictable in the first half of the 17th century, significant shifts started occurring in the second half.
After 1660, there was a steady decline in the number of indentured servants available for agricultural labor. The system of indentured servitude, modelled after the English concept of apprenticeship and “servants in husbandry”, was adapted by the Virginia company to solve the colonists’ labor supply problem. Under this system, English youth under 25, often unemployed in a struggling economy at home, came to the America to work for an employer for a fixed period in exchange for the cost of their transportation across the Atlantic. The employer also provided food and basic amenities to live to the employee, but by no means a full wage. The entire transaction was formalized in an indenture or a legal contract. Once the indentured period ended, the servants would attain free status and often got some land upon their departure. The new landowners sometimes competed with their old masters. The system worked fine for a while but after 1660 there was a severe shortage of indentured servants. Improvements in the local English economy changed the prospective servants’ risk-reward equation. Opportunities at home didn’t seem too bad compared to the risk of migrating to far away colonial destinations. In terms of relative attractions of various destinations: Barbados became unattractive because of the climate, New England didn’t have a staple crop, Pennsylvania became more hospitable than Virginia and Maryland. Ill health and mortality rates discouraged the servants to go to Carolina. These factors led to a significant increase in the price of indentured servants, outside the range of the Chesapeake planters’ ability to pay, and therefore the planters started exploring other forms of labor such as Native Indians.
The colonists’ efforts to use local Indians as plantation labor ended in a failure. Although indigenous slavery existed in North America in the pre-colonial era, its roots were in warfare, captive exchange, and as a symbol of prestige of tribal leaders. Indian nations who sought to trade with Europeans discovered the newcomers’ desperation for bound labor. The British, who wanted to trade with Indians, realized that trading partners were not ideal for enslavement given their numerical superiority and the ease with which they could escape. Further, attempts to enslave Indians resulted in costly wars. Indian slavery existed alongside African slavery in the colonial South until 1715, when an indigenous uprising against British trade abuses known as the Yamasee War severely curtailed the capture of Indians for local or slave trade to the Caribbean. Numerous colonists were killed in trying to enslave the Indians. The remaining Indian groups allied together more determined than ever to face the Europeans from a position of strength rather than be enslaved. Given the intense demand for labor, the failure of the colonists to use Indians on plantations and the dwindling supply of indentured servants, the colonists were desperate for a stable supply of bound labor.
The colonists’ labor supply problems created an opportunity for English recruiting merchants who were increasingly being asked to cast their net more widely for bound labor. Initially, the merchants tried to fulfill the demand from Europe by luring Irish women, convicts, homeless and orphans. However, these efforts did not pan out. The would be migrants no longer considered indentured servitude in a far destination as attractive as opportunities at home. To fulfill the unmet labor demand, the merchants then turned to a new source: sale of slaves transported directly from Africa. The Royal African Company enjoyed a monopoly in the lucrative business of selling African slaves to North American colonies. However, in 1698, the British Parliament yielded to the demands of rival merchants and eliminated the monopoly of Royal African Company by opening slave trade to all. The number of slaves transported on English ships increased dramatically to an average of over 20,000 a year. Loans and credits for transportation of slaves were easily available from lenders. Merchants who transported indentured servants were incentivized by the headright system that rewarded anyone, who brought a slave, with 50 acres of land. Virginia plantation owners had now found an alternate source of labor in the numbers that kept pace with their agricultural growth. In 1690, blacks, less than 10% of Virginia’s population, grew to almost 30% by 1730. Before the direct import of slaves from Africa, black slaves were brought from West Indies in exchange for goods or Indian slaves. However, with the decline in other sources of bound labor, slave import from Africa became common in the early 18th century and established itself as an important foundation of the colonies’ agricultural economy.
Not only did the imported slaves fulfill the unmet labor demand, but they were also less costly and well suited for the commercial plantation work. The transition from indentured servants to African slaves had a direct correlation with the cost differential between the two types of labor. Whereas indentured servitude applied only for a fixed number of years after which the servants earned freedom, slavery applied to the enslaved African’s entire life and extended to future generations. Therefore, replacement of indentured servants with African slaves was a no-brainer from an economic standpoint. In fact, as early as 1630, planters put a higher valuation on African women slaves than on indentured European women. They could squeeze much more work out of them. Planters required the slaves to stay in the fields 15 or 16 hours a day during the planting and harvesting seasons. At other times, slaves raised nutritious crops, looked after livestock, cleared fields, chopped wood, and mended damaged buildings and fences. The colonists extracted labor from everyone in the slave community, young, old, healthy, and disabled. Even children were forced to work, picking up trash in groups, weeding fields, carrying drinking water, and helping in the kitchen or feeding chickens and livestock. Disabled and elderly slaves had to work on spinning wool or cotton, weaving fabric, and tailoring clothes. Blacks were better suited towards plantation regime than whites or Indians. They were more vigorous, more easily controlled, and better able to withstand the hot climate and diseases. On the other hand, Native Indians were more used to subsistence farming, the indigenous way of agriculture, not aligned with the colonists’ desire for mass agricultural production. The Indians were mostly hunters or fishermen not used to plantation style labor. Their knowledge of terrain and geography made it difficult to contain them in a system of cultivation. Even though economic considerations were the main reason for black slavery, political and legal influences also had a role in perpetuating the race based system.
Unlike the plantation owners, and to some degree indentured servants, the blacks had no
political or judicial clout either in England or in the colonies. The political and judicial establishment, completely controlled by the planters, created laws that safeguarded their economic interests at the expense of the enslaved Africans. Even the indentured servants did have one important right: the right to the courts. “Legal considerations, however laxly regarded, imposed some limits, as did the realization, at least in North America, that some of the mistreated would eventually command free status and political influence.” From the court records, there is evidence that servants often sued their masters for grievances such as excessive punishment, freedom due to mistreatment, and failure of the master to provide clothing required by the indenture. On the other hand, the African slaves had no one looking out for their interests. The judicial and political decks were stacked against them. The planter dominated political and legal bodies systematically eliminated the black slaves’ avenues of freedom. One of the ways lifetime servitude could be enforced is by eliminating the possibility of a slave earning freedom by converting to Christianity. As early as 1664, a Maryland statute mentioned that Christian baptism would have no effect upon the legal status of a slave. This meant that even Christians could be enslaved permanently by other Christians. Other legal changes not only moved to make slavery racial but also hereditary. Under the English law, a child inherited the legal status of the father. The Virginia officials made an exception in 1660s that applied to the child of a slave woman from an Englishman, by declaring that the child would inherit the status of the mother. In 1705 Virginia’s planter dominated House of Burgess drew up a code of laws: about inherited and permanent bondage of African descent, a separate judicial and penal system for the slaves, and slave patrols which required participation from non-slaveholders to protect the property rights of the slaveholders. In 1669 the planters of Barbados expanded their operations into South Carolina after they got legal guarantees that they could import their model of black slavery. One of the scenarios the colonial leaders feared the most was discontent and cooperation among poor and bound labor. White servants and African slaves worked together and shared similar grievances toward their masters. Both groups participated in strikes and uprisings among tobacco pickers in Virginia, leading to a rebellion in 1676. The outnumbered authorities, essentially a proxy for the economic interests of the planters, realized that they needed to divide their labor force to have a better control on it. To achieve this goal, they started emphasizing ethnic and cultural divisions.
Some colonists always had racial and cultural prejudices against blacks. Segments of the English population believed in negative stereotypes about Africans: black color is punishment for sin, Africans are lazy, and they resemble devils who practice sorcery and cannibalism. “The combination of color, language, dress and culture, created an image of Africans as others and since slavery was a status reserved for strangers, the Europeans had no moral issue in enslaving black Africans.” However, racial prejudices were neither universal nor the sole cause of slavery. During the first half of 17th century, bound labor was color blind as it included white indentured servants along with blacks and Native Indians. Both the whites and blacks had a shared goal against the injustices and fought side by side in the Bacon’s rebellion of 1776 in Virginia. Further, some colonists such as the Quakers of Pennsylvania were one of the most vocal critics of black slavery and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Some historians believe that black slavery was more about class than race. Their perspective is that slavery was a “negotiated relationship” between the master and the slave classes. Even though the masters had power over the slaves, the slave class constantly forced the masters to make concessions. The master-slave relationship was always remade depending on the circumstances. This means that the reality of a slave’s life was determined not as much by race as by the competing interests of the master and slave classes which varied with time and place.
The economic interests of the master class, such as labor demand and supply, cost, and worker productivity, were the most important factors that led to the rise of black slavery over other forms of bound labor. While demand for bound agricultural labor increased in the 2nd half of 17th century, not enough indentured servants or Indian slaves were available at the right price, leading to a search for an alternative stable source of labor. Desperate for agricultural labor, the colonists started relying on direct imports of African slaves, a workforce that was less costly and more suitable for plantation work. Having found this alternate source of labor, the colonists used the levers of power, politics and judiciary, to safeguard their economic interests by passing laws that perpetuated race based slavery. Social, religious, racial biases, while present, were not the sole cause of black enslavement. Although the inhumane treatment of slaves was horrible, the shift towards race based African slavery within the colonies was a rational form of capitalism, under which the economic motives drowned out moral or social considerations.