Indentured Servitude and Slavery

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The origins of slavery in the American territories and why it came to be

From 1526 until 1776, complex pressures shaped the structure of slavery in the United States, and historians have proposed multiple ideas to explain how slave trade evolved. Slavery was strongly related to labor demand in European colonies, particularly in the Caribbean and South Americas labor-intensive sugar plantation industries of Great Britain, Spain, France, and the Dutch Republic. Slave ships transported captives from Africa to the West and indigenous peoples were enslaved in North American colonies on a smaller scale (OpenStax, 2019). However, Indian slavery effectively stopped in the late eighteenth century.

How slavery was handled differently in each colonial territory of British North America

Enslaved people worked in various sectors, including breweries, shipyards, plantations, and timber yards. In the regions north of Maryland, slavery would gradually give way to free labor. The slave population in the North progressively fell throughout the 1760s and 1770s with slaves in Philadelphia reducing to approximately 700 in 1775 (OpenStax, 2019). Antislavery activism was rife in the city, with nationalist pamphleteers handing out antislavery booklets to blacks and whites. The presence of antislavery groups facilitated the spread of manumissions thus slavery became less viable in the North. New York had a high percentage of slaves who acquired valuable trades such as masonry and goldsmithing working alongside artisan masters. All slaves in New York were freed in 1827 (OpenStax, 2019) despite the liberation sentiment in the North during the Revolutionary battle.

The contrasts between indentured servants and slaves

Indentured service varied from enslavement in that it was a type of debt servitude where an agreed-upon period of unpaid service that often covered the servants costs of immigration to America. Indentured workers were not awarded incomes, although they were housed, clothed, and nourished in most cases. Slaves were deemed property and were only awarded freedom on rare occasions despite several years of strenuous labor (Gabor, 2021). Slaves were sold, exchanged, negotiated for, and even utilized as property in a will.

References

Gabor, G. (2021). Slavery, servitude and forced labor in international law: should the difference still matter?Kings Law Journal, 32(2), 228-259. Web.

OpenStax. (2019). U.S. History. OpenStax CNX. Web.

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Indentured Servitude and Slavery

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