Weighted: 6-8% °❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･ 1607-1754
With the physical regional differences established, moving moreover to the demographic makeup, it's important to remember wealthy white men in southern colonies often brought along them indentured servants. Despite being another source of unpaid labor, indentured servants are not the same as enslaved workers. Indentured servants were typically poor white men who either sought opportunities in America but lacked funds or needed to pay off debts. Therefore, they accompanied rich white men across the Atlantic to perform unpaid labor under them for 4-7 years through an agreed contract. After their required time was up, they would be given resources like food and land and were officially declared free in America. This is different from another form of unpaid labor called chattel slavery. Chattel slavery is far more intense and brutal as workers were no longer considered humans but instead property that could be owned. The decline of indentured servitude to chattel slavery through the English colonies can be accounted from one of America's earliest rebellions, Bacon's Rebellion.
Nathanial Bacon was a Virginian farmer who, like many other farmers and indentured servants, were not corporative with the surrounding Native population. Due to things such as territorial disputes over limited land, a lot of tension between the colonists and Natives arose. Bacon personally went to the Virginian governor Sir William Berkely over these grievances and to his displease, received little support or attention. Therefore, Bacon took it upon himself to rally up likeminded farmers and indentured servants to attack the nearby Native groups, which then shifted towards disrupting Berkely's plantations. While the rebellion was stopped before anything drastic happened, elite planters and wealthy plantation owners realized the potential dangers of utilizing indentured servants. So there began the shift from indentured servitude to chattel slavery particularly from Africa who, according to the colonists, would be more compliant and less likely to cause elaborate uprisings.
Moving on, as the English colonies were physically very distant from their host country, Great Britain, they began to develop their own forms of regional democratic governments like the Mayflower Compact (Massachusetts) and the House of Burgesses (Virginia). These assemblies had their own respective powers and rights such as levying taxes and hosting elections. Of course, at this time only white male property owners could vote though and especially in the middle and southern colonies, these governments were run and dominated by the wealthy elites. Back to the mother country Great Britain, while American colonies had the ability to create their own laws and self-govern themselves, the main goal had always been to contribute back to mercantilism. Mercantilism, defined by Fiveable, is an "economic system that focuses on growing a nation’s wealth by exporting easily produced goods in exchange for limited imports". Basically, the colonies were an extension of the mother country and sent raw materials for the dominant country to export elsewhere. The main emphasis to making income here is having more exports than imports. By about the mid 1600's, Great Britain had also passed the Navigations Act which were a series of laws that controlled trade and shipping between Great Britain and the American Colonies. In order to promote mercantilist policies, Britain restricted colonial trade with other nations and ensured that trading mainly occurred through British ports with British supervision. This was mainly to prevent Dutch merchants from becoming the "middleman" in between the trades and to maximize profits to Great Britain. However, this hurt the colony's economy and resulted in many participating in something called salutary neglect. Due to Britain's lax enforcement towards the Navigations act (as they were undergoing their own domestic problems), many colonial merchants disobeyed the policies and traded outside Britain anyways. This seemingly innocent resistance foreshadows larger grievances depicted in Unit 3. However, in the larger picture of this time period, world trade was very prosperous and the Triangular Trade Route continued to be at its highest and most profitable since Columbus's influence in the Americas. Ships from New England carried rum to West Africa in exchange for enslaved workers to be carried to the West Indies via the brutal Middle Passage. From there, sugar cane would be cultivated and brought back to New England and the cycle continued.
As indentured servitude grew more distrustful for the elites, chattel slavery soon made up most of America's unpaid agricultural labor force. Slave codes, laws that aimed to strip slaves from their autonomy and personal liberties, were applied to force submission and control. Evidentially, not all enslaved workers accepted this system, and many resisted in one of two ways. The first was covert resistance: keeping cultural beliefs, heritage, or faking illness to not work. The second more notable was Overt resistance which used violence as a way to resist. A prime example of this was the Stono Rebellion where in 1739, South Carolinian enslaved workers stole weapons from a store, burned down plantations, and killed numerous white colonists before being forcefully shut down. Still, most white elites preferred Chattel slavery over indentured servitude by this time.
Shifting back to the existing Native population, as English colonies primarily cared about their land, tensions grew heavily between the two coexisting groups. Due to fights over land disputes, Wampanoag chief Metacom led his tribe and others against the English and their native allies they'd acquainted. In the end, Metacom's side had lost, and he was sent to be executed. This was the first attempt at a large-scale Native American resistance to kick out the English, which failed with many casualties. However, it's interesting to note around this time frame, the Pueblo Revolt (as previously mentioned in unit 1) had occurred and won against Spain. Very intriguing parallels.
Author's Note: mmm bacon['s rebellion]. Also, there were definitely other reasons why there was a major shift from indentured servitude to chattel slavery like the obviously one racism, but college board really likes to test students' ability to detect cause and effect relationships and this was for sure a big one I noticed.
──── ୨୧ ──── thanks for reading!!!
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