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Slavery was a legal institution in all of the 13 American colonies. A majority of the founding fathers owned slaves, including the author of the Declaration of Independence, the Father of the Constitution, and the commander of the Continental Army. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the uneven distribution of the factors of production necessitated a steady stream of servants and slaves to colonial British America: capital was scarce, land plentiful, and free labour too expensive and undependable and this ensured that approximately three quarters of all who came to the colonies experienced unfree labour at some point in their lives. Thus it is reminding us that the stability and prosperity of the thirteen colonies that ultimately came together to form an independent republic at the end of the eighteenth century rested on illiberal and often brutalizing foundations. The 200, 000 people who crossed the Atlantic from England, 120, 000 (60 %) went either to Virginia or Maryland; or that between 1654 and 1660 thirty-five per cent of indentured servants leaving Bristol came from within twenty miles of the city and seventy-seven per cent from less than sixty miles The first generation of Africans in the New World tended to be remarkably cosmopolitan.
Few of the first generation came directly from Africa. Instead, they arrived from the West Indies and other areas of European settlement. These "Atlantic Creoles" were often multilingual and had Spanish or Portuguese names. Sometimes they had mixtures of African and non-African ancestry.
During the very first years of slavery in the seventeenth century, blacks experienced a period of relative racial tolerance and flexibility that lasted until the 1660 s. A surprising number of Africans were allowed to own land or even purchase their freedom. Racial lines had not assumed the rigidity that they would subsequently acquire. White and black servants worked together, received the same punishments, and plotted escapes together. Blacks fathered about one third of all the illegitimate children born to white servant women. In 1677, at the end of Bacon's Rebellion (a revolt against Virginia's royal government), the last holdouts were 20 white indentured servants and 80 black slaves.
Beginning in the late 1660 s, colonists in the Chesapeake colonies of Maryland and Virginia imposed new laws that deprived blacks, free and slaves, of many rights and privileges. At the same time, they began to import thousands of slaves directly from Africa. Yet slavery remained dispersed and decentralized. Even the wealthiest Chesapeake planters tended to divide their estates into many separate quarters where small groups of slaves lived and worked.
In the South Carolina and Georgia low country, slavery was also remarkably fluid during the pioneering period. Black soldiers played an indispensable role in protecting the colonies against the Indians and the Spanish. White planters were heavily dependent on the knowledge and skills of African-born slaves in growing rice, raising cattle, and building irrigation canals. The meaning and outcome of the American Revolution was intimately tied to slavery.
Leaders of the patriot cause repeatedly argued that British policies would make the colonists slaves of the British. The colonists' emphasis on the danger of mass enslavement derived in part from the highly visible example of racial slavery. In 1774, George Washington explained that if the colonists' failed to aggressively assert their rights, then the British ministry "shall make us as tame and abject slaves, as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway. " Both the British and the colonists believed that slaves could serve an important role during the Revolution. In April 1775, Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, threatened that he would free the colony's slaves if the colonists resorted to force against his authority. In November, he promised freedom to all slaves belonging to rebels who would join "His Majesty's Troops. " Some 800 slaves joined British forces, some wearing the emblem "Liberty to the Slaves. " Meanwhile an American diplomat, Silas Deane, hatched a secret plan to incite slave insurrections in Jamaica. Two South Carolinians, John Laurens and his father Henry, persuaded Congress to unanimously approve a plan to recruit an army of 3000 slave troops to stop a British invasion of South Carolina and Georgia.
The federal government would compensate the slaves' owners and each black would, at the end of the war, be emancipated and receive $ 50. The South Carolina legislature rejected the plan, scuttling the proposal. In the end, however, and in contrast to the later Latin American wars of independence and the U. S. Civil War, neither the British nor the Americans proved willing to risk a full-scale social revolution by issuing an emancipation proclamation. As a result of the Revolution, a surprising number of slaves were manumitted, while thousands of others freed themselves by running away.
Georgia lost about a third of its slaves and South Carolina lost 25, 000. Yet despite these losses, slavery quickly recovered in the South. By 1810, South Carolina and Georgia had three times as many slaves as in 1770. The Revolution had contradictory consequences for slavery. In the South, slavery became more firmly entrenched. In the North, every state freed slaves as a result of court decisions or the enactment of gradual emancipation schemes.
Yet even in the North, there was strong resistance to emancipation and freeing of slaves was accompanied by the emergence of a virulent form of racial prejudice. Worked Cite: Acts of the General Assembly of the State of South Carolina from 1791 to December 1794, Volume 1. Columbia, S. C. : D. & J.
J. Faust, State Printers, 1808. Wood, Peter H. Black, and Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion. New York: W. W.
Norton & Company, Inc. , 1974. Simon Middleton Slavery and Servitude in North America, 1607 - 1800 Jean M. West Slavery and Sanctuary in Colonial Florida J. A. Saco, Historia de la Escalvitud de la Raza Africana, Tomo II, pp. 80 - 82 CHRONOLOGY OF SLAVERY AND FREEDOM IN AMERICA Frederic Bancroft, Slave Trading in the Old South (1931); Jay Country, The Notorious Triangle: Rhode Island and the African Slave Trade, 1700 - 1807 (1981); James A.
Rally, The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A History (1981).
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