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.Planters also benefited from gaining a headright grant of 50 acres for every slavethey imported.2 As large landowners invested heavily in this growing workforce,the proportion of slaves to white servants reached one-to-three.3 In order tokeep up with incessant demand for more slaves, the Royal African Company wasformed.Instead of combing the islands of the Caribbean (primarily Barbados)for chattel, this euphemistically named British enterprise purchased blacks inAfrica, primarily from ports along the western coast where they had been col-lected for sale, and then shipped them across the Atlantic.Colonists began sub-mitting to the company requests to buy slaves in exchange for tobacco or specie,and a brisk transoceanic trade quickly developed.By the early 1680s, the RoyalAfrican Company was transporting several thousand slaves to the Southern col-onies each year.Ships sailed up Tidewater estuaries and docked at variouswharves before throngs of expectant buyers.Young men and women who hadsurvived both a long captivity in Africa and then a perilous sea journey were ledaway blinking and uncomprehending to a life of degrading servitude.Many of them did not even make it across the Atlantic.Crammed into low-ceilinged, foul-smelling decks like so many sacks of flour, often deprived of ade-quate food, and felled by fevers and dysentery, large numbers of slaves perishedduring the Middle Passage, their bodies summarily dumped into the sea.Duringone typical eight-year period, the Royal African Company lost nearly a quarter ofits human freight en route to the Chesapeake.4 That percentage might well havebeen higher but for the fact that most slaves brought over from Africa wereyoung (only in their teens) and healthy.Conditions for them on terra firma weresomewhat better, if only because their new masters wanted to safeguard thisnewly acquired property.Slaves worked in the fields for 16 or more hours at astretch, resting only on Sundays, and enjoying only three holidays Christmas,Easter and Whitsuntide during the entire year.5 Their living quarters wereprimitive, with little in the way of sanitation; they were fed barely nutritious1.Virginia records show an importation of 229 slaves in 1700, followed by a sharp increaseto 1,639 in 1705.See Menard, From Servants to Slaves, Table 6, Slaves Imported toMaryland and Virginia from Africa, 1695-1709, 370.2.For this purpose, slaves were classified as servants. Hughes and Cain, AmericanEconomic History, 33.3.Bruce, Economic History, vol.2, 85.4.Ibid., 123.5.Isaac Rhys, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill: University of NorthCarolina Press, 1982), 44.29 Race to the Frontierrations and received almost no medical attention if they were injured or takensick.(Many, in fact, died shortly after arrival as the result of respiratory infec-tions against which they had no immunity.1) Still, Africans brought to Virginiasurvived reasonably well in fact, they tolerated New World conditions betterthan their fellow slaves in the Caribbean and the white servants who laboredbeside them in the tobacco fields.Although the early cargoes of slaves arriving inthe colony contained few females, importation combined with natural increaseenabled the black population to grow relatively rapidly, doubling in size every25 years up until 1710.2But even this burgeoning supply of slaves could scarcely keep up withdemand.By the 1670s, Virginia was annually sending some 15 million pounds oftobacco back to England, and to sustain this high level of exports, more andmore slave labor had to be acquired.3 The roughly 2,000 blacks then living in thecolony were not sufficient.4 More and more slave traders docked on the banks ofcoastal rivers during the next few decades, bringing an estimated 2,000 slaves inthe 1680s, over 1,300 in the following decade, another 8,000 between 1700 and1710, and over 11,000 from 1718 to 1725.5 Meanwhile, the migration of whiteindentured servants virtually came to a halt by the second decade of the 18th cen-tury.In fact, turning Virginia into a slave colony had a strong, negative impact onall working-class whites.As the number of slaves increased, the need for whitehelp declined.Virginia s proletariat was radically transformed: in 1674, slavesmade up only a fifth of those in servitude, but this percentage grew to one thirdin 1686.6 By the last decade in the 17th century, blacks had numerically surpassedwhite servants as the chief source of labor in the colony.7 From then on, the Africanization of Virginia proceeded apace.In 1710, one in five persons wasenslaved;8 within a decade, slaves made up more than 30 percent of Virginia stotal population of 87,757.9 (Viewed in a broader perspective, the proportion ofthe colony s blacks grew from about 7 percent in 1680 to more than 30 percent in1.Kulikoff, Alan, A Prolifick People: Black Population Growth in the Chesapeake Colo-nies, 1700-1790, Southern Studies 16 (1977), reprinted in Colonial Southern Slavery, 130.2.Hughes and Cain, American Economic History, 19.3.Otto, Southern Frontiers, 17.4.See Bruce, Economic History, vol.1, 572.5.Berlin, Generations of Captivity, 55.Menard, From Servants to Slaves, 367.Richard L.Morton, Colonial Virginia, vol.2, Westward Expansion and Prelude to Revolution, 1710-1763(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960), 492.6.Morgan, American Slavery, 306.7.Deal, Race and Class, 87.Cf.Morgan, American Slavery, 306.8.Menard, From Servants to Slaves, 381.9.Deal, Race and Class, 175.This population statistic comes from Series Z 1-10, EstimatedPopulation of American Colonies: 1610-1780, Historical Statistics of the United States, part2, 1168.30 I.White Negroes in the Tidewater1730, and more than 40 percent by the 1750s.1) This headlong rush to importslaves is reflected in the continuing rise in prices planters were willing to pay forthem: these doubled from approximately 18 pounds sterling in 1676 to 35 poundsin 1700.2 Virginia s well-to-do planters handed over this much of their hard-earned money for slaves even though they remained almost twice as expensive topurchase as increasingly costly white servants.3 As a result of this racialchangeover, opportunities for poor young English men and women to seek socialand economic advancement across the Atlantic were effectively eliminated.From the plantation owners perspective, switching over to black labor wasfar less painful.For them, it was mostly a matter of psychological adjustment.They had to come to terms with their role of racial oppressors.This was eased bythe changing make-up of the colony s black population [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.Planters also benefited from gaining a headright grant of 50 acres for every slavethey imported.2 As large landowners invested heavily in this growing workforce,the proportion of slaves to white servants reached one-to-three.3 In order tokeep up with incessant demand for more slaves, the Royal African Company wasformed.Instead of combing the islands of the Caribbean (primarily Barbados)for chattel, this euphemistically named British enterprise purchased blacks inAfrica, primarily from ports along the western coast where they had been col-lected for sale, and then shipped them across the Atlantic.Colonists began sub-mitting to the company requests to buy slaves in exchange for tobacco or specie,and a brisk transoceanic trade quickly developed.By the early 1680s, the RoyalAfrican Company was transporting several thousand slaves to the Southern col-onies each year.Ships sailed up Tidewater estuaries and docked at variouswharves before throngs of expectant buyers.Young men and women who hadsurvived both a long captivity in Africa and then a perilous sea journey were ledaway blinking and uncomprehending to a life of degrading servitude.Many of them did not even make it across the Atlantic.Crammed into low-ceilinged, foul-smelling decks like so many sacks of flour, often deprived of ade-quate food, and felled by fevers and dysentery, large numbers of slaves perishedduring the Middle Passage, their bodies summarily dumped into the sea.Duringone typical eight-year period, the Royal African Company lost nearly a quarter ofits human freight en route to the Chesapeake.4 That percentage might well havebeen higher but for the fact that most slaves brought over from Africa wereyoung (only in their teens) and healthy.Conditions for them on terra firma weresomewhat better, if only because their new masters wanted to safeguard thisnewly acquired property.Slaves worked in the fields for 16 or more hours at astretch, resting only on Sundays, and enjoying only three holidays Christmas,Easter and Whitsuntide during the entire year.5 Their living quarters wereprimitive, with little in the way of sanitation; they were fed barely nutritious1.Virginia records show an importation of 229 slaves in 1700, followed by a sharp increaseto 1,639 in 1705.See Menard, From Servants to Slaves, Table 6, Slaves Imported toMaryland and Virginia from Africa, 1695-1709, 370.2.For this purpose, slaves were classified as servants. Hughes and Cain, AmericanEconomic History, 33.3.Bruce, Economic History, vol.2, 85.4.Ibid., 123.5.Isaac Rhys, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill: University of NorthCarolina Press, 1982), 44.29 Race to the Frontierrations and received almost no medical attention if they were injured or takensick.(Many, in fact, died shortly after arrival as the result of respiratory infec-tions against which they had no immunity.1) Still, Africans brought to Virginiasurvived reasonably well in fact, they tolerated New World conditions betterthan their fellow slaves in the Caribbean and the white servants who laboredbeside them in the tobacco fields.Although the early cargoes of slaves arriving inthe colony contained few females, importation combined with natural increaseenabled the black population to grow relatively rapidly, doubling in size every25 years up until 1710.2But even this burgeoning supply of slaves could scarcely keep up withdemand.By the 1670s, Virginia was annually sending some 15 million pounds oftobacco back to England, and to sustain this high level of exports, more andmore slave labor had to be acquired.3 The roughly 2,000 blacks then living in thecolony were not sufficient.4 More and more slave traders docked on the banks ofcoastal rivers during the next few decades, bringing an estimated 2,000 slaves inthe 1680s, over 1,300 in the following decade, another 8,000 between 1700 and1710, and over 11,000 from 1718 to 1725.5 Meanwhile, the migration of whiteindentured servants virtually came to a halt by the second decade of the 18th cen-tury.In fact, turning Virginia into a slave colony had a strong, negative impact onall working-class whites.As the number of slaves increased, the need for whitehelp declined.Virginia s proletariat was radically transformed: in 1674, slavesmade up only a fifth of those in servitude, but this percentage grew to one thirdin 1686.6 By the last decade in the 17th century, blacks had numerically surpassedwhite servants as the chief source of labor in the colony.7 From then on, the Africanization of Virginia proceeded apace.In 1710, one in five persons wasenslaved;8 within a decade, slaves made up more than 30 percent of Virginia stotal population of 87,757.9 (Viewed in a broader perspective, the proportion ofthe colony s blacks grew from about 7 percent in 1680 to more than 30 percent in1.Kulikoff, Alan, A Prolifick People: Black Population Growth in the Chesapeake Colo-nies, 1700-1790, Southern Studies 16 (1977), reprinted in Colonial Southern Slavery, 130.2.Hughes and Cain, American Economic History, 19.3.Otto, Southern Frontiers, 17.4.See Bruce, Economic History, vol.1, 572.5.Berlin, Generations of Captivity, 55.Menard, From Servants to Slaves, 367.Richard L.Morton, Colonial Virginia, vol.2, Westward Expansion and Prelude to Revolution, 1710-1763(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960), 492.6.Morgan, American Slavery, 306.7.Deal, Race and Class, 87.Cf.Morgan, American Slavery, 306.8.Menard, From Servants to Slaves, 381.9.Deal, Race and Class, 175.This population statistic comes from Series Z 1-10, EstimatedPopulation of American Colonies: 1610-1780, Historical Statistics of the United States, part2, 1168.30 I.White Negroes in the Tidewater1730, and more than 40 percent by the 1750s.1) This headlong rush to importslaves is reflected in the continuing rise in prices planters were willing to pay forthem: these doubled from approximately 18 pounds sterling in 1676 to 35 poundsin 1700.2 Virginia s well-to-do planters handed over this much of their hard-earned money for slaves even though they remained almost twice as expensive topurchase as increasingly costly white servants.3 As a result of this racialchangeover, opportunities for poor young English men and women to seek socialand economic advancement across the Atlantic were effectively eliminated.From the plantation owners perspective, switching over to black labor wasfar less painful.For them, it was mostly a matter of psychological adjustment.They had to come to terms with their role of racial oppressors.This was eased bythe changing make-up of the colony s black population [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]