Importance Of Indentured Servitude

1619 was a critical year in development. The House of Burgesses was created, but more importantly, the first slaves were brought into the colony of Jamestown, Virginia. Between the years of 1607-1770, slavery became a staple of the Southern American economy. Slaves were a chief source of labor making the treatment of the slaves and their role in American society change significantly. The reasons for the rise of their importance reflected in the economic, geographic, and political factors of the time.
The idea of indentured servitude was born of a need for cheap labor. The earliest settlers soon realized that they had lots of land to care for, but no one to care for it. With passage to the Colonies expensive for all but the wealthy, the Virginia …show more content…
This was appealing to plantation owners because this meant that they could essentially get free slaves from slaves he already owned. As seen in document 3 and 4 African American children born to a slave were slaves. Young women were often advertised for sale as "good breeding stock". To encourage child-bearing some population owners promised women slaves their freedom after they had produced fifteen children. One slave trader from Virginia boasted that his successful breeding policies enabled him to sell 6,000 slave children a year. It has been claimed that plantation owners were often the fathers of slave children. Slave women were forced to comply with sexual advances by their masters on a very regular basis. Consequences of resistance often came in the form of physical beatings; thus, an enormous number of slaves became concubines for these men. Most often the masters were already bound in matrimony, which caused tension and hatred between the slave and the mistress of the house. Many "mulatto" or racially mixed children also resulted from these relations. Because the "status of the child" followed that of his or her mother, the child of a white man would not be freed based upon patriarchal genealogy as seen in document …show more content…
They fled from abusive masters, to take a break from work, or in search of family members from whom they had been separated. Some servants were lured away by neighbors attempting to steal labor. The cost and the likely hood of finding a runaway servant caused plantation owners to lose money. Slaves, unlike servants, were typically much easier to find due to markings and scars found on their bodies. Document 7 clearly shows the detail kept and used in order to find slaves. Slaves were also able to be punished in a more brutal way due to the fact that they were