Around 1680, enslaved Africans were fewer than one in ten people in Virginia, and most of the colony's field workers were English indentured servants. By 1750, about four in ten Virginians were enslaved, and the law said their children and grandchildren would be enslaved forever. That change happened within one long lifetime. To explain it, you need three things: why planters wanted enslaved Africans instead of servants, why slavery took such different shapes in different British colonies, and how colonial lawmakers built a legal system in which being of African descent came to mean being enslaved.
Why British colonists turned to enslaved labor
Every British colony shared one basic condition: land was plentiful and workers were scarce. A colonist who could get workers could turn cheap land into tobacco, rice, sugar, wheat or timber for sale to Europe and the Caribbean, where demand for these goods kept rising through the 1600s and 1700s. The question was where the workers would come from.
In the Chesapeake, the first answer was indentured servitude. Most Europeans who came to Virginia and Maryland in the 1600s were servants: usually young, poor, single Englishmen who sold four to seven years of their labor in return for passage, food and, sometimes, "freedom dues" of clothing, tools or land when their terms ended. Early on, servants made economic sense because so many people died within a few years of arriving that paying more for a lifetime worker was a bad bet.
From the 1660s, several changes pushed Chesapeake planters toward enslaved Africans instead:
- Fewer servants. England's population stopped growing, and wages there rose, so fewer people needed to sell their labor. New colonies such as Pennsylvania (1681) also competed for the servants who did come.
- Longer lives. As death rates in the Chesapeake fell, a worker held for life became worth more than one held for five years.
- Hereditary status. Laws such as Virginia's 1662 act (below) made an enslaved woman's children the enslaver's property, so an enslaved worker was also an investment that produced more workers.
- More captives for sale. The Royal African Company, chartered in 1672, shipped Africans to English colonies under a monopoly. After Parliament opened the trade to all English merchants in 1698, many more slave ships sailed and the supply to the mainland grew.
- Fear of freed servants. In Bacon's Rebellion (1676), landless former servants joined Nathaniel Bacon in burning Jamestown (Topic 2.4). Large planters had learned that every year's crop of freed servants produced more armed, poor and angry men. Enslaved Africans would never be freed and could be denied guns and rights by law.
Historians weigh these causes differently. Edmund Morgan, in American Slavery, American Freedom (1975), stressed the last one: Virginia's elite reduced tension with poor whites by shifting to a labor force defined by race, which let poor and rich whites see themselves as equals above enslaved Black people. Winthrop Jordan (White over Black, 1968) argued that English prejudice against Africans existed before slavery took hold and made it easier to enslave them for life. Economic historians emphasize prices: when servants grew scarce and Africans became available, planters bought Africans. Most historians now see these causes working together.
South Carolina skipped the stage of servitude. Planters from Barbados founded it in 1670 and brought the sugar island's slave system with them, including its slave code. Carolina's money crop became rice from the 1690s, grown in tidal swamps where malaria killed many Europeans. Planters valued Africans from rice-growing regions of West Africa, and historians such as Judith Carney argue that African knowledge of growing and processing rice built the industry, though others say planters' experiments mattered more. In the 1740s, Eliza Lucas Pinckney developed indigo, a blue dye plant, as a second export crop. Georgia began in 1733 with slavery banned, but its settlers pushed for repeal, and slavery became legal there in 1751.
Slavery region by region
Slavery existed in every British colony, but its weight differed enormously from region to region. A useful distinction comes from the historian Ira Berlin: in a society with slaves, slavery was one form of labor among many; in a slave society, slavery was the center of the economy and the enslavers were the ruling class.
| Region | Main economy | Place of slavery by about 1750 |
|---|---|---|
| British West Indies (Barbados, Jamaica) | Sugar | Slave societies. Enslaved Africans were the large majority; Barbados alone held about 50,000 by 1700. Death rates were so high that the islands needed constant new arrivals. |
| Lower South (South Carolina, Georgia) | Rice, indigo | Slave society. South Carolina had a Black majority by about 1710, and in the rice-growing lowcountry (the flat coastal plain of tidal rivers and swamps around Charleston) most people were enslaved. |
| Chesapeake (Virginia, Maryland) | Tobacco | Became a slave society between about 1680 and 1720. Enslaved people were about 40 percent of Virginia's population by 1750. |
| Middle colonies (New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania) | Grain farms, trade | Societies with slaves, but with large enslaved populations in port cities. About one in five residents of New York City was enslaved in the 1740s. |
| New England | Small family farms, shipping, fishing | Societies with slaves. Enslaved people were a few percent of the population, mostly in port towns working as servants, sailors and artisans. |
Two facts in this table surprise students. First, the great majority of enslaved Africans never came to North America. Of the roughly 10.7 million captives who survived the Atlantic crossing, about 400,000, under 4 percent, landed in the mainland colonies that became the United States; most went to the Caribbean and Brazil, where sugar plantations worked people to death and bought replacements. Second, the enslaved population of the mainland, especially the Chesapeake, began to grow by natural increase in the early 1700s, as more women arrived and family life became possible. That rarely happened in the sugar islands.
New England's small number of enslaved people did not mean its economy stood apart from slavery. New England ships carried fish, grain, lumber and horses to feed and supply the sugar plantations of the West Indies, and brought back molasses that Rhode Island and Massachusetts distillers turned into rum. Merchants in Newport, Rhode Island, organized most of the slaving voyages that sailed from mainland ports, trading rum on the African coast for captives. This is the Atlantic trade system of Topic 2.4: every region of the British Atlantic profited from slave labor, whether or not many enslaved people lived there.
How the law made slavery racial and permanent
The first Africans in English Virginia arrived in 1619, when an English ship brought "20. and odd" captives taken from a Portuguese slave ship. For several decades their legal status was unsettled. Some were treated as servants for a term and later freed. Anthony Johnson, who arrived in 1621, became free, owned land on Virginia's Eastern Shore, and won a 1655 court case to keep John Casor, an African man, as his servant for life. But signs of a separate status for Africans appeared early. In 1640, when three servants ran away together and were caught, a Virginia court added four years to the terms of the two Europeans and sentenced the African, John Punch, to serve for life.
As planters came to depend on enslaved labor, colonial assemblies wrote laws that removed the ambiguity. Each law answered a question that English law did not settle:
- Can a child born to an enslaved mother be free? Under English common law, a child took the father's status. Virginia's 1662 act made status follow the mother instead.
- Is slavery for life? Maryland's 1664 law declared that enslaved Africans would serve for life and that their children would be enslaved too.
- Does becoming Christian free a person? Virginia ruled in 1667 that baptism did not change a person's status, which closed a route to freedom that some enslaved people had used in court.
- Can an enslaver be punished for killing an enslaved person? A 1669 Virginia law said a death caused by "correction" was not a felony.
- Can Black and white colonists marry? Virginia's 1691 law banished any free white person who married a person of African or Native descent, and required anyone who freed an enslaved person to pay to transport them out of the colony.
Virginia's 1705 code gathered these rules together. South Carolina's codes, beginning with one based on Barbados law in 1696, went further, and after the Stono Rebellion its Negro Act of 1740 controlled enslaved people's movement and gatherings and made it a crime to teach them to write. The 1662 law shows how deliberately lawmakers worked:
WHEREAS some doubts have arrisen whether children got by any Englishman upon a negro woman should be slave or ffree, Be it therefore enacted and declared by this present grand assembly, that all children borne in this country shalbe held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother . . .
Virginia General Assembly, "Negro womens children to serve according to the condition of the mother," Act XII, December 1662
The "doubts" were about children of English fathers and enslaved African mothers, often born from rape or coercion by enslavers. Making status follow the mother meant those children were enslaved, so an enslaver's sexual abuse added to his property, and the line between free and enslaved became a line of race passed down through mothers. Laws against interracial marriage protected that line from the other side. Taken together, these laws turned an unsettled labor arrangement into chattel slavery: a person was legally property, enslaved for life, with that status inherited by descendants.
How enslaved people resisted
Enslaved Africans and their descendants resisted in ways that ranged from daily refusal to armed revolt. Most resistance was quiet, because open revolt usually meant death. People worked slowly, broke tools, pretended to be sick, hid in the woods for days, and stole food. Just as important, they defended their humanity: they kept African names and naming practices, formed families and kin networks even when sales separated them, and blended African music, religious practices and languages with what they found in America. In the South Carolina lowcountry, where enslaved people were a large majority, they developed Gullah, a language that combined English with West African languages.
Open resistance also happened:
- New York City, 1712. About two dozen enslaved people set fire to a building and killed nine white men who came to put it out. Twenty-one were executed, and New York passed harsher slave laws.
- Stono Rebellion, 1739. In September, about twenty enslaved men led by a man named Jemmy, probably from the Kingdom of Kongo, seized guns near the Stono River in South Carolina and marched south toward Spanish Florida, killing about twenty colonists and gathering recruits. Militia caught them within a day; most rebels were killed or executed.
- Flight to Spanish Florida. Spain offered freedom to enslaved people who escaped from British colonies and accepted Catholicism, partly to weaken Carolina. In 1738 the governor of Florida founded Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, a fortified town north of St. Augustine where free Black men served as militia defending the colony.
- New York, 1741. After a series of fires, white New Yorkers became convinced that enslaved people and poor whites were plotting a revolt. Thirty Black men and four white people were executed and more than seventy Black people were sold away, on evidence historians now consider thin.
Resistance changed slavery in turn. The Stono Rebellion led to South Carolina's Negro Act of 1740 and, for a few years, a heavy duty on importing new captives, because lawmakers feared that a large majority of newly arrived Africans was dangerous.
Worked examples
Using the 1662 Virginia act quoted above, explain the purpose of the law and how it broke with English legal tradition.
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Answer. The law's purpose was to settle the status of children born to enslaved African mothers and English fathers, and it settled it in the enslavers' favor: the child was enslaved because the mother was. This broke with English common law, under which a child took the status of the father. The change guaranteed that enslaved women's children, including those fathered by their enslavers, added to the enslaved labor force, and it helped make slavery hereditary and tied to race.
Why this works. "Purpose" asks what problem the lawmakers wanted to solve and for whom, so the answer names the "doubts" in the preamble and who benefited. The break with tradition is a precise contrast (father's status versus mother's status), and the last sentence connects the law to the larger process of making slavery racial and inherited.
Explain how New England's economy was connected to slavery in the British West Indies in the 1700s, even though few enslaved people lived in New England.
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Answer. West Indian sugar planters devoted nearly all their land and enslaved labor to sugar, so they bought food, lumber, barrel staves and horses from New England. New England merchants sold these goods in the islands and bought molasses, which New England distillers made into rum. Rhode Island merchants then carried rum to West Africa to trade for captives who were sold in the Caribbean and the mainland colonies. New England's farmers, shippers and distillers thus earned their living from the plantation economy.
Why this works. A connection answer needs a mechanism: the specific goods that moved each way and why the islands needed them. It makes the point the exam wants without overstating it: New England was a society with slaves, but its economy depended on slave societies elsewhere.
Evaluate the relative importance of the causes of the growth of slavery in the British North American colonies from 1660 to 1750.
Write a thesis, a sentence of context, and an outline of the body.
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Thesis: The growing demand for colonial crops was the most important cause of slavery's growth, because it made colonists want large, permanent labor forces; but a shrinking supply of indentured servants and new laws defining slavery as racial and hereditary determined that those workers would be enslaved Africans.
Context: In the early 1600s, Chesapeake planters relied mainly on English indentured servants, and land was abundant while labor was scarce in every British colony.
Body 1, crop demand. European demand for tobacco, and from the 1690s for Carolina rice and later indigo, made labor the limiting factor in planters' profits. South Carolina, founded by Barbadian planters for export agriculture, had a Black majority by about 1710. Reasoning: where cash crops were most profitable, slavery grew fastest, which is why New England's family farms used few enslaved workers.
Body 2, the labor supply. Rising English wages after 1660 cut the supply of servants, Bacon's Rebellion (1676) showed planters the danger of freed servants without land, and the end of the Royal African Company's monopoly in 1698 increased the number of captives offered for sale. Reasoning: these explain the timing of the Chesapeake's shift between about 1680 and 1720, but they operated only because demand for workers already existed.
Body 3, law and race. Virginia's 1662 act made slavery pass through the mother, the 1667 act denied that baptism freed anyone, and the 1691 and 1705 laws drew a strict racial line. Reasoning: laws made an enslaved African a lifelong and hereditary investment, and historians such as Edmund Morgan argue that a racial line also served planters by dividing poor whites from enslaved Black people. This cause shaped what kind of system grew, more than whether it grew.
Why it scores. "Relative importance" requires ranking, so the thesis names a most important cause and says how the others relate to it. Each body paragraph uses specific evidence (dates, laws, colonies) and ends with reasoning that ties back to the ranking, which is the line of reasoning graders look for.
Where students lose points
On the exam
Questions on this topic can set a colonial law, a planter's letter, or data on the slave trade and ask you to explain causes or effects, or to connect slavery to the Atlantic economy (Topic 2.4) or to regional differences (Topic 2.3). In essays on colonial labor or regional economies, specific laws (1662, 1691, 1705, 1740) and specific events (Stono, the 1741 New York trials) make strong evidence when you explain what each one shows.
Check yourself
Question 1
Which change best explains why Chesapeake planters bought more enslaved Africans and fewer indentured servants after about 1680?
- A
Parliament banned the shipment of indentured servants to the colonies.
- B
Fewer English workers were willing to emigrate as servants, while falling death rates made lifetime labor more valuable.
- C
Tobacco prices collapsed, so planters needed cheaper workers to grow food crops instead.
- D
The Great Awakening convinced planters that indentured servitude was immoral.
Show answer
B
Rising wages in England reduced the supply of servants, and once colonists lived longer, a worker held for life (whose children were also enslaved) was a better investment than a servant held for five years. No law banned servant shipments (A), and the Great Awakening (D) came decades later and did not end servitude.
- A
Question 2
Ira Berlin distinguished a 'society with slaves' from a 'slave society.' Classify New England and the South Carolina lowcountry in about 1740 and give one piece of evidence for each.
Show answer
New England was a society with slaves: enslaved people were a few percent of the population and worked mostly as servants and artisans in port towns, while family farms relied on family labor. The South Carolina lowcountry was a slave society: enslaved Africans were a large majority of its people, and rice plantations worked by enslaved labor were the center of its economy.
The distinction is about how central slavery was to the economy and the social order, not about whether slavery was legal. It was legal in both places.
Question 3
Why did the Spanish governor of Florida found the town of Mose near St. Augustine in 1738?
- A
To house Native captives taken in raids on Carolina's Indian allies
- B
To give free Black refugees from British colonies a fortified home whose men would help defend Spanish Florida
- C
To create a market where Spanish settlers could buy enslaved Africans from British traders
- D
To resettle Pueblo people displaced after the Spanish reconquest of New Mexico
Show answer
B
Spain offered freedom to people who escaped slavery in the British colonies and became Catholic, which weakened Carolina and strengthened Florida's defenses; Mose's men served as militia. The promise of Florida is part of why the Stono rebels marched south in 1739.
- A
Question 4
Explain how Virginia's 1691 law against interracial marriage worked together with its 1662 law on the status of children.
Show answer
The 1662 law made a child's status follow the mother, so children of enslaved Black women were enslaved. The 1691 law banished any white person who married a person of African or Native descent, which discouraged legitimate mixed families and free children of mixed descent. Together they kept a sharp line in which African descent meant enslavement and whiteness meant freedom.
Each law closed a different gap in the racial line: one handled children of enslaved mothers, the other the marriages that could produce free families across the color line.