Slavery

Essay by Israelc7High School, 10th gradeA-, October 2014

download word file, 4 pages 0.0

Israel Cervantes

APUSH Mr. Riggins 1st period

09.09.14

The moment the colonies began to settle down, it was obvious that a workforce was needed to make any sort of profit from these colonies. At first indentured servitude was a thing, where people, often young people offered their services to work as a way to pay a trip to the new land, the ones who decided to do this made a contract with someone and for a number of years they agreed to work for them in order to pay the debt of the trip. This worked well for a while, but then due to the massive growing of tobacco and other work intensive crops, colonists soon realized that indentured servitude just wasn't going to cut it, so they resorted to tactics that other countries used such as Portugal, England, the Netherlands used, slavery. Slavery introduced an incredibly cheaper way for the colonists to get workforce, there were many benefits of slaves over indentured servants, they were cheaper, people could have more, they basically did everything they were told to do by their owners/masters, and over all, they were not tied to any sort of contract, while indentured servants knew their freedom was guaranteed, slaves were in it for life, unless their masters for whatever reason chose to free them.

Something else that greatly influenced the growth in slavery was the fact that you could simply buy tons of slaves, generally they would take just about as many able-bodied people from the countries in which they would get slaves from, generally Africa. The people would take men and women and children. They would be brought over to the new world through something known as, "the middle passage." The middle passage was the voyage from the country over to the new land,