American Colonial History: Slavery as a Popular Prospect

American Colonial History
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American Colonial History
The colonial period was a significant time that changed the socio-political trajectory of the US. As America sought its socioeconomic and political freedom, it also fostered advancing its growth through the industrial revolution. Slavery was among the most popular prospects during the American colonial era. For years, slaves were treated as commodities to fuel the industrial revolution. To the colonies, slaves only needed food and clothes to ready them for their roles. While slavery was a significant factor in colonial America and its spread has been discussed in literature widely, the prevalence of slavery through different colonies has been explored only mildly. In this research, the focus is put on assessing American colonial history with an emphasis on Virginia and Georgia. Virginia and Georgia are different in the sense that Virginia was the first colony while Georgia was the last colony. Both colonies experienced slavery extensively. However, it is not known how much had changed between the time when Virginia was founded in 1607 and when Georgia was founded in 1732. Within that period, so much would have occurred to affect the lives of the slaves. Some of the questions that the paper will be exploring include understanding whether slavery looked different right from when it was adopted in Virginia to when it was accommodated in Georgia or whether the lives of slaves showcased some differences from their treatment in Virginia to how they were treated in Georgia. Assessing the above aspects of colonial history should be vital in further exploration of slavery, how it transformed, and why it remains a significant historical factor in America.
Background
The history of the colony in North America is shaped by slavery. The colonies treated enslaved people (men, women, and children) as commercial goods for more than 150 years. People are treated harshly in the logic of enslavement as inputs to produce outputs. Only food and clothing were given to slaves as inputs for their labor to be produced by the colonists. In American history, slavery first appeared before the 17th century, in 1619, following the entrance of Africans who had been taken as indentured servants or, more specifically, taken as slaves by the colonists for a set period before being freed. In a nutshell, slavery was a type of labor system that influenced colonial society and thought in every way. After Massachusetts and the North made slavery legal in 1641, slavery spread there. Following legalization, slave codes were created and put into effect. The Codes set out rules for slavery and portrayed slaves as property rather than as living beings. In the colonies, this behavior sparked resentment and uprisings. A rise in hostility between slave owners and their charges led to bloody slave uprisings throughout the colonies.[Brown William. 1848. Fugitive Slave. Boston: Antislavery Office.] [Sabin, Joseph. 1877. Bibliotheca Americana: A Dictionary of Books Relating to America. Nassau Street: Sabin and Sons]
The created codes in the North American colony enshrined slaves as the property of their owners, denying them any rights. Captured people from Africa were sold as slaves to European slave dealers, who transported them to the American market. They were traded among the enslavers to pay off debts after being sold to their masters in America to work on plantations. They used to work without much nourishment from sunrise to dusk. Deviant slaves were tortured as a kind of punishment and a warning to other slaves. Slavery started as an expedition by one person who wanted to travel the world. Insatiable curiosity led to the discovery of economic opportunities involving other people, which gave rise to racial segregation and racism in society. There were many different types of slavery, such as domestic slavery, military enslavement, and plantation slavery. This essay seeks to provide a thorough description of North American slavery as a system of work and the experiences of those who were held captive.[Sabin, Joseph. 1877. Bibliotheca Americana: A Dictionary of Books Relating to America. Nassau Street: Sabin and Sons]
Slavery first appeared in North America in 1654 because it was a type of labor system that adjusted to shifts in the demand for labor and goods. Plantations of sugarcane and other crops were expanding in North America, and the plantations needed cheap labor to operate.  The capture and selling of people for trade goods was a result of plantation cultures. Many people think that more than 11 million people were brought to America from Europe to work on the plantations. Because their captors saw them as tools rather than as human beings, slaves endured brutal treatment from their masters. Deviant slaves were subjected to severe torture, including lashing, by their captors. The slaves started a revolt by refusing to work so that the masters would treat them fairly. When their owners understood this, they began to offer them minor rewards like extra food, clothing, and, in rare instances, downtime in the hopes that they would keep working.[Gallay, Alan, ed. 2009. Indian Slavery in Colonial America. University of Nebraska Press.] [Wood, Betty. 2005. Slavery in Colonial America, 1619–1776. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.]
The rewards the slaves received were insignificant in comparison to the suffering they endured. They endured hangings, severe lashings, and limb amputations. Additionally, the captors made the slaves travel to the New World in difficult conditions by water from their home countries. When slaves died, their lords left their remains on the ground, which allowed diseases to spread swiftly. The slaves were underfed. The awful experience of slavery in North America had a significant impact on how the history of the United States was shaped. The Civil War and the barrier it established between the white and black races, which remains today, were two ways that slavery altered America.[Wood, Betty. 2005. Slavery in Colonial America, 1619–1776. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.]
Slavery in Virginia
Virginia was among the first colonies to adopt slavery. Being the first colony, Virginia was ahead of the rest in the fight for economic revolution. Achieving its mission of becoming an economic powerhouse in North America meant that Virginia engaged in an extensive industrial revolution. Part of that revolution implied seeking labor to fuel the development of the industries. To that extent, slavery became an essential option for Virginia’s transformation. Native Americans were captured and sold into slavery in Virginia during the early years of the English Colony of Virginia and far into the late eighteenth century. This happened mostly before the legalization of the slave trade which would ease the seeking of more farm workers from the rest of the world.  The captured Native Americans mostly toiled in the fields of tobacco. Twenty Africans from modern-day Angola came to Virginia in 1619 on the ship The White Lion, marking the arrival of the first Africans or African slaves in colonial Virginia. The enslaved individuals were typically made to work on vast tobacco plantations as the slave trade expanded, where their unpaid labor helped plantation owners become wealthy.[Brown William. 1848. Fugitive Slave. Boston: Antislavery Office.] [Sabin, Joseph. 1877. Bibliotheca Americana: A Dictionary of Books Relating to America. Nassau Street: Sabin and Sons] [Burnard, Trevor. 2019. Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650-1820. University of Chicago Press.]
Cultural diversity started growing with the influx of slaves into colonial Virginia. Native Americans who spoke the Algonquin language, English, other Westerners, and people from West Africa all coexisted in colonial Virginia.  Each of the above individuals freely brought their own cultures, languages, and ceremonies. Plantation owners by the eighteenth century were Virginia's nobility, thanks to the expanded labor market through the routes of the slave trade. Amidst the advancements of slavery within Virginia, slaves started receiving varying treatments. The new slaves were put to work on the farms for long hours without much food or pay. At the same time, there were a few slaves who were accorded the opportunity to oversee the works of other slaves on the farms. A few poor whites competed with slaves for supervisory roles. It is worth noting that when Virginia's farmers still relied on Native Americans alone for labor, the outputs were low and farming was not as organized as it would be with the increase in the number of slaves and ratification of routes to bring more slaves into the country. 
The influx of the first batch of slaves into Virginia only set a platform for more slaves and worse treatment of farm workers. The colony's main export during the seventeenth century was tobacco. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the trade and breeding of slaves became steadily more profitable than the export of tobacco. That is because the demand for labor in other colonies was increasing and Virginia had a surplus to provide. What began as the trade of humans later grew into a serious business with traders involved in crooked ways of acquiring, breeding, and holding slaves.  Black women were brought through slave routes. Those women were forced to give birth to more blacks to increase the number of enslaved people.  This happened since black people were fast becoming Virginia's most valuable and profitable commodity of export. Following the changes in the industry and advancements in the industrial revolution in other colonies, the Virginia General Assembly enacted the first statute granting the right to own slaves to any free person in 1661. The purpose of the legislation passed in 1672 was to stop and capture fugitive slave labor. In the seventeenth century, more laws fueling the enslavement of Africans were created, and in 1705, Virginia's first slave code was formalized. Laws gradually began to deny more and more rights. Laws were enacted to support the interests of slave traders, breeders, and owners with limited efforts put to address the rights of the slaves.[Gallay, Alan, ed. 2009. Indian Slavery in Colonial America. University of Nebraska Press.] [Smedley, Audrey. 2018. Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview. Routledge.] [Brown William. 1848. Fugitive Slave. Boston: Antislavery Office.]
The treatment of slaves in the colony of Virginia did not get any better as the demand for slaves increased in North America and even Europe. Slaves endured a variety of traumas for more than 200 years, including physical violence and rape. Slaves as well endured being separated from family members, starvation, and public humiliation. The colonies developed every avenue to make it impossible for slaves to enjoy even the basic needs of humanity. The laws made it difficult for them to learn how to read and write, preventing them from having access to books or the Bible. The slaves could only leave the farm for a predetermined number of hours and had to apply for a permit to do so. In the early years of their servitude in America, black people were not permitted to gather in groups, so if they would want to go to church, they had to be separated from the white congregation in white religious institutions or meet in complete secrecy in the woods. This situation changed later when black people were able to find black churches from where they could occasionally worship. The hardest part of being sold was being separated from family members; as a result, they developed coping strategies like passive resistance and making work songs to get through the long, arduous days in the fields. Also, the slaves developed unique musical genres such as Black Gospel music and somber tunes to ease their coping with the hard labor that they had to endure. By around the mid-1600s, a few blacks were beginning to understand their rights and began to mildly fight for their rights. The few blacks filed lawsuits that sought for them to work for fewer hours on the farms as a basic element of human rights. Their requests were quashed as the slave owners claimed that those individuals were legally bound to servitude for life. In 1640, a slave, John Punch, attempted to run away from his capture. Punch was unlucky, re-arrested, and sentenced to a lifetime of servitude by the Virginia courts. Put simply, the justice system did nothing to save the slaves from their owners in colonial Virginia.[Burnard, Trevor. 2019. Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650-1820. University of Chicago Press.] [Sabin, Joseph. 1877. Bibliotheca Americana: A Dictionary of Books Relating to America. Nassau Street: Sabin and Sons] [Wokeck, Marianne S. 2015. Trade in Strangers: The Beginnings of Mass Migration to North America. Penn State Press.] [Fitzhugh, George. 1854. Sociology for the South: Or, the Failure of Free Society. Richmond, VA: Morris Publisher.] [Wood, Betty. 2005. Slavery in Colonial America, 1619–1776. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.]
The more Virginia acquired and bred more slaves, the more the roles of those in servitude increased. Enslaved persons were given certain tasks to complete from Monday through Saturday. The majority of the slaves worked on farms, including minors.  Other duties accorded to the slaves by their masters included caring for white children, housekeeping, and cooking and serving food. Others received training to become coopers, builders, and metalworkers. Those who had gardens or livestock took care of them on Sunday. Sunday was also a day for worship and spending time with family, something that Virginia was gradually adopting as more blacks gathered to worship, some openly while others in secrecy. Children were forced to work as well. Small black minors at Monticello by the late eighteenth century assi...