It goes without argument that the United States and those who helped bring it about were strongly dependent upon the products produced by slaves as a means of purchasing the support and supplies required by the Revolutionary Army in the county’s battle with Britain for independence. “They desperately need the assistance of other countries, especially France, and their single most valuable product with which to purchase assistance was tobacco, produced mainly by slave labor” (Morgan, 1972: 6). This suggests that the institution of slavery was already a well-established practice within the original colonies long before they realized any need for outside support. “Unquestionably it was a demand for labor which dragged the Negro to American shores, but the status which he acquired here cannot be explained by reference to that economic motive.
Long before black labor was as economically important as unfree white labor, the Negro had been consigned to a special discriminatory status which mirrored the social discrimination Englishmen practiced against him” (Degler, 1959: 62). Investigating the reasons for the establishment of slavery in the colonies and the motivations for keeping it reveals that slavery as an institution was perpetuated because of the economic incentives it offered, the self-interested laws that seemed to support it and the cultural attitudes that made the dominant white culture envision themselves as protectors.
A great deal of the reason slavery as a practice was so quickly established in places such as the Chesapeake colonies was due to the economic motivations offered in the idea of very cheap labor coupled with a high level of profit. The economic motivation was evident even in the earliest years of slavery in the colonies as acreage was awarded based on headright, which was measured by how many servants were attached to the household. “Over time, powerful Virginia landowners began to realize that enslaving Africans made good economic sense. England’s economy had revived, and fewer indentured servants were signing up for the voyage to the colony” (Johnson 41) while the concept of black people as slaves for life began to grow, promising eternal service at a minimal cost. The Africans taught the European settlers how to grow a new cash crop, rice, that became yet another form of killing field for future slaves. Within this environment, the degree to which the concepts of economics dictated the perceived value of the life of a slave became clear. “South Carolina planters … believed it to be cheaper to lose a slave than to treat one humanely. So the captives were destined to labor in the steamy, sodden fields, sacrificing their souls for the crop” (Johnson 84). The economic strength that the produce from these crops made possible gained the colonies important allies, such as the French, who would later help them win their freedom from England at the same time that new laws were being drafted to secure the ownership and enforcement of black slaves. As the money produced by the slave trade found its way into the treasure houses of the English aristocracy, another important event was occurring. The slave trade that had brought England out of economic ruin now drove the processes of the industrial revolution making today’s modern world possible.
Within these colonies, slavery was legitimized by established rules of law and the developing colonial legal institutions, most of which had a vested interest in its continuance. This process began in the early 1600s with a court decision in which a black man was sentenced to serve for the rest of his natural life as compared to two white men who shared his crime but were sentenced only to some additional years of service. This decision marked both the distinction being made between the black man and the white man as well as the possibility of holding a man’s entire lifetime’s worth of labor for one’s individual profit. Although this one case is not the defining moment in which slavery, as it existed in America, was founded, it is strongly representative of a growing impression in the minds of the voluntary colonists that a clear division existed between white and black that could be legally regulated. Recognized as a legal institution as early as 1641, it wasn’t long before the laws of the colonies also functioned to make slavery hereditary by determining that a child born to a slave was also a slave. “In 1669, Virginia declared it lawful to kill an unruly slave during punishment. In 1691, a white woman marrying a black man, whether or not he was free, would be banished.
A year later, it became legal to kill runaway slaves” (Johnson 46). Laws that restricted the movement of slaves were designed to both reduce the possibility for runaways, a consistent problem, but also as a means of strongly suppressing the slaves so as to avoid a slave uprising should the slave class discover a means of capitalizing on their strength in numbers. By 1740, laws existed that controlled the slaves’ freedom of movement at all times, the ability to gather, and that prohibited teaching slaves to read or write (Johnson 106). These measures were all intended as a means of hyper-controlling the potentially dangerous majority of slaves as compared to white people at the same time that some restrictions on slaveowners were imposed, such as permitting slaves to have Sundays free for religious worship, as a means of pacifying potential resistance. These ideas were also reinforced again and again by church law as the need to introduce the heathens to the true Christian faith became incorporated into the legal code as well.
The reasons these laws seemed so easy to pass was not only the result of personal and economic interest but also because of already established cultural ideas that enabled the slave owners to view themselves as benefactors rather than oppressors. Captain James Newton, a slave trader, wrote that “these poor creatures are not only strangers to the advantages which I enjoy, but are plunged in all the contrary evils … they are deceived and harassed by necromancing, magic and all the train of superstitions that fear combined with ignorance can produce in the human mind” (Johnson 76). In fact, many slave owners didn’t seem to believe that slaves were capable of understanding the complex thoughts and ideas that were a part of the Christian religion and thus refused to acknowledge any kind of kinship with them such as shared race. Part of this poor perception of the ‘black’ people may have also been the result of a strong opposition existent in the English culture since well before their involvement with slavery. “The meaning of black before the sixteenth century included ‘deeply stained with dirt; soiled, dirty, foul … Indicating disgrace, censure, liability to punishment’” (Jordan 6). There was already a strong contrast drawn between the goodness of white and the baseness of black that naturally shifted into identifying human nature and worth once these terms were used to apply to skin tones. “It seems probable that the Revolutionary champions of liberty who acquiesced in the continued slavery of black labor did so not only because of racial prejudice but also because they shared with Tucker a distrust of the poor that was inherent in eighteenth-century conceptions of republican liberty” (Morgan, 2003: 13). Thus, whether it was a question of perceived intelligence, a cultural prejudice against a misplaced color identifier, or a means of keeping the poor rigidly in their non-threatening place, slavery was as much a cultural institution as it was a legal and economic one.
Motivated by the need to profit in the new world and a general lack of manpower, slavery quickly grew into something monstrous in the unchecked climate of the British colonies as a result of the extreme greed and fear of the white population. Africans who were stolen from their homes and deliberately separated from anyone familiar were perceived as supremely unintelligent rather than shocked and these perceptions helped fuel preconceived notions that they were the antithesis of white goodness and the Christian right. As questions of slavery arose, the colonies often found it expedient to simply draft new laws that protected white economic interests rather than concerning themselves with the dubious reliability of human rights.
Although this was a significant departure from how slavery had been interpreted throughout history in other parts of the world, the English, being the superior beings, they were with God on their side, managed to find a new way of turning a profit on other men’s backs.
Works Cited
Degler, Carl. “Slavery and the Genesis of American Race Prejudice.” Comparative Studies in Society and History. Vol. 2, N. 1: (1959). pp. 49-66.
Johnson, Charles. Africans in America: America’s Journey Through Slavery. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1999.
Jordan, Winthrop D. The White Man’s Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974.
Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom. W. W. Norton & Company. (2003).