Slavery in Colonial America
...racial mixture. Ancient societies, however, did tattoo, brand, or mutilate their slaves as a symbol of their dishonored status. The ancient world did not necessarily regard slavery as a permanent condition. In many societies, slaves were allowed to marry free spouses and become members of their owners' families. In ancient Babylonia, for instance, freeborn women and male slaves frequently married, and their children were considered to be free. Access to freedom tended to be far easier under ancient slavery than it was under Colonial American slavery. In Greece and Rome, emancipation of slaves was not uncommon, and former slaves carried little stigma from their previous status. Slaves did not necessarily hold the lowest status in their societies. Our society today draws a sharp distinction between slavery and wage labor, such dissimilarity was largely non-existent in the Classical and Ancient world, and slaves could be among the wealthiest or most influential people in a city. The Bible, for example, tells the story of Joseph getting sold into slavery by his brothers. Joseph later became a trusted governor, counselor, and administrator in Egypt. In classical Greece, many educators, scholars, poets, and physicians were in fact slaves. And in ancient Rome, slaves ranged from those who labored in mines to many merchants and urban craftsmen. In the ancient Near East, slaves could conduct trade and business on their own. In certain Muslim societies, rulers were customarily recruited among the sons of female slaves. It appears that ancient slavery was primarily a household institution. Ancient peoples did not breed slaves or subject them to the kind of regimented efficiency found on slave system spun out of Colonial American plantations. It appears that most slaves in Africa, in the Islamic world, and in the New World prior to European colonization worked as farmers or household servants, or served as concubines or eunuchs. They were symbols of prestige, luxury, and power rather than a source of labor. Colonial America’s slavery has its own profound history that has deeply influenced America politically, culturally and socially. Racial slavery originated during the middle Ages, when Christians and Muslims increasingly began to recruit slaves from east, north central, and West Africa. As late as the fifteenth century, slavery did not automatically mean black slavery. Many slaves in southern Europe and the Islamic world came from the Crimea, the Balkans, and the steppes of western Asia. Christian slave traders drew increasingly upon captive black Muslims, known as Moors, and upon slaves purchased on the West African coast or transported across the Sahara Desert. By the eighteenth century, Islamic societies also became dependent almost exclusively on sub-Saharan African slaves. For the first time, the most menial, strenuous, and degrading forms of labor were associated with black slaves. Slavery in Colonial America began with the importation of white European indentured servants and the enslavement of Native Americans and eventually replaced with Africans as the native populations declined through disease. ( Lauber 1913, 108). The first Africans arrived as Indentured Servants through Jamestown, Virginia in 1619. Since 1619 to about 1640, Africans could earn their freedom working as laborers and artisans for the European settlers. (Long Island University, 2005) Africans could become free people and enjoy some of the liberties like other new settlers. By 1640, Maryland became the first colony to institutionalize slavery. In 1641, Massachusetts, in its written legislation, Body of Liberties, stated that “bondage was legal” African workers became chattel slaves who could be bought and exclusively owned by their masters. Capitalism increased the degree of dehumanization and depersonalization implicit in the institution of slavery. (Rochester Institute of Technology, 2005). Within previous historical eras slaves were legally defined as a thing or piece of property. In America he or she also became a form of capital. His or her life was strictly controlled to fill the needs of a highly organized productive system sensitively attuned to the driving forces of competitive free enterprise. American masters were probably no cruel...