Forms of Labour in Colonial America
Indigenous Tribes
Indentured Labour
Slavery
The primary goal of British expansion and colonization in North America was
to acquire land and resources to produce exports to sell for profit on the
growing trans-Atlantic market. Profitable production demanded significant
labour resources. The elite and entrepreneurial western Europeans who
settled in the North America sought labourers to cultivate cash crops. mine
for precious metals, tend livestock, provide domestic service, and work in
various artisanal trades. The labour sources they drew from to fill this demand
included European indentured servants and convicts, free and enslaved
indigenous people in the Americas, and enslaved Africans purchased
through the developing trans-Atlantic slave trade. This meant that early
colonial labour forces in the Americas were often a mix of Europeans,
American Indians, and Africans.
Access to land was an important factor in seventeenth-century colonial
America. Land. English settlers believed, was the basis of liberty and
economic freedom. Owning land gave men control over their own labour
and, in most colonies, the right to vote. The promise of immediate access to
land lured free setlers, and 'freedom dues' that included land persuaded
potential immigrants to sign contracts as indentured servants. Land in
America also became a way for the king to reward relatives and allies. Each
colony was launched with a huge grant of land from the crown, either to a
company or to a private individual known as a proprietor. Some such grants,
if taken literally, stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. Land wasa
source of wealth and power for colonial officials and their favourites, who
acquired enormous estates. However without labour land would have little
value. Since European emigrants did not come to America intending to work
the land of others (except in the case oí indentured servants).
John Smith, one of the first leaders of Jamestown said that the emigrants
"preferred the prospect for gold rather than farm. They "would rather starve
than work." However the colonists slowly realized that for the colonies to
Survive it would have to abandon the search for gold, grow its own food, and
find a marketable commodity. It would also have to attract more setlers. The
spread of tobacco farming proaduced a dispersed society with few towns
and little social unity.
The early Colonial American society based
was on primarily farming. fishing.
maritime activities, and a few small industries. Even as late as 1789 America
was a nation of farmers. As the Europeans started settling in North America a
demand for labour arose for building roads, homes, railway tracks; cultivate
crops; mining, fishing, domestic work etc. The colonists tried to quell this
demand for labour by adopting three broad forms of labour, chiefly - Native
Americans, indentured white servants and African slaves. The role of these
groups in the growth of the colonial economy has been significant.
Small-scale industries that were set up by the colonists required skilled and
semi-skilled workers. Depending on the availability of natural resources, the
colonies estiabished glass industries, brick and tile yards, and potters' klins:
bog ores proved suitable for making castings and hollow ware, and rock ores
fed furnace and forge industries. A flourishing lumber industry supported
related activities such as shipbuilding and the production of naval stores and
potash. New England's white pine provided masts, yards, and spars for the
Royal Navy: the white oak of the Middle Colonies supplied valuable stock for
the cooperage industry, and other hard woods of that area were used in the
cabinetmakers trade; in the South, yellow pine was the principal source of
tar, pitch, and turpentine. Fishing and whaling required substantial fleets and
thousands of sailors.
Indigenous tribe
Land in North America, of course, was already occupied. And the amival of
English settlers presented the native inhabitants of eastern North America with
the greatest crisis in their history. Unlike the Spanish, English colonists did not
call themselves "conquerors." They wanted land, not dominion over the
existing population. They were chiefly interested in displacing the Indians and
settling on their land, not intermarrying with them, organizing their labour, or
making them subjects of the crown.
The English exchanged goods with the native population, and Indians often
travelled through colonial settlements. Fur traders on the frontiers of
settlement sometimes maried Indian women. partly as a way of gaining
access to native societies and the kin networks essentfial to economic
relationships. Most English settlers, however, remained obstinately separate
from their Indian neighbours. European nations justified colonization, in part
with the argument that they were bringing Christianity-without which true
freedom was impossible-to Native Americans.
Many eastern Native Americans initially welcomed the newcomers, or at
least their goods, which they appreciated for its practical advantages. Items
like woven cloth, metal kettles, iron axes, fishhooks, hoes, and guns were
quickly integrated into Native life. Natives also displayed a great desire for
goods like colourful glass beads and copper ornaments that could be
incorporated into their religioUs ceremonies.
As Native Americans became more and more integrated into the Atlantic
economy, subtle changes took place in their way of life. European metal
goods chonged their farming, hunting, and cooking practices. Men devoted
more time to hunting beavers for burgeoning fur trading. Older skills
deteriorated as the use of European products expanded, and alcohol
became increasingly common and disruptive. Natives learned to bargain
effectively and to supply items that the Europeans desired. Later observers
would describe this trade as one in which Indians exchanged valuable
commodities like furs and animal skins for worthless European trinkets, this way
the European economy profited more than it should have.
The colonists tried to enslave indigenous tribes, many of them were taken as
slaves after the tribes lost battles with the Europeans. However the colonists
quickly discovered that the Indians, the Native Americans who had settled
the continent centuries before the Europeans, would not make compliant
workers confined to settled abodes. The alternatives for labour power were to
be found.
For a variety of reasons, Africans replaced American Indians as the main
population of enslaved people in the Americas. In some cases, warfare and
disease eliminated the indigenous popuations completely. In other cases,
such as in South Carolina, Virginia, and New England, the need for alliances
with American Indian tribes, cOupled with the availability of enslaved Africans
at affordable prices, resulted in a shift away from American Indian slavery.
Moreover, indentured labourers from Europe and Africans slaves were skilled
and better equipped, than the indigenous tribes, for the various labour
requirements that arose in the colonies
Indentured Labour
Indentured servants first arrived in America in the
decade following the
settlement of Jamestown by the Virginia
Company in 1607. The idea of
indentured servitude was born of a need for
cheap labour. The earliest
settlers soon realized that they had lots of land to care for, but no
one to care
for it. As passage fee to the Colonies was
expensive for all but the wealthy,
the Virginia Company
developed the system of indentured servitude to
attract workers. Indentured servants became vital to the colonial
economy.
The timing of the Virginia colony was ideal. The Thirty Year's War had left
Europe's economy depressed, and many skilled and unskiled labourers were
without work. A new life in the New World offered a
glimmer of hope. Almost
one-half to two-thirds of the immigrants who came to the American
colonies
arived as indentured servants.
European settlers who went to the colonies had to pay for their own passage
fee in order to be considered free persons once
they reached America.
These settlers would then quickly acquire land and build a life for themselves
in the new lands. In the seventeenth
century, however, almost two-thirds of
English settlers came to North America as indentured servants. Indentured
servants were those who voluntarily surendered their freedom for a
specified
time (usually five to seven years) in exchange for passage to America, room,
board, lodging and freedom dues. Just like slaves, these servants could also
be bought and sold, they could not mary without the permission of their
owner, were subject to physical punishment, and their obligation to labour
was enforced by the courts. While the life of an indentured servant was harsh
and restrictive, it wasn't slavery. Unlike slaves, these servants could look
forward to a release from bondage once they had completed the term
specified in their contracts. There were laws that protected some of their
rights. But their life was not an easy one, and the punishments meted out to
people who wronged were harsher than those for non-servants. An
indentured servant's contract could be extended as punishment for breaking
a law, such as running away, or in the case of female servants, becoming
pregnant.
Many historians argue that they were better off than those new immigrants
who came freely to the country. Their contract may have included at least 25
acres of land, a year's worth of con, arms, a cow and new clothes. Some
servants did rise to become part of the colonial elite, but for the majority of
indentured servants that survived the treacherous journey by sea and the
harsh conditions of life in the New World, satisfaction was a modest life as a
freeman in a burgeoning colonial economy.
Once the indentured servants had completed their ferm as labourers they
would receive a payment known as "freedom dues" and become free
members of society. However, indentured servitude was not a guaranteed
route to economic autonomy, because of the high death rate many servants
did not live till the end of their terms. Freedom dues were sometimes so
meagre that they did not enable recipients to acquire land and other
resources. Many of these servants often found the reality of life in the New
World less appealing than they had anticipated. Many employers, who
employed indentured servants, constantly complained of servants running
away, not working diligently or being unruly.
Convinced that England was overpopulated, the British govemment
encouraged emigration to America of the unemployed poor and vagrant
class and permitted skilled workers to go to the colonies. Gradually, with
England's rise to commercial and industrial primacy by the end of the
seventeenth century, the official attitude changed, culminating in the
enactment by Parliament in 1765 of a law forbidding the emigration of skilled
workers. This was followed in turn by statutes of 1774, 1781, and 1782
forbidding the exportation of textile machinery, plans, or models. Toward the
poor, the untrained, the vagrants, and the criminal class the government felt
no such inhibitions; they were encouraged to immigrate to the colonies if
someone, somewhere, would foot the bill for the passage.
The importation of skilled artisans continued virtually unabated throughout
the colonial years. Nor was the source confined to England. Swedes came to
the Delaware, Walloons and Dutch to settle New Amsterdam. To Virginia
came Polish workers for the naval stores industry, French to cultivate
vineyards, Italians to set up glassworks, and Dutch to erect sawmills. Georgia
recruited ltalians for silk culture; emigrants from the Germans shipped out in
large numbers to become farm workers and ultimately owners., to labour in
the burgeoning iron industry, and to produce naval stores. Irish flax workers
developed the linen industry in New England as well as on Maryland's Eastern
shore. The Scotch Irish worked the far reaches of Pennsylvania and the
Shenandoah Valley. In the lower South, sizable forces of Greeks and Italians
were transported to British-controlled Eost Florida.
Attracted by higher wages and the opportunity to set tip an independent
business or to acquire a homestead, skilled workers continued streaming into
the colonies, down to the moment of war with Britain. In the post-war years,
as immigration resumed, American agents scoured English fowns fo persuade
trained mechanics to emigrate in large numbers.
The transportation of convicts from Britain provided another source of bound
labour in the colonies. This practice, stepped up in the latter half of the
seventeenth century, was spelled out by a Parliamentary act in 1718
authorizing seven-year terms of servitude for those convicted of lesser crimes
and fourteen years for those guilty of offenses punishable by death. An
estimated 10.000 convicts were sent from Old Bailey alone between 1717
and 1775, with double that number entering the single province of Maryland.
Other convicts were shipped to irginia and the West Indies.
With continuous expansion of colonies, the demands for labour grew, so did
the cost of indentured servants. Many landowners also felt threatened by
newly freed servants demand for land. The colonial elite realized the
problems of indentured servitude. Landowners turned to African slaves as a
more profitable and ever-renewable source of labour and the shift from
indentured servants to racial slavery had begun. Most of the indentured
servants, retumed home after their contracts expired
Slavery
In 1619 the first black Africans came to Virginia. With no slave laws in place,
they were initially treated as indentured servants. That is they were treated as
bound servants and were freed when their terms expired and given pretty
much the same opportunities for freedom dues as the white indentured
servants. Sometime in the 1640s, the practice began of selling imported
blacks as servants for life. In short, this form of de facto slavery preceded
legalized slavery. Slave laws were soon passed- in Massachusetts in 1641 and
Virginia in 1661 and any small freedoms that might have existed for blacks
before, were taken away. In the 1660s and 1670s statutes in Virginia and
Maryland gave slavery its formal distinguishing features, an inheritable status
of servitude for life. Soon restrictions on slave mobility, along with a harsh
system of discipline, were written into the "Black Codes" of all the Southern
colonies.
Although the practices of indentured servitude and the enslavement of
Native Americans was already in place, planters in the southerm British
colonies quickly came to favour enslaved Africans.
The principle cash crop harvested by the South Carolina slave population in
the early 18th century was rice, a crop which probably originated in
Madagascar and had been introduced into South Carolina in 1694. Once
rice was established as the principle cash crop of South Carolina, it brought
unprecedented wealth and prosperity to planters and the region. By 1850, a
South Carolinian rice planter, Joshua John Ward, was the lagest American
slaveholde, with an estate that held 1,130 slaves and gave him the title.
"King of the Rice Planters."
It is no coincidence that white planters in the region starting importing African
slaves when rice cultivation was introduced into the South, as the first English
planters in South Carolina knew little about rice cultivation. Not only were
Africans well suited to tropical climates, they aso brought special skils and
husbandry knowledge for crops such as rice, which the British found useful.
The planters relied on the expertise of their African slaves imported from the
Rice Coast. For instance, enslaved Africans showed planters how to propertly
dyke the marshes. periodically flood the rice fields, and use sweet grass
baskets for milling the rice quicker than wooden paddles. These innovations
increased the efficiency and profitability of cultivation. In later yecrs,
water-powered mills, also helped expand rice cutivation in the South. All this
evidently shows how important the role of slaves was to the colonial
economy of North America. as they were not just a form of cheap
exploitative labour.
During the later part of the 17th century, the economic development of the
Chesapeake region revolved around tobacco cultivation required intensive
labour. At first, Chesapeake farmers hired indentured servants-men and
women from England who sold their labour for a period of five to seven years
in exchange for passage to the American coloniesto harvest tobacco
crops. However, by the 1680s, fluctuating tobacco prices and the growing
scarcity of land in the region made the Chesapeake less appealing to men
and women willing to indenture themselves. The scarcity of indentured
servants meant that the price of their labour contracts increased. and
Chesapeake farmers began to look for alternative, cheaper sources of
bonded labour.
As a result, many Chesapeake farmers turned toward imported African slaves
to fulfil their desire for cheap labour. Although African chattel slavery was a
more expensive investment that white indentured servitude., it guaranteed a
lifetime service of free labour. As the demand for Chesapeake cash crops
continued to grow, planters began to increasingly invest in the Allantic slave
trade.
Slaves that lived in the North were often domestic servants to small farmers
and rural ironworks. Unlike in the South, northern farms were not large-scale
enterprises that focUsed on producing a single cash crop: instead they were
often smaller, more agriculturally diversified enterprises that required fewer
labourers. Hence, the need for enslaved labour gradually dwindled
especially as rapid sil depletion and the growth of industry in northern cities
atracted many rural northerners to wage labour.
Even though slavery was not a prevalent institution in the North, the
commercial urban centres that sprang up in these colonies meant that most
northerners had a vested stake in ensuring that American slavery flourished in
the South. This is particularly true after the advent of the cotton gin, which
supplied the North with the surplus of raw cotton necessary to produce
finished goods for export. Northern industry and commerce relied on southern
cash crop production; therefore, while slavery was actively abolished in the
North, most northerners were content to allow slavery to flourish in the
southern states. Indeed, it wasn't until later arguments over the admission and
representation of states in the union and the threat of southern states
overpowering their northern counterparts because of their higher slave
populations that many northerners began to oppose the expansion of
southern slavery.
Slavery and the African slave trade quickly became a building block of the
colonial economy and an integral part of expanding and developing the
British commercial empire in the Atlantic world.
The transport of slaves to the American colonies accelerated in the second
half of the 17th century. In 1660, Charles I created the Royal African
Company to trade in slaves and African goods. His brother, James Il, led the
company before ascending the throne. Under both these kings, the Royal
African Company enjoyed a monopoly to transport slaves to the English
colonies. Between l672 and 1713, the company bought 125,000 captives on
the African coast, losing 20% of them to death on the Middle Passage, the
journey from the African coast to the Americas.
In the North American colonies, the importation of African slaves was
directed mainly southward, where extensive tobacco, rice, and later, cotton
plantation economies, demanded extensive labour forces for cultivation.
Slaves everywhere resisted their exploitation and attempted to gain freedom
through armed uprisings and rebellions, such as the Stono Rebelion and the
New York Slave Insurection of 1741. Other less violent means of resistance
included sabotage, running away, and slow labour paces on the plantations.
Unlike their counterparts in the Caribbean, however, American slaves never
successfully overthrew the system of slavery in the colonies and would not
gain freedom until legislative decree made after the United States Civil War.
Slavery was outlawed in the USA after the American Civil War but the
repercussions of this cruel form of labour are still felt by the descendants of
the African slaves in form of racism and evident economic divide between
the black and white populations of North America.
Richard Moris
INDENTURED LABOUR
On August 5, 1774, just a month before the First Continental
Congress convened in Philadelphia, the ship Needham landed in
New York from Newry, England, Captain Wiliam Cunningham,
master. The ship's cargo was white indentured servants. On arrival
they proiested to ihe authorities that they had been kidnapped in
Ireland and had suffered "bad usage" on the voyage across the
Atlantic. Whereupon the city fathers ordered them discharged.
The servants had gained their freedom, but Cunningham nurseda
grudge, and later, as the notorious provost marshal of the British
army in America, he confined captured Patriots to atrocious prison
ships and jails. The incident of the Needham's cargo dramatizes
how the early American labor market was supplied.
