INDRAPRASTHA COLLEGE FOR

WOMEN

Assignment

Name: Swetlana
Paper: DSC- 3 History of the USA: Independence
to Civil War
Roll No.- 23/HIS/64
Reg No.- 233510259674
Ques: Analyse the role and contribution
of indigenous tribe, indentured labour,
and the slaves to the consolidation of
the colonial economy in America.

The fundamental purpose of British development and

colonization in North America was to acquire land and
resources in order to generate exports that could be sold
profitably on the expanding trans-Atlantic market.
Profitable production required a large amount of labour.
Access to land was critical in seventeenth-century
colonial America. English settlers thought that land was
the foundation of liberty and economic freedom.
Owning land provided men authority over their own
labour as well as the right to vote in most colonies. Free
settlers were enticed by the prospect of quick access to
land, and freedom dues that included land prompted
potential immigrants to accept contracts as indentured
slaves. However, without labour, land has little value.
Because European emigrants did not come to America
with the intention of working other people's land (save
for indentured servants).
As Europeans began to settle in North America, a
demand for labour arose to build roads, homes, railway
tracks, cultivate crops, and so on. The colonists
attempted to meet this demand for labour by employing
three broad types of labour, primarily native Americans,
indentured white servants, and African slaves. These
groups played an important part in the expansion of the
colonial economy.

Indigenous Tribes
Of course, land in North America was already
populated. And the entrance of English settlers caused
the worst catastrophe in the history of the indigenous
peoples of eastern North America. The English
colonists were primarily concerned in displacing
Indians, settling on their lands, and organizing their
labour. Many eastern Native Americans welcomed the
newcomers at first, or at least their commodities, which
they valued for their practical benefits. Weaved cloth,
metal kettles, iron axes, fishhooks, and weapons were
swiftly incorporated into Native life. Metal
commodities influenced European agricultural, hunting,
and culinary customs. After indigenous tribes lost wars
with the Europeans, many of them were kidnapped as
slaves by the colonists. The colonists rapidly learned,
however, that the Indians, or Native Americans, would
not be cooperative labourers confined to fixed abodes.
Labor power alternatives had to be discovered. For a
variety of causes, Africans surpassed American Indians
as the primary enslaved group in the Americas. In
certain situations, warfare and illness entirely wiped out
indigenous populations. Furthermore, indentured
laborers from Europe and African slaves were better
trained and equipped than indigenous tribes for the
different labour needs that evolved in the colonies.

INDENTURED LABOUR
The concept of indentured slavery arose from a need for
inexpensive labour. The first settlers quickly found they
had a lot of land to care for but no one to care for it. The
colonial economy relied heavily on indentured servants.
Indentured servants voluntarily gave up their freedom
for a set period of time (typically five to seven years) in
exchange for passage to America, accommodation,
board, lodging, and freedom dues. These servants, like
slaves, could be bought and sold, could not marry
without their owner's consent, were subject to physical
punishment, and their need to work was enforced by the
courts. The life of an indentured servant was tough and
constrained, but it was not slavery. Unlike slaves, these
servants may expect to be released from bondage after
fulfilling the terms of their contracts. Some of their
rights were guaranteed by legal regulations. The
contract of an indentured servant could be prolonged as
punishment for disobeying the law, such as fleeing or,
in the case of female workers, becoming pregnant.
When indentured servants completed their tenure as
laborers, they received a stipend known as "freedom
dues" and became free members of society;
nevertheless, the freedom dues were sometimes so
meagre that recipients were unable to acquire land and
other resources. Many of these servants found life in the
New World to be less appealing than they had
anticipated. Many employers who used indentured
slaves frequently complained about employees fleeing,
not working diligently, or being belligerent. Convinced
that England was overpopulated, the British
government encouraged unemployed people to emigrate
to America. With England's rise to commercial and
industrial primacy by the end of the seventeenth
century, the official attitude gradually changed,
culminating in the enactment by Parliament in 1765 of a
law prohibiting skilled workers from emigrating, but
encouraging the poor, untrained, and criminal class to
immigrate to the colonies. Attracted by higher salaries
and the chance to start their own business or buy a farm,
talented workers continued to flood into the colonies
until Britain declared war. Convicts transported from
Britain supplied another supply of bound labour in the
colonies. This practice was formalized by a
Parliamentary ordinance in 1718, which authorized
seven-year periods of slavery for those convicted of
lesser crimes and fourteen years for those convicted of
felonies punishable by death. As the colonies continued
to expand, the demand for labour increased, as did the
expense of indentured servants. Many landowners were
likewise alarmed by newly emancipated servants'
demand for land. The colonial aristocracy recognized
the problems associated with indentured slavery.
Landowners began to resort to African slaves as a more
profitable and ever-renewable source of labour, and the
transition from indentured servants to racial slavery
began.

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. 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. Soon restrictions on slave
mobility, along with a harsh system of discipline, were
written into the "Black Codes" of all the Southern
colonies. 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 also
brought special skills and husbandry knowledge for
crops such as rice. Their innovations increased the
efficiency and profitability of cultivation. 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 to
harvest tobacco crops. 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, they 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 Atlantic slave trade. Even
though slavery was not a prevalent institution in the
North, 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, 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. In 1660, Charles II created the Royal
African Company to trade in slaves and African goods.
Between 1672 and 1713, the company bought 125,000
captives on the African coast. Slaves everywhere
resisted their exploitation and attempted to gain
freedom through armed uprisings and rebellions, such
as the Stono Rebellion and the New York Slave
Insurrection of 1741. Other less violent means of
resistance included sabotage, running away, and slow
labour paces on the plantations. 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.