Here’s a little fun fact about tobacco. It’s pretty damn labor-intensive to grow the damn stuff. Between the planting, the harvesting, and the drying, it just took a lot of work for some jackass back in England to enjoy a good toke on their pipe after lovemaking or whatever. As you can probably imagine, this caused a bit of a problem for the tobacco farmers in Virginia, who really didn’t want to pay out the nose for labor. Luckily, this was the seventeenth century, when solutions that seem terrible today were just hunky dory and peachy keen. While there weren’t many English folks just sitting around, there were a hell of a lot of Native Americans, who didn’t seem to have anything better to do, at least from the point of view of the colonists. Of course, the natives really didn’t agree with this assessment, which is probably why the colonists began forcing them to be slaves.
Now to be fair, it should probably be stated that slavery wasn’t a new concept for the natives living in what is today Virginia. For generations it had been common practice to force people captured in raids and wars to be servants for the victors, so selling such people to the colonists for some sweet ass European goods wasn’t all that much of a leap. However, what was different was the fact that in general, aside from some occasional ritualistic torture, slavery was more of a temporary thing to most Native Americans, with captives slowly integrated fully into the tribe. In comparison, the colonists didn’t really see integration as an option, meaning that natives sold to them as slaves were pretty much screwed for life. Now for some reason, the natives weren’t really down with this system, and as a result they made every effort to escape. However, this really wasn’t the big issue. A much more significant problem as the fact that enslaved natives kept dying pretty regularly from various Old World diseases, which was less than optimal for the tobacco farmers wanting to exploit them.
Though the enslavement of Native Americans continued throughout the seventeenth century, it really didn’t fulfill the overall demand for labor, especially as tobacco plantations began to grow larger. As a result, the colonists shifted to a new strategy, which involved shipping in poor people from England. Now at the time, lots of English folks wanted to get to the New World, what with all the “free” land just waiting to be seized from the quickly dying off natives, but getting a boat ride across the Atlantic was ridiculously expensive. To get around this, rich people began paying the cost of passage in return for around seven years of indentured servitude, which is a nice way of saying people sold themselves into slavery for a temporary period of time. Now though indentured servants did have some rights, for example you just couldn’t up and kill them or something like that, they otherwise could be treated the same as slaves in every other regard, up to and including buying and selling them. This, along with the fact that indentured servants already spoke English, didn’t die as easily from Old World diseases, and really didn’t have anywhere to go if they ran away, gave them a distinct advantage, or a disadvantage depending on from whose perspective you’re looking at it from, compared to Native Americans.
The colonists in Virginia preferred indentured servants so much, that not only did they pay out the nose for them to be shipped across the Atlantic, but the colonial government sweetened the deal by offering free land to any ship captain who brought them across. This made the shipment of indentured servants very lucrative, which of course in no way led to any types of abuse. At first this was mostly just the usual amount of lying and taking advantage of the desperate and illiterate, getting them to sign contracts without fully being aware of what exactly it was they were signing. However, as people began to get wise to such hijinks, the more seedy ship captains found new ways to get their hands on previous human cargo, one of the more successful being the shipment of prisoners.
Now it’s probably important to understand that at this point in history people in England were beginning to question whether or not killing or maiming people was really the best way to deal with lawbreakers. The growth of urban centers like London was leading to a growth in crime, and there are only so many public hangings you can see before you start to wonder about their effectiveness. As a result, prisons were becoming fuller than ever, and though not officially legal, the government was more than happy to turn a blind eye towards shipping convicts across the ocean and forcing them into indentured servitude. After all, out of sight out of mind. Of course there are some people who might say shipping a bunch of convicts across the ocean isn’t really all that much of a solution to anything, but will wait for next week to get into that.
