By the latter half of the seventeenth century, thousands of indentured servants were working their asses off throughout the colonies of Virginia and Maryland. Little better than slaves, their masters controlling every little aspect of their lives, and with only limited legal protection, their fate was completely up the whim of rich asshats who did everything from beat them to rape them. All in all it wasn’t all that great, but at least it had a definitive beginning and end. The answer is of course, as it almost always is, a lack of other opportunities. England, a relatively small island, was rapidly filling up with people, making it increasingly difficult to make a living. In comparison, the New World seemed a wide-open paradise, one which after around seven years of hell, would be opened to anyone willing to pay the price of admittance. By law, those who completed their contracts as indentured servants were entitled to a certain amount of land and enough goods to set themselves up a nice little farm, which all together was a pretty sweet deal given the English colonies had a much higher standard of living then back in England.
Of course, not everybody was really happy with this arrangement. For example, many religious leaders of the time weren’t really down with the idea of enslavement, at least when it concerned other English folks. The big rich plantation owners weren’t really all that down with it either. Not was tobacco a labor intensive crop, but it was also one which just beat the shit out of the soil, requiring a constant shift towards newer and more fertile soils to keep profits as high as possible. Something made more difficult by having to constantly give away nearby land to people they only recently had the right to beat the shit out of for no good reason. The fact that a certain number of these people were formerly convicts as well only added to the general feeling that there had to be a better way, which this being the seventeenth century, of course meant a better way of treating people like shit and exploiting them for profit.
The first African slaves arrived in Virginia in 1619, only twelve years after the founding of Jamestown, when a Portuguese slave ship was blown off course. Not sure what exactly to do with them, the Jamestown settlers decided that they could live out their lives as indentured servants, which seemed the kindest thing to do at the time, you know, other than treating them like human beings. For most of first half of the seventeenth century, African slaves were more of a curiosity than a major source of labor. The second shipment of slaves didn’t even arrive until nearly a decade later in 1628. Though increasingly common in the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, the use of African slaves for tobacco production was seen as prohibitively expensive given the domination of the trade routes to Africa first by the Portuguese and then by the Dutch. However, this began to change in the latter half of the seventeenth century, a shift which was fueled by the creation of the English owned Royal African Company in 1660, which made the importation of African slaves much more affordable, and both Virginia and Maryland outlawing the shipment of convicts to their shores in 1670.
For the plantation owners of Virginia and Maryland, slaves imported Africa was the perfect solution to their labor issue, a perfectly horrific solution. Though at first legally considered indentured servants, few if any Africans could read or write English, meaning it was ridiculously easy to exploit them and basically force them into a permanent life of indentured servitude. Not being from England, there were also fewer busybody religious types complaining about how they were treated, meaning their owners could feel free to really let themselves go when it came to beatings, rapes, and other such monstrous behaviors. As a result, the number of African slaves in Virginia and Maryland rose from less than 600 in 1640 to some 28,000 by 1700. As the practice became more normalized, the pretense that what was going on was anything but slavery fell away. Virginia formally legalized the enslavement of Africans in 1661, followed by Maryland in 1664. In both colonies, the status of children was tied to the status of their mothers, meaning unlike indentured servants, the children of African slaves were automatically slaves themselves. Soon after, further laws were put in place, barring Africans from moving freely, gathering together, or owning firearms. Whippings became much more common. By the end of the 1600s, any and all rights Africans might have had were completely stripped away, leaving them property rather than people, no different than livestock. A slave owner could literally beat their slave to death in the middle of the town square with no consequence other than perhaps a fine for making a mess. It was the beginning of a terrible system, one which would eventually tear the United States apart and still reverberates to this day.
Now to be fair to what was going on along the Chesapeake Bay, this was not a new or unheard of practice for the time. Most civilizations around the globe at the time practiced some type of slavery. What made the African slave trade different was the sheer distances involved. Historically speaking, slavery was a fairly localized affair. Though various peoples might be enslaved, it was not uncommon to see similar looking people walking around all free and whatnot, which made it rather hard not to question the ethics of such arrangements over time. Even in the case of Native Americans, though viewed by Europeans as inferior, the fact that multiple opportunities existed to interact with non-enslaved natives created a sense that enslavement was not the norm. The same could not be said of African slaves. Shipped across the Atlantic to lands completely devoid of any people like them that weren’t slaves, it was frighteningly easy for those who purchased them to assume that such an arrangement was part of the natural order of things, even to the point that they were able to completely remove all sense of those they enslaved being fellow human beings.
