The origins of slavery can be traced back much further than the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century plantations in the southern United States. By the time the English had begun to settle permanent colonies in North America, the Spanish and Portuguese had developed a model of slavery to provide labor for commercial agriculture. This model was critical for the development of slavery in Anglo-America.

The development of the slave trade began with the Portuguese exploration of West Africa, primarily from Senegal to Angola, in the fifteenth century. With funding from Prince Henry, a patron of sciences who devoted his life to sponsoring innovation, the Portuguese sent expeditions to West Africa in hopes of finding gold and, later, an eastern water passage to facilitate trade with Asia. In 1441, captains Antão Gonçalves and Nuno Tristão led a voyage to Cabo Branco (on the Atlantic “bulge” of Africa), returning with gold, ostrich eggs, and twenty slaves, beginning a four-century traffic in Africans across the Atlantic world.

Slavery had existed in Africa prior to the arrival of Europeans, although it did not take the form it would assume in the Western Hemisphere. There, it would become integrally connected to commercial agriculture and result in defining the slave as chattel, or personal property. In the African system, slavery was not generational; a child did not become a slave to his mother's owner. Furthermore, under the African system, slaves were not defined as property and they could rise to positions of influence. Under this system, slavery was not racially prescribed.

To facilitate and increase their African trade, the Portuguese built several fortified outposts along the African coast. One of these posts was Elmina, "the mine," founded in 1482, which became the first exchange point for slaves on the West African mainland. Coastal tribes captured slaves from the African interior and shipped them to these coastal outposts. These journeys were difficult, and it is estimated that 40% of the captured slaves perished before reaching the coast.

Under Portuguese, and later Dutch, control Elmina served as a major trading post for shipping slaves to the Americas. Africans brought people captured in raids and wars to Elmina and other such posts, exchanging them for European goods such as mirrors, knives, cloth, beads, iron, guns, and gunpowder. By the early 1500s, the slave trade was well established. It would grow exponentially, with an estimated 50 million Africans either becoming slaves or dying en route to slave outposts during the 17th and 18th centuries. Of this 50 million, 10-15 million were sent to the New World, primarily South America and the West Indies. However, 400,000 of those slaves landed in North America, primarily at auction blocks in Newport, Rhode Island, and Charleston, South Carolina.

When the Spanish and Portuguese established their own colonies in the Western Hemisphere, they tried to recreate the system of bound labor that had emerged on their Atlantic islands. The most obvious source of such labor was the indigenous peoples. But using native labor was problematic, especially as Indian populations decreased in size in the face of European-borne diseases like smallpox, diphtheria, and tuberculosis, for which the natives had little immunity. In some areas, including various Caribbean islands, the native population vanished entirely.

As a result, planters searching for labor had to find alternatives, which they found in the African slave trade. When the English began to colonize America, they had no experience with slavery. However, as they discovered a marketable crop and realized there was relative unavailability of European-born servants, they turned to slavery. Such a process occurred on the English colony of Barbados, where planters struggled to find a viable export. They eventually found it in sugar cane introduced by Dutch merchants eager to add the crop to their cargos.

The rise of sugar cane cultivation initiated major changes on the island: planters cut down the jungles and turned virtually every inch of land into sugar cultivation. The most successful formed an elite that amassed increasing amounts of land, labor, and wealth. As demand for labor increased, such men first turned to indentured servants—men and some women who were willing to bind their labor for typically four to seven years in return for their passage.

These indentured servants contracted with a merchant or shipmaster for passage to the New World. The merchant or shipmaster then sold the indenture to a buyer in America or the West Indies. During their servitude, individuals received food, shelter, and clothing. Upon completing their terms of service, they were issued "freedom dues," which could include seeds for planting, new clothes, or even land, although this was rare. Newly released indentured servants were free to make their own living in the New World.

Planters were willing enough to use servants, but the sheer brutality of sugar cultivation and the urge to squeeze as much labor out of a servant’s relatively short term of indenture eventually soured the English on indenturing themselves to Barbadian landowners. Moreover, freed servants found it virtually impossible to buy land, since the island’s small surface had been taken over by the large sugar planters. As the supply of servants dwindled, planters looked to slaves. Dutch traders—and later English ones—were happy to oblige. In turn, Barbados and other English West Indies colonies would eventually provide the first regular source of slaves for American mainland planters.

However, horrific conditions on slave voyages limited the number of slaves that arrived on the mainland. These “middle voyage” treks each carried hundreds of African slaves chained by their neck and extremities on the cargo deck. In most cases, the slaves were so crowded in that they had to lay on their back for the entire trip. Some captains allowed the slaves to be washed regularly, but harsher ones kept the slaves captive, laying in their own excrement, for the three-to-six month voyage. These conditions were a breeding ground for disease, and between one and two million slaves died en route to America.

Slavery took a far longer time to develop in England’s first permanent colony, Virginia, than it had in the West Indies. John Smith had hoped to integrate natives into the Jamestown settlement, but his strong-arm tactics caused the natives to regard the infant colony with attitudes ranging from wariness to hostility. Unwilling to enter into any kind of long-term cooperative relationship with the English, the natives certainly did not allow themselves to become English chattel.

Furthermore, these natives of the Eastern Woodlands would prove poor subjects for slavery: their numbers declined in the face of disease; their values of individual autonomy and their agricultural methods did not translate easily into the kinds of collectivized agriculture slavery fostered; they knew the area and could easily escape into the forests; and their extended family networks led to trouble for anyone who might enslave a clan member.

However, by the early 1620s, the tobacco boon made it apparent that a reliable labor source for the back-breaking cultivation was absolutely necessary. Since Indians were unsuitable, and Virginia’s high mortality rates and a skewed sex ratio (males outnumbered females by almost 3:1) meant that finding a major source of labor in one’s children was out of the question, the planters turned to indentured servants from England.

In the earlier part of the seventeenth century, nearly half of England’s population lived at subsistence level, and the island was overpopulated. Some of the nation’s poor were willing to chance life in America, since their prospects at home were so bleak. Virginia’s planters, in turn, were only too happy to buy servants to cultivate their tobacco fields. Indentured servants provided the major source of the colony’s bound labor during the seventeenth century.

Yet servants were not a completely ideal labor source. For one thing, since servants provided labor for only a fixed period, their turnover rate was high. More importantly, their availability became more problematic as the century wore on. After about 1660, England’s population began to level off, and its economy, in the throes of the industrial revolution, proved better able to supply jobs. There was thus less reason for poor, single men and women to hazard their fortunes in America. In addition, the settlement of other American colonies meant that Virginia had to compete in an expanding labor market. Virginians began to have to pay more for the servants they employed. The number of freed servants was proving to be a political and social problem.

People indentured themselves with the hopes of gaining their own land, but by 1676, the opportunities for freed servants to obtain their own title had greatly diminished as wealthier colonists bought up vast amounts of undeveloped land for speculative purposes. In that year, the freedmen’s frustrations boiled over when a series of Indian attacks ravaged Virginia’s western counties.

Nathaniel Bacon, a member of Governor Sir William Berkeley’s council but also a planter whose foreman had been killed in a raid, demanded that the governor commission him to lead a volunteer army against the Indians. Berkeley refused, declared Bacon an outlaw, and started to recruit an army against him. As a result, a civil war broke out. In the end, Berkeley suppressed the rebellion but not before the colony had been thrown into turmoil and a hoard of complaints about how Virginia’s leaders ruled the colony had been given to a royal investigative commission. Bacon’s Rebellion reinforced how dangerous a mass of freed indentured servants might prove.

Meanwhile, a second form of bound labor was slowly taking shape. Since the first few African slaves arrived in Jamestown in 1619, a handful of black servants labored alongside whites. Indeed, small communities of free blacks—some of whom themselves held black slaves—appeared on the Eastern Shore in the mid-seventeenth century, living on seeming equal terms with their white neighbors. English law did not recognize the status of slave, and for decades Virginia’s planters struggled to define the legal status of people who were something other than indentured servants.

Some important court cases in the 1660s pointed toward the future; the results of these cases influenced laws known as the “slave codes” that were designed to control the population of slaves. One of them declared that a slave could not sue for his or her freedom just because he was a Christian (longtime convention had held that Christians could not enslave other Christians). Another decreed that the status of a child followed the status of the mother, since children of mixed lineage usually had a free white father and an enslaved black mother. Furthermore, these slaves and their children were pronounced to be slaves for life. Another important slave code made it illegal to teach slaves to read. With these slave codes, legal racial bias became part of the law in the American colonies.

The colonists were creating a category of people deemed subordinate to others on account not only of their race, but also because they were viewed as heathen and physically brutish by English canons of beauty and culture. Those same characteristics also argued against incorporating a mass of such people into Chesapeake society. The English preferred laborers of their own sort, and during the 1680s Virginia’s slaves constituted only some seven percent of the colony’s population.

Importation of slaves did not reach its height until the eighteenth century, between 1690 and 1720. During most of this period a softness in the international tobacco market forced numbers of planters out of tobacco and into wheat cultivation. Meanwhile, those who managed to prosper gained a comparative advantage by buying slaves, whose labor could be exploited for their entire lifetime. In addition, the average life expectancy was increasing, which meant that the number of workable years a slave could offer was also increasing, thereby reducing the overall cost of slavery.

The West Indies could no longer supply the number of slaves Virginians wanted, but slaves imported straight from Africa were expensive and hard to come by. In 1698, however, Parliament dispensed with the Royal African Company’s monopoly and opened the slave trade to any English merchant. Slave imports soared. By 1720, 20 percent of Virginia’s population consisted of black slaves, and by mid-century, that figure had climbed to over 50 percent. Likewise, in South Carolina, black slaves outnumbered whites 2 to 1. From this southern majority, a miniscule number of former black slaves became landowners and even owned slaves themselves.

Slavery provided planters with a long-term labor supply. Small planters, themselves tobacco farmers and, in many cases, slave owners, had the same interests in maintaining their labor force as the large planters. The “Old Dominion” had transformed from a society with slaves to a slave society.

Copyright 2006 The Regents of the University of California and Monterey Institute for Technology and Education