Unit 4 reading notes

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West Los Angeles College *

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Oct 30, 2023

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Unit 4 reading notes The Settling of Virginia 3.2 I. The Settling of Virginia: The Development of a Tobacco Economy and the Arrival of the Colony’s First Africans - The English failed in their first attempt to establish a colony in 1585 in Roanoke island - this colony late became north carolina - 1607 they establish a settlement called James town - Natives of Chesapeake resisted English colonization - In time the natives tried to befriend the English but the English Brough disease and sought to enslave them - 1619 first African arrive and the colonies were still under Indian attack II. Colliding cultures - By 1616, 80 percent of all English immigrants that arrived in Jamestown had perished - 1614 the marriage of Pocahontas, the daughter of Chief Powhatan, to John Rolfe eased relations with the Powhatan - Within fifteen years American colonists were exporting over 500,000 pounds of tobacco per year. Within forty, they were exporting fifteen million. - tobacco caused an economic boom for europeans - Virginia would later become the United States - In 1619 the Virginia Company established the House of Burgesses, a limited representative body composed of white landowners that first met in Jamestown. That same year, a Dutch slave ship sold 20 Africans to the Virginia colonists. Southern slavery was born. III. The first African in James town - The Africans’ arrival would not only change the course of Virginia history but the course of what would become the United States of America - African Slaves enabled the growth of a new landowning middle class IV. The peopling of Maryland colony - In the 1660s, less than 25% of Maryland’s bound laborers were enslaved Africans. By 1680 the number had increased to 33% and by the early 1700s, three quarters of laborers were enslaved African

- 300 slaves arrived each year - From the beginning, the Maryland population was religiously, socially and racially diverse - in 1640 Maryland adopted the head-right system that Virginia had instituted earlier. - While interested in establishing a refuge for Catholics who were facing increasing persecution in Anglican England, the Calverts were also interested in creating profitable estates - Indentured laborers, mostly white, dominated the Maryland workforce in the 17th century - As the seventeenth century closed there were far fewer enslaved Africans in Maryland than in Virginia. 3.3 I. Tightening the bonds of slavery - In the early years of slavery, especially in Virginia and Maryland, the distinction between indentured servants and slaves was initially unclear. - 1643 a law was passed in Virginia the made it clear women had di ﬃ cult agricultural labor - the law was an attempt to distinguish white from African women. - The idea was that slave owner should have enough enslaved workers so that their family members won’t have to work - 1660’s. As European servants became scarce and expensive, African labor came to dominate the labor force - Virginia law’s, for example, stated that an enslaved woman’s children inherited the “condition” of their mother. - which meant children were born in slavery II. Slave Life in the Eighteenth Century Chesapeake - Most eighteenth-century Chesapeake Africans, and their native-born descendants, lived and worked as slaves growing tobacco on “quarters” or “plantations” in the eastern part of Virginia although some worked in forgers or mills - As plantation sizes increased, 40% or more of enslaved people lived in quarters away from the home plantation and the slave owner’s direct supervision - By the end of the eighteenth century, the Chesapeake landscape was a network of large and small plantations. Although many planters on Maryland’s western shore still held fewer than a dozen enslaved people 3.4

I. Africans in the Low Country - the Carolina colony essentially imported a preexisting slave system from the Caribbean in the late seventeenth century - King Charles II of England chartered the Carolina colony in 1663 and it quickly developed a thriving economy based on African, African-American, and Native American slave labor - In 1712, Carolina split into two colonies, North and South Carolina - 20 to 30% of the settlers were Africans of diverse ethnic origins - As the eighteenth century opened Africans in South Carolina numbered 2,444, making up 75% of the total population. Within thirty years, there were 20,000 Africans, out-numbering Europeans 2:1. This was still the case in 1740. II. Rice Cultivation and Slavery in the Low Country - 1750 second wave of African slave was Brough to Carolina and Georgia - Traders acquired and sold Africans from this region because they came from rice growing cultures and brought with them technological and agricultural skills that were crucial to developing a thriving rice plantation system in the Low Country. - Africans introduced sophisticated soil and water management techniques - levees, ditches, culverts, floodgates, and drains - all the di ff erent irrigation system that were introduced and constructed - In the ten years following the Stono Rebellion, a 1739 slave uprising near Charleston that resulted in the deaths of more than two dozen whites - They fear of more slave rebellions because they rely to much on slave labor for their cultivation skills - Rice cultivation and processing were mainly women’s work. - African women brought three rice cultivation techniques to Low Country plantations - Enslaved women pressed the rice seeds into the muddy ground with their heels. Afterwards men called “trunk minders” flooded the fields to encourage seed germination - the technique used to plant the rice - enslaved women pounded about 44 pounds of rice a day, cumulatively millions of pounds of rice for export - they pound more rice than in their home land - After they [slaves] finished “their required day’s work, they were given as much land as they could handle on which they planted corn, potatoes, tobacco, peanuts, sugar, watermelons, and pumpkins and bottle pumpkins… They plant for themselves on Sundays…They sell their own crops and buy some necessary things…” wrote Johan Bolzius of low country slaves in the mid-18 th century (Bolzius 1750:259–60, Translated and edited by Loewald, Starika and Taylor, 1957). - low country slaves were given the opportunity to gain profit from their personal crops.

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This freedom was later banned - After completing their tasks for the slave master, the African men hunted, fished, worked as carpenters and in other trades to earn money. The women washed clothes, prepared food and cooked for their families, raised chickens and vegetables to eat and to sell. These activities allow the Africans to participate in trade and cash sales Conclusion By late eighteenth century, before the colonies convulsed during the American Revolution, racial slavery had become rooted in the soil and law of colonies stretching from Georgia north to New England. But nowhere was slavery more important to British North American economy than in the Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland, and the Low Country colonies of South Carolina and Georgia. The extraordinary wealth African and African-American slaves produced for white plantation owners not only created an economic aristocracy, but a political ruling class who also cherished the liberty and freedom slave labor made possible for them.