In 1619, the first 20 Africans arrived on a Dutch boat in Jamestown, a
slave trader exchanged them for food. The price tag for an African male
was around $27, while the salary of a European laborer was about seventy cents
per day. The English settlers treated these captives as indentured servants... The
difficulty in using any other group of people as forced servants, led to the
relegation of Blacks into slavery. In all,
about 10–12 million Africans were transported to the Western Hemisphere.
Massachusetts was the first colony to legalize slavery in 1641. Other
colonies followed suit by passing laws that passed slavery on to the children
of slaves. By 1700 there were 25,000 slaves in the American colonies, about 10%
of the population. The great majority of slaves lived on southern
tobacco or rice plantations.
Daily life for
a slave was incredibly difficult. They worked from sunrise until sunset. Even
small children and the elderly were not exempt from these long work hours. They
were generally allowed a day off on Sunday, and on infrequent holidays such as
Christmas or the Fourth of July. The diet supplied by slaveholders was
generally poor, they rarely had fish or meat and slaves often supplemented it
by tending small plots of land or fishing. Many slave owners did not provide
adequate clothing either, many slaves only wore rags so slave mothers often
worked to clothe their families at night after long days of labor. Shelter
provided by slave owners was also meager: many slaves lived in small stick
houses with dirt floors, these shelters had cracks in the walls that let in
cold and wind, and had only thin coverings over the windows. Again, slave
owners supplied only the minimum needed for survival; they were primarily
concerned with keeping their financially valuable slaves alive and working rather
than providing for their comfort, health, or safety.
However, slave
owners usually allowed slaves to marry, because any children from the marriage
would add to their wealth. According to law, a child took on the legal status
of its mother; a child born to a slave mother would in turn become a slave,
even if the father was free. But masters could break up marriages and separate
families as they wished… The slave separated countless husbands, wives, parents
and children. Slaveholders cared little about the kindred bonds of slaves, and
tore families apart by selling slaves for profit.
In the
Northern states, the revolutionary spirit did help African Americans. Beginning
in the 1750s, there was widespread sentiment during the American Revolution
that slavery was a social evil (for the country as a whole and for the whites)
that should eventually be abolished...
Source :
http://www.infoplease.com/spot/bhmtimeline.html
http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/nchist-antebellum/5602
Source :
http://www.infoplease.com/spot/bhmtimeline.html
http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/nchist-antebellum/5602
