by John Brant

Created on: February 28, 2010

Although most people think of the South when they think of slavery in the United States, during the colonial period, very little debate occurred regarding the morality of slavery in the English colonies.  Slavery first appeared in the 1600s in Virginia, and took hold in the South, where it became the main labor system.  However, during the colonial period, every future state allowed slavery, and New England traders actively participated in the slave trade by transporting slaves from Africa and the Caribbean to the British North American colonies.  The abolition of the slave trade and slavery in many states shows just how much the Enlightenment had changed beliefs in what would become the United States, and how the generation of the Revolution struggled to live up to an ideology that stated their new country would be founded on the concept of freedom.

Slavery existed in Europe for centuries before coming to the future United States.  Beginning in the 1300s, the Portuguese took slaves from their voyages of exploration down the coast of Africa and sold them in Europe.  With the beginnings of colonization in the Americas, all of the great European powers turned to slavery to provide labor for sugar plantations, mostly in the Caribbean and Brazil.  Only with the Jamestown Colony’s discovery of the profitability of tobacco did slavery begin to appear in North American British colonies.

As depicted in film, the media, and drawing the most attention from scholars, one would think that slavery was a uniquely African experience.  However, Native Americans routinely ended up as laborers on plantations or in the houses of people in the North.  At the eve of the Revolution, 40% of the slaves in South Carolina (the only colony with a slave majority) came from Native American tribes.  The servant Tituba (of the Salem Witch Trials) has traditionally appeared as a Native American slave, although her ethnicity remains open to debate.  Both North and South used both African and Native American slaves regularly until the Revolution.

No one is sure when slavery began in what is the United States.  Although we know that the first Africans arrived in 1619 in a Dutch ship, their status remains debated.  These first Africans may have arrived as slaves, or as indentured servants.  Slavery did not become recognized by the law until a Virginia court ruled in 1654 that John Casor was to be held as property for life

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