Racial Slavery Research Paper

Why did the institution of racial slavery develop in every colony in British America?
Slavery has plagued nearly every part of the world, from ancient Greece to modern Mauritania in 2007; countless government bodies have sanctioned the ‘civil relationship in which one person has absolute power over the life, fortune, and liberty of another’. North American slavery began in the early seventeenth century; however the stage was set as early as the fourteenth century, when the wealthy nations of Spain and Portugal began importing captive slaves from Africa to Europe. When these practices extended into the newly conquered Caribbean and West Indies in the mid-1600s, Virginia colonists began to take note of the phenomenal agricultural production
Bacon’s rebellion undoubtedly sent shockwaves across the 13 colonies, but it does not account wholly for the creation of slavery; primarily because the origins of slavery were already deeply seated before the affair. A far more obvious interpretation of history is available as to why slavery was enacted, in necessity. A Virginia lawyer argued in 1772 “Societies of men could not subsist unless there were a subordination of one another… that in this subordination the department of slaves must be filled by some, or there would be a defect in the scale of order”9. This is partly true, subjugation does contribute to the growth of society, every political system features it; subjugation, in this case being the ‘department of slaves’, was necessary. This necessity arose from the Virginia Company’s decision to mainly export tobacco, whilst John Smith and others endeavoured not to rely solely upon one staple product as they attempted to “solve this problem by encouraging silk-manufacturing, glass-manufacturing, soap-manufacturing, the export of timber products, of grain, of wine, of anything but the one thing which proved to be the third necessity for the salvation of Virginia: tobacco”10. For the reliance upon an economy based upon a single staple crop would put the producers at the mercy of the
There was no provided alternative to that of indentured servants; their aspirations and wages could not support the widespread depreciation of value that occurred through cultivation. A budding America needed complete and total subjugation of other peoples in order to build its foundations; whilst that is a harsh reality, it is not unparalleled to the beginnings and heightening of other civilisations, for instance that of Ancient Egypt. Whilst necessity drove each state to consider alternatives, it was however the political actions of Bacon which provided the tipping point of legitimacy. Bacon’s rebellion exemplified the growing problem of the use of indentured servants, as well as their inability to expand their cultivation westward, that solidified legal reform in favour of slavery. The product of the freedman’s frustration led to the shackles of