Indentured Servitude Essay

Words: 526
Pages: 3

Before slavery was established, servitude was the source of labor. Indentured servants were the workers in servitude, and they weren’t treated like property. Indentured servants would usually be men and women who would agree to work for their “owner” for certain amount of time till they paid off their debt from transportation to the ‘New World’. Their bosses would treat them fairly and usually provide food, clothing, and shelter along with transportation. When slavery became involved in society, race was one of major discriminations. In the Chesapeake society, the Caucasian population created boundaries between themselves and the African people. In this area, tobacco became the main cash crop. Tobacco was cheap to grow, required very minimum …show more content…
The South Carolina region came across rice, which soon became a cash crop as well. The only problem with rice as a crop was that the white indentured servants couldn’t withstand the physical requirements need. This is when African slaves came to the rescue, since they held two major advantages in cultivating rice over the white servants. The first major advantage was the immunity to the diseases that came from the work environment like malaria and yellow fever. The Africans had an immunity to these diseases since they were common in their homeland. The other main advantage the slaves had over the servants was their experience. Rice was a common crop in Africa so many of the slaves had expertise in production of the rice, which made them a better fit over the naïve indentured servants. Another crop that required a slave driven labor force would be sugarcane. In the Caribbean, sugarcane also became a popular crop, even though it was never a cash crop. Sugarcane was an enormous lucrative crop that revolutionized the economy of the region. The labor needed for these crops was over three times the amount of labor needed for tobacco, which caused the accumulation of many slaves being brought to the islands. This migration of over 1.6 million slaves was called the Atlantic Slave Trade, which converted the islands to a predominantly slave populated