Slavery, Indentured Service & Colonial Resistance · Grade 7 Social Studies

Part 1 · Indentured servitude, and what it was not

Perhaps half of all Europeans who came to the mainland colonies in the seventeenth century arrived as indentured servants. The bargain was explicit: a merchant or planter paid the passage, and in exchange the servant worked without wages for a fixed term, commonly four to seven years, after which came freedom dues — often clothing, tools, sometimes land. The contract was written, registered and enforceable in court by both parties.

The conditions were often brutal. Servants could be beaten, sold on to another master, and had years added for running away or for a pregnancy. Many died before the term ended, particularly in the Chesapeake, where disease killed newcomers in appalling numbers. Nobody should read indenture as mild.

The supply of servants also explains the timing of the shift. English wages rose and population growth slowed in the later seventeenth century, so fewer people were desperate enough to sign away years of their lives, and those who did could demand better terms. At the same time the Royal African Company lost its monopoly in 1698 and the price of enslaved people fell. Planters facing a tightening market for one kind of labour and a cheapening market for another chose, and the law followed the choice.

But three things distinguished it absolutely from what slavery became. It ended. It was entered by contract rather than imposed by capture. And it was not inherited — the servant's children were born free. Each of those three protections was removed, by law, for Africans and their descendants over the following decades, and watching them go one at a time is the clearest way to see that the system was made rather than found.

Part 2 · Eighty years of statute

The decisive law came in 1662. Virginia's assembly declared that a child's condition followed that of the mother — in the Latin formula, *partus sequitur ventrem*. English common law had held the opposite, that status followed the father. The reversal did two things at once: it made slavery inheritable down the generations, and it meant that a child fathered by an enslaver on an enslaved woman was born his property rather than his heir.

Other gaps were closed in turn. In 1667 Virginia enacted that baptism did not confer freedom, removing the argument that a Christian could not be held as a slave and so severing conversion from liberty. Laws restricted free Black people's rights to vote, to testify, to own weapons and to employ white servants.

Bacon's Rebellion in 1676 accelerated everything. Poor white settlers and Black Virginians, both enslaved and free, rebelled together against the colony's governor and burned Jamestown. The planter elite had just watched the two groups they most depended on make common cause, and the laws that followed pulled them apart — widening the privileges of poor whites while narrowing the position of all Black Virginians. Virginia's comprehensive slave code of 1705 gathered the whole structure into one statute.

Part 3 · Slavery in New York

Slavery was not a southern institution in this period; it was an American one. The Dutch West India Company brought enslaved Africans to New Amsterdam in the 1620s, and under English rule the numbers grew sharply. By 1746 roughly a fifth of New York City's population was enslaved, the largest proportion of any city on the mainland outside Charleston.

The work was different from the plantation South — domestic service, dock work, carting, crafts, and farm labour on the Hudson Valley estates — and that changed the texture of it. Enslaved New Yorkers lived in their enslavers' houses in small numbers rather than in quarters of their own, which made family life harder to sustain and surveillance constant, but also put them in daily contact with one another in markets and on the waterfront.

The city's fear of what might come of that contact produced two notorious episodes. A revolt in 1712 left several white New Yorkers dead and ended in brutal executions. In 1741, after a series of fires, the city convicted itself into a panic over an alleged conspiracy and executed more than thirty people, most of them Black, on evidence that historians have regarded ever since as largely imagined.

Part 4 · Resistance that leaves fewer records

Revolt is visible because it produces trials, newspaper reports and executions. It was also rare, because the odds were hopeless and the reprisals fell on everyone nearby. Judging resistance by uprisings alone therefore measures the records rather than the people.

Most resistance was daily and deniable. Working slowly, misplacing tools, feigning illness, damaging equipment in ways that looked accidental — each cost the enslaver and carried a chance of being read as incompetence rather than defiance. Running away was common enough that newspapers carried columns of advertisements for it, and those advertisements are now among the richest sources we have, because to describe a runaway an enslaver had to describe a person: their scars, their skills, their languages, who they were likely heading toward.

Enslaved people also used the courts when any crack appeared. Freedom suits were brought in several colonies on grounds of descent from a free woman, of a promise made in a will, or of residence somewhere slavery was not lawful — the same argument the Scotts would make in Missouri two centuries later, which you will meet in chapter seven. Most failed. That they were brought at all, by people with no money and no standing, is itself the evidence.

The deepest resistance was the hardest to record. Keeping marriages and families together when the law recognised neither, holding onto names, languages and practices across generations, and raising children who knew they were owed something better — none of that generates a court record. It is visible mainly in what existed by the time anyone thought to look.