2Īll seventeenth-century racial thought did not point directly toward modern classifications of racial hierarchy. Skin color became more than a superficial difference it became the marker of a transcendent, all-encompassing division between two distinct peoples, two races, white and Black. The permanent deprivation of freedom and the separate legal status of enslaved Africans facilitated the maintenance of strict racial barriers. New laws gave legal sanction to the enslavement of people of African descent for life. The 1660s marked a turning point for Black men and women in English colonies like Virginia in North America and Barbados in the West Indies. English traders encouraged wars with Native Americans in order to purchase and enslave captives, and planters justified the use of an enslaved workforce by claiming white servants were “good for nothing at all.” Although the minister thought otherwise and baptized and educated a substantial number of enslaved people, he was unable to overcome enslavers’ fears that Christian baptism would lead to slave emancipation. Le Jau’s strongest complaints were reserved for his own countrymen, the English. He met enslaved Africans ravaged by the Middle Passage, Native Americans traveling south to enslave enemy villages, and colonists terrified of invasions from French Louisiana and Spanish Florida. And none, perhaps, would be as brutal and destructive as the institution of slavery.Īfter his arrival as a missionary in Charles Town, Carolina, in 1706, Reverend Francis Le Jau quickly grew disillusioned by the horrors of American slavery. Patterns and systems established during the colonial era would continue to shape American society for centuries. At the same time, colonial settlements grew and matured, developing into powerful societies capable of warring against Native Americans and subduing internal upheaval. Civil war, religious conflict, and nation building transformed seventeenth-century Britain and remade societies on both sides of the ocean. A new and increasingly complex Atlantic World connected the continents of Europe, Africa, and the Americas.Įvents across the ocean continued to influence the lives of American colonists. And yet the colonial backwaters on the North American mainland, ignored by many imperial officials, were nevertheless deeply tied into these larger Atlantic networks. The North American mainland originally occupied a small and marginal place in that broad empire, as even the output of its most prosperous colonies paled before the tremendous wealth of Caribbean sugar islands. Meanwhile, as colonial societies developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, fluid labor arrangements and racial categories solidified into the race-based, chattel slavery that increasingly defined the economy of the British Empire. ![]() ![]() Native Americans saw fledgling settlements grow into unstoppable beachheads of vast new populations that increasingly monopolized resources and remade the land into something else entirely. Whether they came as servants, enslaved laborers, free farmers, religious refugees, or powerful planters, the men and women of the American colonies created new worlds.
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