Chapter Overview

The exploration and settling of the New World by the European powers was a long process that tried to encompass a very vast area. African slaves provided labor for this expansion alongside a wide array of white laborers who had come to the New World as indentured servants, lured by the offered transit of the Atlantic in return for a number of years of their labor to European investors. Due to its diverse makeup, North American slavery evolved differently in each geographical region throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries, but a unified vision of slavery as the harshest of existence with the constant dangers of disease, violence, and death from starvation emerges from the collective histories of American slavery. Ultimately, black humans were targeted as the ideal slave population, and their freedoms were gradually taken away as they became chattel property rather than bound or indentured laborers.

Learning Objectives

After reading this chapter you should understand the following:

• The very complex system of European claims upon North America's vast, unexplored territory
• The nature of African servitude before the permanent nature of black slavery was proclaimed by European masters
• The European process of systematically reducing black people into chattel property through a legalization of inherited, unending, race-based slavery