Essay On North American Slavery

Slaves played a very important part in Spain efforts to gain a position in North America. In 1607 African Americans took part in the settlement of the Virginia colony at Jamestown. In 1526 Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon led a mission to bring 200 Spanish settlers from Santo Doming to Hispaniola to form a colony in North America. The colony suffered disease, hunger and the slave revolted and the colony shortly returned to the Caribbean without their slaves. The slaves became known as the first Old World settlers in the United States.

The exploration and settling of the New World by European powers was a long process that tried to incorporate a very large area. African slaves provided labor for this expansion alongside of white laborers who had come to the new world as indentured servants, lured by the offered transit of the Atlantic in return for many years of their labor to European investors. North American slavery evolved differently in each region throughout the 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, but were listed as servants in census in1623 alongside whites that were also unfree. 70 to 80% of whites who

Manumission was not uncommon reward to meritorious service to the slaves yet held many qualifications to receive it. The slave’s children could not have free status and slaves would had to pay an annual due to the Dutch West India company. The legalization of slavery occurred in Virginia because of the rapid labor shortage. Virginia structured a new legal code that sanctioned a continuous slave condition and the substandard position of all people of African descent. Over the years many states in acted laws that overturned some if not all the liberties that blacks had previously