...se skills became the basis of a flourishing plantation economy. Africans ere also skilled at ironorking, music and musical instruments, the decorative arts, and architecture. Their ork, hich still marks the landscape today, helped shape American cultural styles. They brought ith them African ords, religious beliefs, styles of orship, aesthetic values, musical forms and rhythms. All of these ere important from the beginning in shaping a hybrid American culture.IIITHE SLAVE TRADE Portuguese traders brought the first African slaves for agricultural labor to the Caribbean in 1502. From then until 1860, it is estimated that more than 10 million people ere transported from Africa to the Americas. The great majority ere brought to the Caribbean, Brazil, or the Spanish colonies of Central and South America. Only about 6 percent ere traded in British North America. The Portuguese, Dutch, and British controlled most of the Atlantic slave trade. Most Africans taken to North America came from the various cultures of estern and est central Africa. The territories that are no Ghana, Togo, Benin, and Nigeria ere the origins of most slaves brought to North America, although significant numbers also came from the areas that are no Senegal, Gambia, and Angola. These areas ere home to diverse linguistic, ethnic, and religious groups. Most of the people enslaved ere subsistence farmers and raised livestock. Their agricultural and pastoral skills made them valuable laborers in the Americas.To transport the captured Africans to the Americas, Europeans loaded them onto specially constructed ships ith platforms belo deck designed to maximize the numbers of slaves that could be transported. Africans ere confined for to to three months in irons in the hold of a slave ship during the crossing of the Atlantic Ocean called the Middle Passage. The meager diet of rice, yams, or beans and the filthy conditions created by overcroding resulted in a very high death rate. Many ships reached their destinations ith barely half their cargo of slaves still alive to sell into forced labor in the Americas.The first Africans brought to the English colonies in North America came on a Dutch privateer that landed at Jameston, Virginia, in August 1619. The ship had started out ith about 100 captives, but it had run into extremely bad eather. hen the ship finally put into Jameston, it had only 20 surviving Africans to sell to the struggling colony. Soon many of the colonies along the Atlantic seaboard started importing African slaves. The Dutch est India Company brought 11 Africans to its garrison trading post in Ne Amsterdam knon today as Ne York City in 1626, and Pennsylvanians imported 150 Africans in 1684.IVSLAVES IN COLONIAL AMERICA AOccupation of Slaves The vast majority of Africans brought to the 13 British colonies orked as agricultural laborers many ere brought to the colonies specifically for their experience in rice groing, cattle herding, or river navigation. For example, South Carolina planters dre upon the knoledge of slaves from Senegambia in est Africa to begin cultivating rice, their first major export crop. In the South, slaves gre tobacco in Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, and rice and indigo in South Carolina and Georgia. In the North, slaves also orked on farms.African Americans, slave and free, also orked in a ide variety of occupations. They ere household orkers, sailors, preachers, accountants, music teachers, medical assistants, blacksmiths, bricklayers, and carpenters, doing virtually any ork American society required.BSlave Populations By 1750 there ere nearly 240,000 people of African descent in British North America, fully 20 percent of the population, though they ere not evenly distributed. The greatest number of African Americans lived in Virginia, Maryland, and South Carolina because large plantations ith many slaves ere concentrated in the South. Blacks constituted over 60 percent of the population in South Carolina, over 43 percent in Virginia, and over 30 percent in Maryland, but only about 2 percent in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Ne Hampshire. In the Northern colonies, enslaved people ere much more likely to ork in households having only one or a fe slaves.Virtually all colonies had a small number of free blacks, but in colonial America, only Maryland had a sizeable free black population. Over the generations of enslavement, at least 95 percent of Africans in the United States lived in slavery. But even as early as the 1600s, some gained their freedom by buying themselves or being bought by relatives. Since slavery as inherited through the status of the mother, some blacks became free if they ere born to non-slave mothers. Others gained their freedom from bondage for meritorious acts or long competent labor.CSlavery versus Indentured Servitude Slavery as the most extreme, but not the only form of unfree labor in British North America. Many Europeans and some Africans ere held as indentured servants. Neither slaves nor indentured servants ere free, but there ere important differences. Slavery as involuntary and hereditary. Indentured servants made contracts, often an exchange of labor for passage to America. They served for a limited time, commonly seven years, and generally received freedom dues, often land and clothing, upon finishing their indenture. Although some slaves gained freedom after a limited term, others served for life, and a second generation inherited the slave status of their mothers. Gradually by the 18th century, colonial las ere consolidated into slave codes providing for perpetual, inherited servitude for Africans ho ere defined as property to be bought and sold.In their day-to-day lives, slaves and servants shared similar grievances and frequently formed alliances. Advertisements seeking the return of slaves and servants ho had run aay together filled colonial nespapers. hen a slave named Charles escaped in 1740, the Pennsylvania Gazette reported that to hite servants, a Scotch man and an Englishman, escaped ith him. Sometimes interracial alliances involved violence. During Bacons Rebellion in 1676, slaves and servants took up arms against Native Americans and the colonial government in Virginia. In 1712 Ne York officials executed Native Americans and African American slaves for plotting a revolt, and in 1741 four hites ere executed and seven banished from colonial Ne York for participating ith slaves in a conspiracy. People in similar circumstancespoor and unfree hites, Native Americans, and blacks-formed alliances throughout the colonial era.VAMERICAN REVOLUTION ABlack Participation in the ar After the British defeated the French in the French and Indian ar 1754-1763, the British began to change their relationship ith their American colonies. They started to increase taxes, demanded that the colonists help pay for British soldiers stationed in the colonies, and controlled the colonial trade opportunities more carefully. Most colonists ere outr...
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