Slavery shaped every English colony. This topic tells its colonial history plainly. Building on The Southern Colonies, it explains how slavery grew, how it was written into law, and how enslaved people resisted.
Key idea
About 12.5 million Africans were forced onto ships in the Atlantic slave trade, and about 10.7 million survived the Middle Passage; under 5 percent of them came to the mainland colonies. Colonial slave codes made slavery lifelong and inherited through the mother. Enslaved people resisted in many ways, including the Stono Rebellion of 1739.
Why it works
At first, Chesapeake planters relied mostly on English indentured servants, who worked for some years and then went free. Late in the 1600s that supply fell, and freed servants wanted land of their own. Planters turned to enslaved Africans, who could be held for life. Laws followed the economy: in 1662, Virginia declared that a child would be "bond or free only according to the condition of the mother," so the children of enslaved women were enslaved from birth. By 1705, Virginia's slave code treated enslaved people as property. By 1775, about 500,000 people, about one in five people in the colonies, were enslaved.
The Middle Passage was the voyage from West and Central Africa to the Americas. Captives were chained below deck in crowded, airless holds for weeks; between one and two in every ten died on the way. Most were carried to Brazil and the Caribbean.
Worked example: Resistance
How did enslaved people resist slavery?
- Every day: working slowly, breaking tools, keeping their own music, faith and family ties.
- Escape: some fled, for example to Spanish Florida, where Spain offered freedom to those who accepted Catholicism.
- Revolt: in 1739, about twenty enslaved men near the Stono River in South Carolina seized guns and marched south toward Florida, gathering others, before the militia defeated them.
Answer: In daily life, by escape and by armed revolt.
Worked example: Cause and effect
What did South Carolina do after the Stono Rebellion?
- Planters feared more revolts in a colony where enslaved people were the majority.
- The Negro Act of 1740 barred enslaved people from learning to read, gathering in groups or moving about freely.
Answer: It passed a harsher slave code, the Negro Act of 1740.
Common mistake
Two mistakes are common. First, slavery was not only Southern: it was legal in all thirteen colonies, and enslaved people worked in Boston, Newport and New York City. Second, slavery was not fixed in law from 1619. The laws that made it lifelong and inherited came step by step, beginning in the 1660s.