The Foundation of Europe's New World

from the slave cabins often identified with the antebellum South. One white servant in Virginia wrote words that very well could have expressed the sentiments of millions of indentured laborers in colonial America: "I thought no head had been able to hold so much water as hath and doth daily flow from mine eyes."¹⁰

Brutal as it may have been, some indentured servants did survive long enough to see their dreams come true. There were those who received their "freedom dues," usually comprising " a sum of money, a parcel of land in some colonies, and perhaps other things too, such as clothing, tools, a horse or a cow." But records indicate that in British North America between 1607 and 1776, just 20 percent of all indentured servants went on to received such rewards for their four to seven years of hard labor.¹¹

Indentured servitude was indeed the backbone of early American labor in the British colonies. Seventy-five percent of colonists in North America arrived as indentured servants in the seventeenth century, and by the outbreak of the American Revolution, over half of all European immigrants to the colonies had arrived as indentured laborers.¹² In many colonies, particularly in the South, however, the number of those entering as indentured servants was on the decrease by 1670. Another source of labor was being exploited. And while this new source would originally be treated no differently from its European counterpart, the physical and cultural differences between the two groups would too be exploited to create the most sinister institution of labor in the "New World."

This labor source was found on the continent of Africa, where an estimated fifty million people lived in various communities, ranging from highly populated and culturally-rich cities to isolated tribal communities in the rain forests. What made these people attractive to Europeans was not their cultural but their military inferiority. They were easily conquerable and many among them were willing to participate in slave trading in exchange for new and previously unknown goods from Europe. What was more, enslavement of this particular group of people proved easier than the forced labor of American Indians. While the Indian tribes were at home, connected by common language, and thus more capable of resistance, Black Africans taken from their homeland and supplanted in a foreign region and cut off from family and language bonds rendered them helpless.¹³

The Transatlantic slave trade itself began

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