The Foundation of Europe's New World

and white servants often ran away together and rebelled together, causing those at the top to become quite nervous in seeing their position in the new society precarious.

So by the 1660s colonies were beginning to pass new laws that defined black Africans as slaves for life, and those born of a slave mother would also be slave, for life. Likewise, laws were being created to define the significant differences between black and white laborers. White servants would have a right to land and money after their terms of service was completed, blacks would have none. Whites would receive lesser punishments for crimes also committed by blacks. White servants obtained more privileges while still under their terms of service than did blacks. By the turn of the eighteenth century, a new system of slavery defined by race was being adopted and placed as the cornerstone of black-white and rich-poor relations in America. As Takaki puts it, the "hidden origins of slavery were rooted in class." That is, as a means of controlling both white servants and black slaves, the powerful elite accorded to their European underlings enough rights and privileges to create in them a sense of belonging, a more personal stake in what was British America while being able to control their interaction with African slaves, thus securing their own position at the top of the social order.¹⁷

Thus by 1700 the American labor system had taken shape. American Indians were declining in number and were seeing their people being pushed farther from their homelands. European laborers were working from the bottom of the economic ladder but making gains in land ownership and independent enterprise. First- and second-generation black slaves had quickly become the lowest but perhaps most important element of the American system of labor. All of this was setting the stage for what was to become a complex web of relations in America between rich and poor, black and white, owner and owned, and business and labor that still remains in many elements today's society.

References

¹Morgan, Edmund. American Slavery, American Freedom. (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1995)

²Loewen, James. Lies My Teacher Told Me. (New York: Touchstone, 1996)

³Ibid.

⁴Murolo, Prascilla and Chitty, A.B. From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend. (New York: New Press, 2001)

⁵Keen, Benjamin. "Black Legend." Christopher Columbus Enyclopedia. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991)

⁶Nash, Gary. Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early North America, 3rd ed.

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