Even in his first sentence, Davis is determined to breakdown our misconceptions about slavery in Colonial America by pointing out slavery was more deeply entrenched in American lifestyle than the usual history books might lead us to believe. He wants us to be aware that slaves in North America were not just cotton pickers on Mississippi plantations in the 1850\u2019s. This chapter focuses on the development of slavery, racism, and societal integration of Africans in Colonial America. I found that I could follow Inhuman Bondage better than American Colonies because of how Davis arranges his discussions. Although not truly chronological, Davis likes to go through the timeline of one colony and then give the timeline of another colony, and as a result allows us to compare the two and makes his arguments easier to find and understand. <\/p>\n

As other classmates have pointed out, it was surprising to read that Virginia and Maryland contained over half of all the slaves in North America in 1775. Davis points out that with exception to South Carolina, English-started colonies were not planning on having a slavery society. In fact, when slavery first cropped up in Rhode Island, the locals banned the practice of enslaving for life, and instead forced owners to release their slaves after 10 years. This is also shown in Pennsylvania, when Quakers sent a petition to a local meeting in Germantown arguing that slavery broke divine law. A point that I think Davis might be making is that English colonialists were not the only perpetrators of slavery, as he points out the Dutch used slaves to settle New Amsterdam. At the end of Dutch rule, Davis says, \u201cBlack slaves would constitute about 20% of the population of New Amsterdam\u2026\u201d (Davis 127)<\/p>\n

This is very similar to what Sylvia<\/a> talks about in her post, that because the Dutch didn\u2019t have the economic, religious, and other problems that were present in England, they needed black labor. Further on Davis says that a third of all labor preformed in New York City in the 18th century was done by blacks. However, he points out that more of the black population was free in New York, 75 out of the city\u2019s 375 black population, than in southern colonies. <\/p>\n

The last point I found very interesting in the chapter was the distinction that Davis makes about how societies develop into a slave society. He separates the northern \u201csocieties with slaves\u201d and the southern \u201cslave societies\u201d as different because of the way slavery played into colonies\u2019 economies. Where southern colonies had cash-crops such as cotton, tobacco, rice, and sugar, the northern colonies did not have a crop that depended on slave labor and thus were just societies who also had slaves. I think this is important as it eventually factors into which states were pro-slavery (the south) and those opposed (the north) in our civil war.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Even in his first sentence, Davis is determined to breakdown our misconceptions about slavery in Colonial America by pointing out slavery was more deeply entrenched in American lifestyle than the usual history books might lead us to believe. He wants us to be aware that slaves in North America were not just cotton pickers on … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Comparing the Colonies investments in Slavery”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":121,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[93,209,273,280],"class_list":["post-255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-davis","tag-new-amsterdam","tag-slave-society","tag-societal-integration"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/121"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=255"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}