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In this week’s readings concerning the Chesapeake colonies, I found the section on slaves to be quite interesting. Especially after having read Inhuman Bondage and learning how badly the slaves were treated, reading about how some slaves in the Chesapeake colonies were able to own land and vote seems strange. The reading even discusses how the most successful freed black slave named Anthony Johnson took his white neighbors to court after they had lured away his slave (154).
The concept of racism was not fully developed yet during that time, and as Beth Wright described in her post “Power Dynamics in the Southern Colonies”, “slaves [became] a uniting factor with the idea of color rather than wealth [to be] the preliminary divider for status” after the surge of African slaves were imported into the colonies. Due to the increase, African culture became more conspicuous and alarmed the slave masters. Because of this, stricter laws were placed on slaves and the rights of freed slaves disappeared almost entirely. Slavery as we know it today appears, or at least in the Chesapeake colonies, to have come from a more economic view that then transitioned into racism, rather than purely out of hatred itself.
Although class distinction was a large part of the culture of the Chesapeake colonies, the difference between whites and blacks later became the “key marker of identity” (157). As the racial boundaries grew, so did the difference between the elite whites and the poor white. Ordinarily, the richest white families owned the majority of the land and the bottom third of the white population owned none (157). Because of this, the poor families could not compete with the rich white families in production of tobacco because the rich whites had slaves to do the job, only increasing the economic and racial divides.