Warning: Undefined variable $num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 126
Warning: Undefined variable $posts_num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 127
Taylor’s piece on the Chesapeake in Chapter 7 definitively traces the emergence of racism in the early colonies. Beginning with an account of the class tensions among settlers in Virginia, the chapter exposes the subjugation of people based on social status rather than race. Among the four levels of hierarchy in society—the king, the provincial government, the county court and the family household—there was an underlying class order whereby the few land elite at the top controlled an enormous portion of the wealth. White landowning men retained a great deal of patriarchal power in the household and also governing power in the community.
The labor necessary to sustain a reasonable crop production for these landowners was dependent on the class of white indentured servants. The cost for a white indentured servant was significantly less than that of an African slave. Therefore, in the beginning of the 17th century, white indentured servants were almost exclusively the laborers of tobacco and maize farms in the Chesapeake colonies. However, the short terms of these servants (usually only a couple of years) were sufficient to pay off their passage from England to the New World. When the servant completed their term, they were often granted “freedom dues” which were settlement packages of land. Therefore, the name servitude is an apt way of distinguishing this type of work from slavery—which became a lifelong period of service around the second half of the 16th century.
Due to greater incentives to remain in England, namely higher real wages, the demand of servants in the Chesapeake region went unfulfilled. The farmers had to look elsewhere for laborers and quickly found an alternative in the slave trade. I thought the inclusion of Anthony Johnson’s story provided an effective preface to the drastic change in race relations. This often-overlooked account of a black slave-owner becomes quickly overshadowed by the subjugation of black people in America to a position below even the lowest classes of white colonists. The shift in the servant class, as Dana mentions in his post on February 9th, permitted all whites to be unified based upon skin color. In using the word “kinship”, Dana seems to illuminate the traces of a central divide contributing to the Civil War. As I expect to see in the later part of this class, many supporters of the Confederacy were united as kin in this acceptance of racism and slavery. Furthermore, Taylor reminds us that racial solidarity accompanied the growing inequality among whites Virginia. To a certain extent, this sense of unification by race diminished the common class white colonists’ concern with class disparity.
This reading provides a very nice foundation for our study of slavery in this class. As Taylor mentions, “A dark skin became synonymous with slavery, just as freedom became equated with whiteness” (Taylor 157). As simple as this observation may seem, it is very telling of the emergence of a new people placed under subjugation. Also it is interesting to trace the underpinnings of racism in America back to this change in servitude caused by a strengthening English economy (see above—real wages increase).