1619
1619 is a significant year in African American history because that was the year a Dutch man traded his cargo of Africans for food in 1619. These Africans became indentured servants. Being that a lot of the slaves were from Portuguese and Spain, they had been converted to Christianity and according to English law and morality of 1619. Christians could not be enslaved. So the Africans were called indentured servents which meant they just had to work till they paid of there purchase price, then they could regain freedom. Africans slowly lost there right to be indentured servents because of greed and the explosive need for labor when the tobacco industry exploded. Now there was huge demand for labor so the masters started to keep their servents from two to seven years longer than they needed to stay. This is kind of how slavery started there masters started to get greedy, and they knew this was the only way they could get free labor. Due to this many of the slaves died from being overworked and from disease. Slaves may have been able to re-gain their freedom if somehow they knew how long they had to work or if they refused to do the work. One event that may have caused the indentured slaves to lose there freedom was when John Punch ran away after he was capture he was sentenced to be a slave for the rest of his life. A lot of the Blacks became merchants, tailors, carpenters, wood craftsmen, masons, or they watched the master's children. There were rare cases when Blacks actually succeeded in living in Jamestown, Virginia Anthony Johnson had 21 acres of land when he was freed in two years he had 250 acres he was a rare example of a black man having success in Jamestown. Only few blacks lived on the colony even when the population sored the blacks still stayed the vast minority. Which is another reason why Blacks could not regain their freedom back.
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