This year is the four hundredth anniversary of the first Africans arriving in the British settlement of Jamestown. In 1619, it was not in any way clear that African slavery would be the future of any of the English colonies in America, and English settlers tried a variety of forms of labor. These Africans did not arrive as enslaved people, as we understand the term to mean today. While they were not there by choice, and had been trafficked, no one claimed ownership over them for life, and their children were not born into the same state of servitude. Many of these people eventually became free, and some even owned land. By the end of the seventeenth century, this would all change. Slavery was firmly established in not just Virginia, but throughout the English colonies in America, and while Native Americans were also forced to labor and kept in a state of slavery at different times, the system we recognize as American slavery – perpetual, hereditary, and race-based – was reserved exclusively for Africans and their descendants.
Your task is to explain why this came to be. In other words, why did the English colonists choose to create, maintain, and grow the system of enslaving Africans and their children, particularly in the southern colonies in the century or so after 1619?
Sample Solution