Indentured Servitude Research Paper

Indentured servants, were by all accounts, the main source of labor in the seventeenth century. The labor force was mainly needed for the newly discovery of the cash crop that was tobacco. It was a plant that need a lot of man power to be harvested and transported to port to be shipped back to England. “At first they turned to their overpopulated country for labor, but English indentured servants brought with them the same haphazard habits of work as their masters.” Indentured service being described as haphazard is an understatement; uprising.

Wolfe discusses the evolution of the methods used by European colonists to eliminate the Native Americans and take control and settle in their lands. He plots the shifting course of the strategies used to incorporate Indians into US society, going in chronological order. He starts by discussing Indian Removal becoming obsolete. He then describes the system of allotment, where Indians were given individuals plots of land to farm and manage. Finally, Wolfe discusses Blood Quantum, the method of evaluating one’s “Indian-ness.”

Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America by Christina Snyder emphasizes on the importance of the of the pre-existing system and the evolution on the Native American social structure in how race was understood among the Native Americans. The book addresses that before the mid-eighteen hundred, the south was a different place where hundreds of Natives groups controlled the Native ground. Snyder’s thesis is identified in her introduction; she supports the idea of Indian slavery in the colonial world and how the indigenous societies were embedded with the idea of race. Captives were a way in which indigenous practice slavery; they saw the captives as a lesser person in the Indian societies. “ Captives was not a static institution for Indians, but rather a practice that they adopted over time to meet changing needs and circumstances.”

In the early 1600’s, indentured servants, usually someone from a poor class in England would sell their labor for a term of four to seven years for the opportunity to travel across the Atlantic and be funded by a master/farmer. After reviewing “A Contract for Indentured Service (1635)” the blank contract I referenced indicates a term of four to seven years to be completed. The contract promises to pay the servant in meat, drinks, apparel and lodging during his time as an indentured servant. After the term is completed the master is required to provide his former servant: clothing, three barrels of corn, and fifty acres of land. The risks that potential indentured servants had to consider when migrating to the American colonies were the bad

In Andrea Smith’s article “Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy”, Smith argues from three different perspectives on how different people are oppressed and are victimized together. She presents three scenarios involving people of color and how they can modernize to become unified. The three pillars she uses to try to understand white supremacy describe the logic behind: slavery and how it deals with capitalism, genocide in the United States colonialism, and orientalism during wartime. In the first pillar presented, slavery is used to understand white supremacy by saying black people are innately thought of as property, which serves as the anchor for capitalism.

Indentured Servitude in Massachusetts Indentured servitude, the practice of signing oneself into a slave-like servitude for an agreed upon amount of time in exchange for various provisions, was widely popular in early Massachusetts as a way for American people to build a workforce and immigrants to migrate to the New World. Indentured men, women, and children, largely from Europe, became a crucial part of the fabric of the society, culture, and economy of this state and the city of Boston. Boston’s economy was shaped by immigrant indentured servants due to their vast impact in building the city to begin with, as well as the practice allowing for immigrant communities to be established in America. Plymouth Colony, one of the original colonies

The process of black slavery taking route in colonial Virginia was slow. Black slavery mostly became dominant in the 1680s. Slaves became the main labor system on plantations. The amount of white indentured servants declined so the demand for black slaves became necessary in the mid-1660s. The number of white indentured servants that Virginia had up until the mid 1660s, was enough to meet white peoples labor needs.

During the early to mid eighteen hundreds, Britain, and subsequently, the British Empire underwent a change of attitudes towards slavery. Beginning in the 1807 when Britain outlawed slavery, the development of indentured servitude occurred. Following this, African slaves who were freed, nevertheless, the grueling plantation work still needed people to till the fields and harvest the crops. Indentured servitude of Indians was an, as of yet, mostly untapped resource. The largely illiterate Indian populace, not knowing the agreements in which they were signing, were forced into similar roles and conditions as the recently freed Africans.

In his letter he described his life as an indentured servant as one where he has nothing to comfort him but sickness and death. The life that he was living in colonial Virginia was one where you couldn’t escape or else you will be captured. Attempting it could of cause him to die, therefore he hoped his parents brought his escape but with his parents being poor there was no way of escaping the life of an indentured servant. Having no escape as an indentured servant, he wrote to his parents a letter asking that his parents bought out the indenture. In his letter, he wrote that he was trapped in a place filled of diseases that can make any body weak and leave you with lack of comfort and rattled with guilt.

Critical Whiteness Studies responds to the invisible and normative nature of whiteness in predominantly white societies, criticizing racial and ethnic attribution of non-white subjects who have to grapple with their deviation from the set norm, and opening the discussion on white privilege that results from being the unmarked norm (Kerner: 278). As Conway and Steyn elaborate, Critical Whiteness Studies aims to “redirect[...] the scholarly gaze from the margins to the centre” (283) and, more specifically, to interrogat[e][...] the centre of power and privilege from which racialization emanates but which operates more or less invisibly as it constructs itself as both the norm and ideal of what it means to be human. (ibid.) Thus, Critical Whiteness

Even though they were European, indentured servants were not treated as fellow European workers, but as slaves; these indentured servants weren’t seen by the RAC as people, but as tools. “Any workman within an enterprise such as the Russian-American Company amounted to something like one slat in a water wheel. Laboring in a circle, a damp one at that” (Doig 165, 1982). The working conditions were brutal, according to historians Steven Hahn and S.B. Okun. In Jamestown, indentured servants were viewed as property, and could be bought and sold at a moment’s notice.

Fahad Albrahim Response 1: Review/Summary: “Whiteness as property” is an article written by Cheryl Harris, in which she addresses the subject of racial identity and property in the United States. Throughout the article, professor Harris attempts to explain how the concept of whiteness was initiated to become a form of racial identity, which evolved into a property widely protected in American law (page 1713). Harris tackles a number of facts that describe the roots of whiteness as property in American history at the expense of minorities such as Black and American natives (page 1709). Additionally, Harris describes how whiteness as property evolved to become seen as a racial privilege in which the whites gained more benefits, whether

The main difference that we see between both racial ethnic groups is that white Americans believed that they could strip Native Americans from their culture and civilize them while “nurture could not improve the nature of blacks” (67). Although some Native Americans did try to live under the laws of white Americans, they were eventually betrayed and forced to leave the

Whiteness as property is significant as it allows us to analyze the superiority that white individuals retained during this time period. It allows us to explicitly distinguish the enormous privilege that white groups obtained. For example, “Europeans assumed whiteness as a personal identity and possession that naturally entitled them to a privileged social position” (10). It ultimately allows us to see that that whites have tangible and economically valuable

Rachael Goodson Professor Kathrine Chiles ENG & AFST 331 15 February 2018 William Apess In the nineteenth century, America was at one of its peaks of racial debate, with people starting to question whether it was right for the African Americans to stay enslaved, or if it was time to start the process of freeing the slaves and allowing them to live a better life. However, most people did not even question how the Native Americans were being treated or forced to change almost every aspect of their lives to “please,” as if they could ever be, the white people. William Apess’ The Experience of Five Christian Indians is an example of some of the harsh ways that Indians were treated before and even after they were “forcibly” converted to Christianity.