Shaping the New World by Eric Nellis

Author:Eric Nellis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Toronto Press Higher Education
Published: 2013-02-26T16:00:00+00:00

Slavery and the Roots of Sectionalism

In 1607, Virginia became the first of the original 13 North American colonies to be settled permanently. It was the southern part of the London Company Charter of 1606. The English charter system encouraged a degree of flexible local political and legal authority forbidding only laws that were inimical to the laws of England. Thus, when the councils and assemblies of Virginia and other colonies adopted codes defining chattel bondage, they did not violate English law, which contained nothing concrete that either condoned or banned chattel bondage. The issue was not properly addressed in England (Great Britain after 1707) until the late eighteenth century on the eve of the American Revolution. By then, Virginia had long since become a full-blown slave society as had Maryland and North and South Carolina. In 1733, Georgia, the last of the original 13 colonies to be chartered, was established in part as a refuge for London’s poor, with strict codes of sobriety and conduct and a ban on slavery. When the experiment failed, Georgia was opened to planter settlement and slavery in 1752.

From the beginning of the eighteenth century, a steady flow of slaves into the southern colonies was offset by a steady flow of white immigrants into the northern colonies and a remarkable rate of natural increase in both. In 1650, a simple comparative statistic shows that after 150 years of settlement and change, the white population in all of Spanish America was estimated at about 6 per cent of the whole.5 After 150 years of settlement and change, in 1750, the population of the 13 British colonies, from Canada south to Florida and west to the Appalachians, comprised 70 per cent whites and 20 per cent blacks, with a 10 per cent native population in the margin. However, the distribution was uneven. The non-native population in the northern colonies was 95 per cent white and in the settled areas of the southern colonies 60 per cent white and 40 per cent black. An even more remarkable statistic shows that the population of British North America was as much as five times greater than it had been when only natives had occupied the territories. As much as the advent and scale of slavery shaped North America’s distinctiveness, its whiteness shaped it too. By the 1750s, the Caribbean was 90 per cent black, Brazil was a mixture of black and mixed coloured with a white minority, and Mexico was distinctly mestizo with pockets of blacks and natives and, as noted, a white minority.

Between 1607 and 1625, the Virginia Company sent managers and servants (white Englishmen and other Europeans) into the area with no real prospects of profit. The colony became a death trap for thousands of white servants who perished from disease, starvation, and native resistance. Incompetence, the absence of gold or any other resource, false expectations, and bad initial planning combined to doom the company. But if the Roanoke Colony of 1585 had been a disaster and abandoned,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.