Chapter 5 summary

In the North American colonies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, African
colonists have given rise to a new African-American people. Born in North America and
permanently removed from their ancestral homeland, they have retained a remarkably significant
portion of their African cultural heritage. In the meantime, a new natural climate and encounters
with American Indian and European descent have allowed African Americans to mold their way
of life in conditions imposed by slavery. In the early years of the Chesapeake Colonies, black
people formed a tiny portion of the labor force comprising white people. From the 1620s to the
1670s, black and white people worked together in tobacco fields, stayed together, and slept
together. Both of them were unfree indentured servants. Thus, although there was much in
common between black and white servants living in Chesapeake during the early seventeenth
century, their masters made differences between them based on color. The few African-origin
women who came to Chesapeake during those years worked with men in tobacco fields, while
most white women served domestic duties. Unlike white servants, black servants typically had
no surnames, and early census records listed them separately from white citizens. Chesapeake
planters' dependency on slavery to satisfy their labor needs stemmed from racial discrimination,
decreasing availability of white indentured servants, rising availability of Africans, and fear of
a class war. After the transition from white to enslaved black labor, tobacco demand in Europe
increased sharply, and the newly established slave labor system proliferated. 
There is no evidence of the actual lives of enslaved black people in colonial North
America, as with the American Indians and most white people of that period, they were poor and
illiterate and kept no records. However, some descriptions of items in a slave cabin in Virginia
list a large iron kettle, a brass kettle, an iron pot, a frying pan, and a beer barrel. Enslaved black
people, including Indians and white people, used hollowed-out gourds for cups and carted water
in wooden buckets to drink, cook, and wash. As the eighteenth century progressed, slave housing
on large plantations grew larger, and slaves acquired linens, chamber pots, and oil lamps. Yet,
long after abolishing slavery, primitive, poorly furnished log cabins existed in many areas. Food
consisted of corn, yams, salted pork, and sometimes salted beef and salted cod. The Slaves
captured fish and raised chickens and rabbits. When farmers in Chesapeake started to grow
wheat in the eighteenth century, slaves baked cookies. In low-lying South Carolina, rice is an
essential part of the African-American diet, but even corn was a staple.
The masters routinely used their power to assault black women Slavery in America has
historically been a mechanism that essentially depends on brute force to refuse equality to
African Americans. From the beginning, black men and women responded by fighting their
masters as best as they could. Some would often die before they could be conquered. There were,
however, periods of revolt in North America from 1710 to 1722 and from 1730 to 1741. Men
born in Africa took the lead in these revolts, and the two most prominent of them took place in
New York City in 1712 and near Charleston, South Carolina, in 1739. In New York, 27 of the
rebels were executed, and those who helped them were also executed.
Chapter 5 summary