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116 PERIOD 2 Colonial America amid Global Change: 1607–1754

Illustration of a Slave Trader’s
Ship This image, which was
These sample pages are distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers.
created during the eighteenth
century, portrays people
being captured in Africa
alongside a ship transporting
them to enslavement in the
Copyright (c) 2024 Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers.
Western Hemisphere.
What is the perspective
on slavery portrayed in this
Strictly for use with its products. NOT FOR REDISTRIBUTION.
image?

DEA/M. Seemuller/Getty Images

Increasingly harsh laws in Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina were enacted
as tobacco cultivation spread across the Chesapeake and the numbers of imported
enslaved Africans increased. By 1668, one-third of all Africans and African Americans
in Virginia and Maryland were still free, but the percentages dwindled year by year.
Once the Royal African Company started supplying the Chesapeake with enslaved peo-
ple directly from Africa in the 1680s, the pace of change quickened. By 1750, out of
150,000 Black people residing in the Chesapeake, only about 5 percent remained free.
Direct importation from Africa had other negative consequences for the enslaved.
Far more men than women were imported, skewing the sex ratio and making it more
challenging for them to form families and communities. Enslaved women, like men,
performed heavy field work. When these conditions, along with brutal work regimens,
sparked resistance by the enslaved, fearful whites imposed even stricter regulations, fur-
ther distinguishing between white indentured servants and enslaved Black people.
While slavery in the Carolinas was influenced by developments in the Chesapeake,
it was shaped even more directly by practices in the British West Indies. During the late
seventeenth century, many wealthy families from Barbados, Antigua, and other sugar
islands also established plantations in the Carolinas. At first, they brought enslaved peo-
ple from the West Indies to oversee cattle and pigs and assist in the slaughter of livestock
and curing of meat for shipment back to the West Indies. Some enslaved laborers grew
rice, using techniques learned in West Africa, to supplement their diet. Slaveholders

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