Causes Of Native American Slave Labor

When Christopher Columbus and his crew arrived in America, they were looking for wealth and more lands. When Native Americans met those Europeans, Native Americans were treating them as equal trading partners. But Columbus was not feeling the same; he thought the Native Americans were inferior to the Europeans. Europeans knew if they wanted to excavate this land, then they needed lots of labor, looking Native Americans as potential servants. European had enforced coercive labor onto different races; as those races, black and white, joined forces to rebel against land owners that they were working for, those white land owners and elites hired more black slave laborers and less white servants, creating a racial based slave labor system. The

Therefore, many Native Americans became dependent to the arms provided by the Europeans. There were some Native Americans who were able to resist European encroachment; others started working with the Europeans. At first, European traders would advance goods to Native Americans. When Native Americans could not pay back, they were required to work for Europeans. But they could never earn enough, which caused them to be trapped in a vicious cycle and forced

They tried to enslave Native Americans but were unsuccessful since they are too powerful and numerous, so they looked for other places. At first, they wanted to use orphans to work until they turned twenty-one, but many of them died before that time. So planters had to look elsewhere again. They found the only people who were willing to work for them were young, poor English adults. Since they were already too poor in their own country, they saw that working in the New World as a big opportunity to break their low status life in England. They were promised to work “for a term of four to seven years in exchange for passage to the colonies. At the end of their period of service, each would get freedom, a set of new clothes, some tools, and fifty acres of land” (Who Built America 68). With the indentured servants, planters also bought some African slaves, who had been enslaved for several years before, to work with those indentured servants. In contrast, those black servants tended to have longer terms of service, and their punishments were more severe than the white indentured servants. But they could still gain freedom after several years of working and became independent farmers. Majority of people suffered from disease, poor diet, malnutrition, and harsh owners. Many people had extended terms of services as punishment or did not get the fifty acres of land that