Indentured Servitude And Slavery In Colonial America

“Another of my wishes is to depend as little as possible on the labour of slaves,” wrote James Madison in a letter to statesman Richard Henry Lee. Like many other well known founding fathers, James Madison was a slave owner. Another key similarity Madison had with the other slave owning founders was a dislike of the institution of slavery, while still taking part in it. However, the founders’ relationship with slavery was not formed at the time of independence. Indentured Servitude and Slavery was vital to the economic success of the British empire in the Americas, and had become commonplace in the colonies nearly two centuries before the lives of the founders. The treatment of both slaves and indentured servants steadily declined from the British settling the Americas to the founding of the country, and early years of the nation (Kennedy). Colonial America relied heavily on the labor of

Slaves and bound servants alike could be bought and sold at auction, by a price determined by the market. Just as slaves could be worked to death, worn-out or dying servants could be dumped by their masters without receiving any compensation (Walsh 117). Laws were later implemented to prevent masters from discarding their unwanted servants, but slaves remained vulnerable to being deemed useless by their masters until the end of the civil war. Another legislative shackle on the feet of both the indentured and slaves was the requirement to complete labor. In many colonies indentured servants and slaves were both subject to being punished by law for disobeying their masters, and nearly all court cases involving disobedience ruled in favor of the master (Cauley 763). The subjugation of indentured servants to their masters was nearly identical to that of slaves under early colonial law, however the rights held by both groups of unfree laborers differs