Origins Of American Slavery Summary

Kayla Wobschall

September 16, 2014

Professor John Master

HIST 121-02: Prompt 1

Economic and Racist Incentives in the Enslavement of Africans Although there were economic and racist intentions in the foundation of American slavery, Betty Wood provides more background and information that supports the economic motive. In her book, The Origins of American Slavery, she certainly declares plenty of evidence for both arguments, and attributes slavery to a combination of these issues. However, the majority of the history presented suggests an economic rationale. The landowners had selfish but purely economic intentions to use the workers to produce sugar. They wanted workers to benefit their businesses and didn’t care who was doing the labor.

(32) The story of Adam and Eve is a main reference for many Europeans, because many believed that Adam and Eve were white, like them. This created an attitude that fair-skinned people were superior. This raised a question of why the Africans were black. They thought that the black skin signified sin, and that Africans were descendants of Ham, a biblical man who defied his father and became an eternal slave. (23) These ideas were more social than racist, because at the time they didn’t understand that people looked differently all around the world. These ideas became a reason that landowners treated their slaves so poorly, and made slavery acceptable. The natives were spared this treatment, because they were thought to be tribal people of Israel. The English thought that the Native Americans simply missed the important process of “civilizing” Europe, “and particularly the Christianizing, of Western Europe.” (33) The Native Americans benefitted from this biblical explanation, because for the most part, they could keep their freedom and their land. The English thought that they needed to be civilized, but they didn’t think that their skin color had to do with sin. The Africans however, were treated like they had sinned. The Europeans used this as a reason to treat them really poorly and to keep slavery around for years. Although racism wasn’t the cause for the enslavement of Africans, it was a reason to keep them from being freed. Some racial ideas contributed to the original enslavement, but more encouraged the economic motives to be achieved by enslaving