Generations of Captivity

The lives of slaves became more intimately controlled on plantations beginning in the late-17th-century Chesapeake. They spread throughout the continent “in fits and starts” (54) over the 18th century and into the 19th century. Slaves’ situations worsened in all areas that previously afforded hopes of mobility or material improvement. Large plantations were usually far removed from the Atlantic world that had been central to charter generations. Planters represented “a class of men whose appetite for labor was nearly insatiable,” and they reinvented “social organization and commercial production” to supply unfree laborers in droves to these sequestered estates (54).

A mass importation of slaves from Africa’s interior altered dynamics of black life in North America as newcomers brought diverse languages and religions. Most of these incomers were male. As a result of the sexual imbalance and geographic displacement, African slaves struggled to reproduce and died in high rates from disease and invigorated brutality in slave discipline, including “dehumanizing affronts” and “grotesque mutilations” (61). Formal law (slave codes) granted power to planters and stripped slaves of most of the rights they had previously exercised. Hardening racial hierarchies also casted out free people of color.

South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida were similar in many respects to the Chesapeake, though plantations further South grew rice and indigo, particularly labor-intensive crops that caused profound suffering for slaves.