This book explores white bondage and convict labor in colonial America, and to some extent in the West Indies.
This is a subject which almost no white Americans are even remotely aware of, as their collective ancestor heritage.
They think they were all free white Europeans, who emigrated here with money in their pockets and a twinkle in their eye!
Jefferson himself alluded to one of the best reasons why black slave labor supplanted white bondage: it was profitable. Slave offspring were property, whereas bond servants, if they survived, were eventually free, and their offspring, if any, during bondage, were not property of the master anyway.
See: Smithsonian Magazine, Henry Wiencek, "Unmasking Thomas Jefferson", October 2012, p. 40.
Another crucial reason why black slave labor gradually supplanted white bondage labor was also a reason based on profitability, or, in many cases, merely of survival of the master's own source of a meager rural living, hand to mouth in many cases.
That reason is survivability of black workers over white workers in coastal plantation conditions.
A third reason was that if a servant was misused, he might try to make his way to a magistrate to seek equitable rights he theoretically enjoyed as a subject of the Crown; this option was not open to slaves.
A third reason was that if a servant was misused, he might try to make his way to a magistrate to seek equitable rights he theoretically enjoyed as a subject of the Crown; this option was not open to slaves.
It had absolutely nothing to do with any theory of the white man's desire to enslave the black man, merely because he was a lower race. Although they fully believed he was a lower race, it was not their reason.
It also had nothing to do with qualms or reluctance on the part of whites to place as many fellow whites into bondage, and to work them as hard as slaves, as were needed at the time.
It also had nothing to do with qualms or reluctance on the part of whites to place as many fellow whites into bondage, and to work them as hard as slaves, as were needed at the time.
If it had been more profitable for white men to place more white men into servitude, rather than to enslave ever more blacks or to enslave fewer, do you think the American colonists, both planters and city dwellers, would have hesitated for a moment to do so?
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