How did people work in the colonies? Why did indentured servitude start and how did it transition to slavery?

Download Primary Source Set: Slavery in the Colonies

Students can explore the evolution of the labor system in the colony by framing their studies around this question: How did people work in the colonies? Why did indentured servitude start and how did it transition to slavery?The first Africans arrived in Jamestown in 1619. In seventeenth-century colonial Virginia, some Africans came as indentured servants, while others had been sold or traded as enslaved labor. A few gained their freedom. Changing economic and labor conditions and racial presumptions of inequity contributed to the tobacco planters’ increasing reliance on slavery as a major source of labor.