As a carryover from English practice, indentured servants were the original standard for forced labor in New England and middle colonies like Pennsylvania and Delaware. New England’s Forced Laborers: the Enslaved, Indentured Servants, and Native Americans Part of the reason slavery evolved differently in New England than in the middle and southern colonies was the culture of indentured servitude. Enslaved women were frequently forced to work as household servants, whereas in the South women often performed agricultural work. As in the South, enslaved men were frequently forced into heavy or farm labor. Ministers, doctors, tradesmen, and merchants also used enslaved labor to work alongside them and run their households. In New England, it was common for individual enslaved people to learn specialized skills and crafts due to the area’s more varied economy. But without the same rise in plantations in New England, it was more typical to have one or two enslaved people attached to a household, business, or small farm. Those Southern economies depended upon people enslaved at plantations to provide labor and keep the massive tobacco and rice farms running. Most of those enslaved in the North did not live in large communities, as they did in the mid-Atlantic colonies and the South. While slavery grew exponentially in the South with large-scale plantations and agricultural operations, slavery in New England was different. So the arrival of Africans in Virginia in 1619 was not the start of a new phenomenon, but the beginning of human trafficking between Africa and North America based on the social norms of Europe. The Origins of American Slavery The concept of slavery was hardly a new one when England’s colonists reached North American shores, as it had been practiced in Europe for more than a century before the colonies. Although New England would later become known for its abolitionist leaders and its role in helping formerly enslaved Southern blacks and those escaping slavery, the colonies had a history of using enslaved and indentured labor to create and build their economies. Yet the roots of slavery in the New World go much deeper than that-back to the original British colonies, including the northernmost in New England. Conversations about slavery in the United States frequently center on the South and the Civil War.
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