From Servants to Slaves: The Transformation of the Chesapeake Labor System

Abstract

This chapter explores regional variations in the growth of slavery within the Chesapeake before concluding with a discussion of the impact of the shift from servants to slaves on the ownership and distribution of labor. Scattered evidence from Virginia suggests that this timing was not peculiar to Maryland, although more data are required before the case can be considered closed. In the prime tobacco lands between the James and Rappahanock rivers the transition was especially rapid and dramatic. Probate inventories provide further evidence of the relative supplies of servants and slaves available to tobacco planters. The size of the migrant group in seventeenth-century England was a function of total population, an assertion that must be qualified by a recognition that migration was highly age, sex, and probably class specific and that the propensity to migrate varied with time.

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