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Really? Those 20 slaves did it, not the millions of others that came in the Transatlantic slave trade for decades before and after?
I don't see how someone could possibly believe something that ridiculous.
Those 20 slaves led to it.
"At first, Virginia plantation owners filled their labor shortage by relying heavily on white indentured servants. Given the very high mortality rates in Virginia, purchasing indentured servants was more cost-effective, since slaves and servants often died within a few years of their arrival. Thus it was only in the second half of the 1600s that, “as life expectancy rose, the slave became a better buy than the servant.” As a result, the working population in late-17th Century Virginia was quite diverse, including white indentured servants, black and Native American slaves, and free whites who had completed their term of service. Outnumbered, plantation owners grew increasingly fearful of threats to their political control. In particular, there was the danger of a cooperative insurrection across racial lines.
The solution was to divide and conquer. Through new laws passed by the Virginia assembly, plantation owners consciously encouraged racial hatred between blacks and poor whites. First, the distinction between freedom and enslavement was specified in explicitly racial, rather than religious, terms. The Virginia assembly established in 1667 that converting to Christianity did not change the condition of blacks and Native Americans in bondage. Previously, some black and native people who could prove that they had been baptized had successfully sued for freedom. Second, the assembly created social distinctions between white servants and black slaves. In 1680, the Virginia assembly passed new legislation preventing “any negroe or other slave” from raising a hand to any white person, a measure that put servants on a par with their masters in their impunity for abuse of enslaved people, and stripped enslaved people of any right of self-defense. In 1691, laws punishing intermarriage between whites and blacks were put in place. Finally, in 1705, the assembly decided that, while white servants could own property, all property owned by slaves was to be seized and sold, with profits “applied to the use of the [white] poor.” Thus the white poor materially benefited from additional oppressions put upon black slaves.
In this way, the legal construction of racism helped diffuse the threat of insurrection. Poor white people would now see themselves as allied with those far wealthier than themselves, and would define themselves by race rather than by class."
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