Intro to Colonial African American Life: 9/11/2008

The plight of African Americans seemed, on the surface, mostly bleak. The vast majority of African Americans in the colonies were enslaved, and the few who were free were often subject to discrimination by society. Slavery in the Chesapeake, however, was the focus of this article, and in particular the difference groups of slaves that came to dominate the Southern economy.

Slaves worked in several different areas that gave rise to different modes of work: in the field, in large plantation houses, and in urban environment. The article goes in-depth to explore urban slavery, a domain of slavery often forgotten in the face of the better remembered plantation slavery. The majority of slaves in the Chesapeake worked on farms and plantations, in particular plantations that grew tobacco. Tobacco was in important cash crop for Virginia in the Colonial era, and since it was a very labor intensive crop to grow, slaves were often the only people who appeared to be useful for such an enterprise.

The lives of slaves also plays a role in the article. Slaves often had very little privacy when living in an urban environment due their proximity with their masters. However, both slaves who worked in plantation houses, as well as slaves in an urban environment, were better off than slaves who worked in fields. It was almost a class structure within the slave community, with slaves who worked in the fields often seen as the most expendable, and least well treated, of the slaves in the Chesapeake region. Such diversity, as well as the region's dependence on the tobacco trade, led to the Chesapeake bearing a culture that was an amalgamation of African American and European cultures and thoughts.