Existing comment:
Servitude in Colonial Virginia
To meet skyrocketing labor demands, white indentured servants were recruited from England, mainly to work the tobacco fields. In time, enslaved Africans took their place.
Virginia's first Africans -- stolen from Portuguese slave traders -- arrived in 1619. But white indentured servants made up 80 percent of the colony's workforce until the 1670s. They were freed after four to seven years of labor. By the 1690s, in some counties blacks outnumbered whites in the workforce. The shift occurred because of English involvement in the slave trade, Bacon's Rebellion of 1676, and improved conditions in England that diminished the labor supply. |