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Igel

(35,296 posts)
8. Because he said "400" years.
Mon Feb 11, 2019, 11:45 PM
Feb 2019

That means 1619.

There was no "deep south" then. There was just a claim to territory to counterbalance Spanish and French claims.

It pays to remember that slaveries vary in time and space. What we think of as "the" slavery from the antebellum South was but one of many, with different traits and legal niceties. In the very 1700s, white Americans were also taken slaves, but not by other white Americans. There were slaver raids through the Middle Ages from the Chersonesus up through County Cork. Benghazi was noted for its slave trade. Benin City was still largely had a slave-trade economy in the late 1800s.

The slave system in North America was different from the system in Brazil was different from the system in Haiti and from the system in Mexico, and they all changed over time.

Serfdom in, say, Russia also varied over time and space. From how the owner was paid, in time or in kind or in cash; whether the serfs could be sold apart from the land or were land-bound; whether they were free to move as long as they stayed on state land. When you read of a serf in 1700 and 1800 and 1850, they're different. Sometimes it matters, sometimes it doesn't.

The "indentured servant" bit is especially telling, however, because indentured servitude continued for scores of years after 1619. At least some of my ancestors were probably brought over as indentured servants. Some people sold themselves for debt; some sold their offspring for debt or money; and some were indentured as a consequence of debt that they owed, not entering into the indenture voluntarily. That it was little different from chattel slavery doesn't mean it wasn't different.

Many of the Africans that landed in 1619 (apparently courtesy of the Dutch) as "indentured servants" won their freedom under the terms of their assumed indenture. That's a difference, and wouldn't have been very likely a hundred years later, and even harder to pull off a hundred years after that.

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