Freedom is on one end defined as the extent to which liberty is denied. British North America defined freedom less as a political or social status than as a spiritual condition.
Christians enshrined the idea of liberation, but as a spiritual condition rather than a worldly one. In this definition, servitude and freedom were mutually reinforcing, not contradictory states, since those who accepted Christ’s teachings from His ambassadors’ became “free from sin and servants to God”.
The Puritans settlers’ of the colonial Massachusetts, who believed their colony the embodiment of true Christianity, planted this spiritual definition of freedom on American soil. The puritan used slavery as a way to coarse individuals accepts Christianity in order to attain certain freedom. Christianity was an alternative out. Slaves accounted for thirty percent of the colonial population.
Because of the massive amounts of tobacco crops planted by families, indentured servants” were brought in from England to work on the farms. In exchange for working, they received transatlantic passage and eventual “freedom due”, which included a few barrels of corn, a suit of clothes, and possibly a small piece of land. The indentured servants who were ‘white slaves’ represented more than ¾ of all European immigrants to Virginia and Maryland in the 17th Century.
Most of the first Englanders in North America were home owners and the great planters owned gangs of slaves and vast domains of land; ruled the region’s economy and monopolized political power then the small farmers who were the largest social group; tilled their own modest plots and may have owned one or two slaves. The Indians mostly came in to North America, settled mainly at Jamestown and they fought off the first English settlement. Women played a very frightening role in New England religious episodes by performing witch craft led some of them to face hang sentences.
References
Reid, John G, and Emerson W. Baker. Essays on Northeastern North America, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. Print.
Smith, Mark M. Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South. Chapel Hill [u.a.: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1997. Print.
