When reading “Drawing the Color Line” I found it interesting that historians thought the first blacks in Virginia were thought of as servants and not slaves. The article stated that they were more “like the white indentured servants brought from Europe” so in reality they were slaves and not “servants.” It remains more evident when you read that they were treated differently than white servants and viewed differently too. The settlers couldn’t readily make the Indians work even though they had firepower at their disposal; they were outnumbered and it wouldn’t solve their labor issues. It was also interesting that the settlers realized their lack of resourcefulness and ineptitude when it came to survival. The issue of survival pushed the settlers in the path of becoming slave masters and with black slaves already being imported from Africa, it seemed like an easy answer. Like the article states “it would have been strange if those twenty blackssold as objects to settlerswere considered as anything but slaves.”
While reading “Slavery Without Submission, Emancipation Without Freedom” I found it interesting that it was thought that “slavery had destroyed the black family” and those who had the “black condition” was because their family was weak and poor. I also thought it interesting that they thought that blacks without families were helpless and would not be able to resist those who tried to enslave them. The Fugitive Slave Act passed in 1850 was also something I learned and thought was important to discuss because it allowed slave owners to recapture ex-slaves or pick and choose those they claimed had run away. These readings shed more light on previous readings about slavery because they actually go into the slave’s account instead of just the slave master’s.
Works Cited
Zinn, Howard. “Drawing the Color Line.” A People’s History of the United States.
Zinn, Howard. “Slavery Without Submission, Emancipation Without Freedom.” A People’s
History of the United States.
