What did slaves do in Colonial times?

In colonial times, people from the west coast of Africa were captured and shipped to Virginia and other colonies to work as slaves. In Virginia, these Africans lived and worked on plantations or small farms where tobacco was the cash crop. Enslaved for life, they could be bought or sold as property.

What jobs did African slaves do?

The vast majority of enslaved Africans employed in plantation agriculture were field hands. Even on plantations, however, they worked in other capacities. Some were domestics and worked as butlers, waiters, maids, seamstresses, and launderers. Others were assigned as carriage drivers, hostlers, and stable boys.

When did slaves have to start working?

Between the ages of seven and twelve, boys and girls were put to work in intensive field work. Older or physically handicapped slaves were put to work in cloth houses, spinning cotton, weaving cloth, and making clothes.

What was life like for African Americans during the colonial period?

Working long hours, living in crude conditions, and suffering abuses from their owners, African captives faced harsh conditions in colonial America. Families were often broken apart, with husbands and wives sold to different owners than their children.

How did slaves get to the colonies?

In 1619, an English Privateer, The White Lion, with Dutch letters of marque, brought African slaves pillaged from a Portuguese slave ship to Point Comfort. Several colonial colleges held enslaved people as workers and relied on them to operate.

What types of jobs did slaves do in each colonial region?

From the seventeenth century onward, slaves in the North could be found in almost every field of Northern economic life. They worked as carpenters, shipwrights, sailmaker, printers, tailors, shoemakers, coopers, blacksmiths, bakers, weavers, and goldsmiths.

What tasks did slaves do?

Large plantations had field hands and house servants. House servants performed tasks such as cooking, cleaning, and driving, while the field hands labored for up to 20 hours a day clearing land, planting seed, and harvesting crops.

What was life like for slaves in colonial America?

Life on the fields meant working sunup to sundown six days a week and having food sometimes not suitable for an animal to eat. Plantation slaves lived in small shacks with a dirt floor and little or no furniture. Life on large plantations with a cruel overseer was oftentimes the worst.

How did slavery develop in the colonies?

In 1619, colonists brought enslaved Africans to Virginia. This was the beginning of a human trafficking between Africa and North America based on the social norms of Europe. Slavery grew quickly in the South because of the region’s large plantations. New England did not have large plantations for growing crops.

When were African slaves brought to the colonies?

1619
The arrival of the first captives to the Jamestown Colony, in 1619, is often seen as the beginning of slavery in America—but enslaved Africans arrived in North America as early as the 1500s.