s in the colony of Virginia note that "a Dutch man of war[re] with 20 negars" arrived (Stampp 15-18), there were white indentured servants, some voluntary immigrants and some indentured because of debt, in all of the colonies.
The arrival of African slaves brought a racial component to that culture, and the effect was to institutionalize the social divides between black slaves and white masters--even if the blacks were not slaves but immigrants. By 1702, New York's the scope of certain slavery laws had a racist tinge because they covered free blacks, who were thought to be willing to foster a slave rebellion among enslaved blacks. In the 1740s, accusation of slave-set arson fires, called the "Great Conspiracy," led to trials resulting in execution by hanging, burning, and transport of more than 30 blacks (Higginbotham 134-5). By 1712, black freedmen and slaves alike were prevented from owning property in New York and banned from certain skilled trades (e.g., cooperage or barrel making and fishing (Higginbotham 121ff). Even the economy of Rhode Island, established by Roger Williams as "an experiment in democracy and soul liberty," was by the middle of the eighteenth century dominated by slave-owning planters at Newport (Becker 168).
American independence from England did not create independence for blacks; far from it. Although the slave trade and the institution of slavery itself moved ever farther southward after the Revolutionary War, the institution was ingrained into the nation because it was embedded in the Constitution. The Great Compromise put in the Constitution (Article I, Section 2) that slaves were to be considered three-fifths of a person for purposes of taxation and congressional representation. By the time of the Revolutionary War--and certainly by the time of the Constitutional Convention--a racist component had entered the picture of slavery. If, as the myth has it, the cotton gin made slavery economically viable, ...