I’ve been writing about the Abolition Movement today. It made me think about why the American colonies started down the road toward slavery in the first place. It’s a question I can’t entirely answer, but at least I can shed a tiny bit of light on it. Of course, slavery was common in the world at that point. But there is more than that going on here …

The first thing that popped out to me in tracing the history of slavery in what became the Southern United States is that at no point was a choice made to use African slaves rather than free labor to work the fields. Free labor was not then a viable option–something that is easy to lose sight of. In the mid-seventeenth century, the large plantations that were being established in Virginia’s Tidewater area and the Carolina Low Country were tended mainly by indentured servants from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Chattel slavery is, of course, quite different from indentured servitude, but one can see how the differences might not have been considered overwhelming at the time.

I’ve written before about indentured servants in the recent report of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on Human Trafficking. Somewhere between one half and two thirds of all white immigrants to the American colonies from the mid-seventeenth century to the Revolutionary War came as indentured servants–either voluntarily or as convicts. Convicts were only about 10% of the total number of indentured servants.

In Virginia, these seventeenth-century servants might serve three to seven years, and if they were lucky enough to survive the period of their indentures, they would often move further into the interior and establish small farms in the Piedmont areas. Chattel slavery of Africans was being practiced–even in the New England colonies—but it was not yet a major factor.

Life was tough for these indentured servants. But it is important to understand why the institution of indentured servitude filled a very real need at the time (and indeed in some parts of the globe continues to be a risky, but plausible way out for those mired in the worst of circumstances).

Consider, for example, my own situation: I am a law professor. If I ever lose that job, I would be unlikely to find another in the San Diego area where I live, so there is a good chance I would have to move. Fortunately for me, I have a little money in the bank to tide me over and finance my move, whether it is 1000 miles to Dallas or 8000 to Delhi. I am lucky.

My ancestors were not so lucky. They didn’t have money in the bank. Indeed, I can’t be sure they had even heard of a bank. But they had heard of the New World and they wanted to come. The problem of how to finance a long voyage from a land of poverty to a land of opportunity is an old one. The seventeenth century British Isles had a lot of willing workers, but not a lot of work or even food to eat. The American colonies were crying out for them. But the logistics of getting from Point A to Point B only seem easy to us because we are looking at them from a distance of hundreds of years. In reality, it required smart thinking and a willingness to take a risk. Who would pay for their passage? And who would pay for their food during the long passage? Where would they sleep before their first payment of wages? What would they eat? They didn’t have savings. Nor did they have easy access to credit.

One of the most logical ways for aspiring immigrants to get credit was to commit themselves to labor through a written indenture, which could be sold by a labor broker to the highest bidder upon arrival in the New World. Put differently, their best option was to become indentured servants. No Old World bank could take the risk of lending money to these would-be immigrants. There would be no way to assure its repayment once they got to America. The debtor could disappear into the interior, never to be located by the lender again. But while an Old World bank couldn’t take the risk, a seventeenth-century Virginia plantation owner in need of laborers could. In addition to providing room, board and work, he could keep a sharp eye on his investment. His neighbors had a stake in helping him do so, since they had indentured servants too. The system worked imperfectly, but well enough to bring a lot of people to America—many of them desperate refugees from famine and religious wars–who otherwise could not have gotten here.

No one should be under any illusion about the potential for abuse. Stories abound of seventeenth century Britons being kidnapped and thrown onto a ship headed for America. Some of the stories were likely true. And there were other problems too. In the seventeenth century, recruiters usually knew a good deal more about what life is going to be like in the New World than did the potential recruit. They therefore were in a position to mislead the recruit in order to persuade him to make the move. “The streets are paved with gold in the New World”—or so it was said. In addition, once the servant arrived at his destination, his employer had an incentive to squeeze as much work out of him as possible. Indeed, an employer who was also a slaveholder had good reason to assign an indentured servant to the more hazardous jobs, since the death of an indentured servant, particularly one whose indenture was about to expire, was less harmful financially to the employer than the death of a healthy slave.

But it is also important not to exaggerate the abuses. Dr. Russell Menard, professor of history at the University of Minnesota and a leading expert in the social and economic history of the North American colonies, has written: “Servants … could protest ill-treatment and receive a hearing in the courts. Cases in this period are few, but the provincial court seems to have taken seriously its obligation to enforce the terms of indentures and protect servants’ rights. No instances of serious mistreatment of servants appear in the [State of Maryland’s] records in the late 1630s and early 1640s. Servants were worked long and hard, but they were seldom abused.”

Chattel slavery of Africans might never have flourished as it did had it not been for the little-understood rebellion in 1676 led by Nathaniel Bacon against Virginia’s colonial Governor William Berkeley. The rebels had a lot of grievances, some possibly legitimate, others not so much. Among other things, they wanted lower taxes and a more aggressive policy toward the Indian tribes, whose territory their farms were often pressing against. The significant aspect of the rebellion for understanding the rise of chattel slavery was that Bacon’s followers included both indentured servants and the small farmers in the interior who had previously been indentured servants (and some members of more prosperous classes too).

According to some historians, once the rebellion was over, the potential for further unrest disturbed the large Tidewater landowners. They resolved to put a stop to future coalitions between their field workers and other poor whites by increasing the use of Africans as permanent slaves, rather than continuing to rely on indentured servants. It was a conscious effort to separate the interests of the plantation field workers and the poor white farmers to the west, and it worked beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. Shifting alliances among the three groups—plantation owners and their allies concentrated in the coastal areas, poor whites concentrated in the upland areas and African American slaves and their descendants—accounted for a good deal of the history of the Southern states well into the modern era.

Indentured servitude was too important to die out quickly, but its use declined over time. As it became more rare, the difference in status between hereditary African slaves and the rest of the population become more and more stark. The immorality of the institution became more and more obvious. By then, however, it was hard to uproot the peculiar institution.

The 338th anniversary of Bacon’s death, which was the beginning of the end of the rebellion, was this past Sunday.