Chapter 4 - American Life in the Seventeenth Century, 1607-1692 Flashcards
Tobacco
First grown in Jamestown by John Rolfe. It is credited with saving the colony, and became an important cash crop for Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina.
Indentured Servants
Indentured servitude was a labor system in which people paid for their passage to the New World by working for an employer for a fixed term of years. The lack of land and opportunity for freed indentured servants was the major cause of Bacon’s Rebellion.
Freedom Dues
The collection of goods an indentured servant was to receive at the end of his time. Usually included some food, a set of clothes, and a small parcel of land.
Headright System
System to entice people to bring indentured servants to the colonies. Whoever paid the passage of laborer was entitled to 50 acres of land. Allowed the early settlers able to amass huge amounts of land for plantations.
William Berkeley
Governor of Virginia during Bacon’s Rebellion. He refused to retaliate against Indian attacks on the frontier where many former indentured servants lived. The reaction to that was Bacon’s Rebellion.
Nathaniel Bacon
1676 - Nathaniel Bacon and other western Virginia settlers were angry at Virginia Governor Berkley for trying to appease the Doeg Indians after the Doegs attacked the western settlements. The frontiersmen formed an army, with Bacon as its leader, which defeated the Indians and then marched on Jamestown and burned the city. The rebellion ended suddenly when Bacon died of an illness. This is a primary cause of the shift to African slavery.
Royal African Company
English company that originally had a monopoly on the AFrican slave trade.
The Middle Passage
Term for the the journey slaves were forced on from Africa to the Caribbean. The Africans were packed into overcrowded ship hulls for the months it took for the ship to reach the slave auctions of the New World. About 20% of the Africans died on the trip, mostly due to disease.
Slave Codes
Slave Codes were a set of laws that allowed a slave’s master to retrieve their slave from the North (free states) without an authority’s permission.
Chattel Slavery
Chattel slavery is what most people have in mind when they think of the kind of slavery that existed in the United States before the Civil War, and that existed legally throughout many parts of the world as far back as recorded history. Slaves were actual property who could be bought, sold, traded or inherited.
Stono Rebellion
A slave rebellion in 1739, in the colony of South Carolina. It was the largest slave uprising in the British mainland colonies, with 42-47 whites and 44 blacks killed.
Plantations
Large scale farms that relied on slave labor to produce a single cash crop like tobacco or cotton. Usually in the South, were very spread out, and they functioned as a small town with their own churches and graveyards.
Yeoman Farmers
Farmers who owned the land they farmed.
Harvard
1636 - Founded by a grant from the Massachusetts general court. Followed Puritan beliefs.
Town Meetings
Regular meetings in New England Puritan towns where men would gather to decide town business. Early version of independence that would plant the seeds of the eventual revolution.
