Imagine yourself at the mercy of another human being. You are dependent upon this person for food and shelter. This person controls your life in every way possible. You and your family lives are in you owners hand. You are told when to wake up, what to do, how to do it and when to stop doing it. If you do not cooperate you will be beaten severely. This is the life of a slave.
             At first, the American colonies did not have slaves doing the work. The majority of the work in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century was done by indentured servants. Woods states, "Seventy-five to 80 percent of all people who left England for Chesapeake during the seventeenth century went as indentured servants" (Wood 14). Wealthy Englishmen work pay their way over and in return the indentured servants work for them for a set number of years. Indentured servants were also treated much better the slaves were treated in the future by most owners. When the servants contract was up they were free to do what they please. The owners would also give the newly freed servants a certain amount of land in which they could now work on their own (Wood 17).
             The English soon realized that their was a much cheaper way in labor they paying the price to transport English families to the new world. You could just take a boat to West Africa, fill up with some Africans and bring it back to North America with a load of free labor. The English outlook on slavery stated by Woods is as follows, "the slave was no longer a person, a man or a women, but an animal" (Wood 10). This is how the English looked at the slaves once they reached North America. The English justified slavery through the bible. They thought that slavery was "a divine punishment for sinful behavior" (Wood 25).
             England began enslaving people in the early 1600's. The English first devised a form of slavery in Barbados. They took the West Africans alrea...