Seeking to curb young white men’s violence, elites began to shift their workforces away from white indentured servants and toward enslaved peoples of African descent. Armed, they formed a dangerous element in the colony, and in 1676 launched a bloody challenge to the authority of elites, in the form of an uprising called Bacon’s Rebellion. Once freed, former servants found themselves without money, land, or hope. Within the first half-century of Virginia’s founding, a few white men with political connections owned most of the fertile lands in the eastern part of the colony. Homesick and forced to perform new and arduous forms of work-cutting down trees to clear forests, and then toiling stooped over in tobacco fields-these servants proved to be resentful members of plantation households. Most field workers were young English indentured servants, bound to a master for a stipulated number of years. Seventeenth-century Virginia landowners cobbled together plantation labor forces from an unruly mix of Europeans, Native Americans, and people of African descent. Morgan’s book American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia(1975) seeks to account for two related historical developments: The origins of American slavery, and the fact that many of the leading Founding Fathers–-George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, James Madison, and James Monroe, to name but a few-owned enslaved workers.
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