The article I chose to do my assignment on is “Of the servants and slaves of Virginia" written by Robert Beverley, a Virginia planter.
This article explains that slaves and servants are not the same thing. Slaves are Negroes and their posterity and they serve for life. Servants only serve for a few years, depending of the country they live in. It also talked about white women and how they were never put to work in the Ground, the law back then imposed the heaviest taxes upon female servants if they were to work the ground, but a woman was able to work out doors. Mostly, when people think about slavery they think every black person was a slave whether they were male or female. The author of this article tries to explain that there was a difference between slaves, servants and women for people to have a different view of what happened back then, and not everyone was a “slave”, some had more privileges than others in a way. Servants had it slightly better than slaves because they didn’t have to serve for life for instance, they also were able to complain if they were getting treated unfair by their “Master” for free, they didn’t have to work when I’ll or lame, and if their master would make them work he would get punished, also at the end of their term serving, they would get 15 bushels of corn from their master, which was basically enough for a year back then, along with clothing. I think servants didn’t have it as bad as slaves just because they were only working for a couple of years and in exchange for food and other things, and their rights granted from being indentured servants were fair, from what I can read in this article. The concessions given at the end of this article are similar to what we have today, people, like the servants, have to work in exchange of money, it’s just different nowadays because not everyone chooses to do so.
