ABSTRACT
F rom the time the first africans stepped onto Virginia’s shore, F the English mainland colonies moved toward a biracial society, one in F which people from Africa and their descendants—including those of mixed African and European heritage—held a subordinate legal, social, and economic status. This caste system originated in three distinct circumstances: the demand for workers (especially on southern plantations); the availability of human beings for sale by means of the Atlantic slave trade; and the cultural predisposition of the English to regard darker-skinned people as inferior, and hence, suitable for enslavement. In the English colonies, this racial hierarchy was first articulated to its fullest in the West Indies, particularly in Barbados, which served as a model for the mainland plantation colonies in the Chesapeake Bay region and South Carolina. New England and the Middle Atlantic region, although less entrenched in slave ownership than the southern provinces, also profited from the labor of enslaved Africans and erected a hierarchical social framework based on notions of race.
