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Bourland 1
Jolynn Bourland
03/27/2017
The Engagement of African-Americans in the American Experiment
The American Experiment begins with Europeans descent to America where hard work
and dedication then leads to the foundation of the United States of America today. History books
tend to focus on people of European descent (also referred to as “White”) when detailing the
hardships and events that took place to build our America. Later on in the 18th century, Whites
were not the sole group responsible in the pivotal American Revolution that helped further the
American Experiment we are still working with in this century. A group that often gets passed
over in our history texts are the African-Americans that were desperately important to the future
United States of America during this time period. Free and enslaved African-Americans, all over
the thirteen colonies, deserve the recognition for their engagements, such as: building America’s
economic growth and sustainability; assisting in the Revolutionary War towards independence;
and creating the African-America culture that still exists in the present day. Even throughout the
persistence of chattel slavery, African-Americans tenacious efforts greatly affected the American
Experiment.
The recognition for the New World economic growth should go to the slaves who
laboriously produced the main consumer goods during the early colonial time periods. Goods
such as coffee, rum, sugar, tobacco, and especially cotton were necessary for colonists to
participate in the world trade system
1
. The translantic slave trade in the early 1600s brought
1
Gildren Lehrman Institure of American History. 2009-2017. "Was Slavery the engine of American Economic
Growth?" Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. Accessed March 22, 2017.
https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/slavery-and-anti-slavery/resources/was-slavery-engine-
american-economic-growth.
Bourland 2
indentured servants on ships to Virginia, in order to being the agricultural climb. These servants
were both white Europeans and black Africans who could not afford to travel to America
2
. The
arrangement was that these indentured servants would work the fields in the colonies for an
agreed upon length of time and their “bill” will be considered paid. Both whites and blacks
worked alongside each other at the very beginning. It was believed that all the servants would
once be able to be free. Records unfortunately show that the listings for the Africans were not
recorded and their terms of service were not finite
3
. Around 1650, Africans were even starting to
become segregated in the field work. The plantation owners started to view Africans as a lower
class; and white servitude decreased due to unskilled workers and their prices skyrocketing. It
was more economical and socially acceptable for plantation owners to enslave blacks for labor.
The main reason for needing slaves, to begin with, was to produce a large amount of
