The Pilgrim Colonists

The Pilgrim Colonists and the Jamestown colonists started arriving in 1620 and bought their first African slaves in 1621. The Colonists met the Indian tribes and established a fairly cooperative relationship at first. The Indians were farmers, and had developed the land into tillable farm plots. Few of the Colonists were farmers, and there was a lack of agricultural knowledge among them. The Indians helped the Colonists survive by giving them Indian foods, and by teaching them the art of farming.

In Jamestown, the Colonists were too busy hunting for gold to prepare for the winter, which as transplanted urban Englanders, they had not entirely anticipated. The Jamestown Colonists spent their time digging up Native American graves and other pursuits while the Pilgrims, who showed up a little later in a different area, were a little more industrious. The Jamestown Colony was a failure and many people did not survive the winter. The Pilgrims were much more successful. They arrived interested in agriculture which was the key to their greater success. They also found ready made farms and homes, even crops in the cultivated fields, waiting for them.

Due to the vast numbers of Native Americans wiped out by disease , tribal farmlands were left unclaimed. The Colonists took these Indian farms over and applied their newly learned skills. Many aspects of the tribal system, such as the truly Democratic government and the use of eagle symbolism, were observed and copied by the Colonists.

After their numbers began to grow exponentially, the Colonists also began to look for ways to expel the Indians from the colonized territories to get the rest of the properties. The Colonists were also looking for ways to make the profits for which they were responsible under their English charters. The tradition of forced servitude was many thousands of years old, and the English Colonists had brought indentured servants with them, which were for all intents and purposes a type of slave.

Some of the Colonists tried making the Native Americans into indentured slaves through various means, as the supply of white indentured servants was limited and the Natives were readily available. The Native Americans could be tricked out of ownership of their lands; could be hired for agricultural labor and then fined for various infractions, leading to indentured servitude to repay the debt; or merely taken and held by force.

Once the Native Americans lost their lands and became dependent on the Colonial economic system, they had no choice but to work. The Indians who were unwilling slaves merely had to run away to return to their families, which was a drawback for the Colonists.

The Pilgrims had been purchasing African slaves from the Dutch and Portuguese

traders. The closeness of Indian settlements became a threat to the Colonists because the Africans learned they could escape to nearby Indian lands. African slaves who escaped to Indian lands were welcomed and honored, and some became chiefs of the tribes. Intermarriage was highly thought of as it produced bi-cultural offspring which were highly regarded in the Indian cultures. The fact that the Indian tribes welcomed the escaped slaves must have been yet another Indian-related annoyance to the white colonists. If a buffer of wilderness could be created by pushing the tribes away from the Colonies, then the African slaves would