★★★★★ 5
The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of... Bernard Bailyn
Format: Hardcover
A remarkable book!!!
I have never read such a comprehensive book on early United States history that contained so much information I had never read before.
How the status of "indentured servant" existed alongside the origins of slavery in Virginia and Maryland (along the Chesapeake Bay) was both remarkable and horrible.
That a white man (typically, landowner) could have a child with a (black) slave who would become a free person at adulthood (earliest laws) created problems (they needed the "help"), so this law of the 1650s-1660s was changed! And if a white (free) woman had a child with a (black) slave, the resulting child would remain a slave! Matrilineal or patrilineal human rights, that is the question.
Indentured servant, but with no expiration date.
I had never before read how people in this country were real "pioneers" in the creation of slavery - at least with slavery of humans captured from the continent of Africa! It seems that whatever voices of "Christian" decency there might have been at the time - church based values or ones simply based in the hearts of people living here - they were drowned out by commercial interests or those who simply couldn't be bothered by such concerns.
I hope you read this book and recommend it to your friends!
Sincerely,
Bob Cargill, Minneapolis
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Reviewed in the United States on April 19, 2013
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