Answer:
Step-by-step explanation:
As British colonists became convinced that Africans best served their demand for labor, importation increased. By the turn of the eighteenth century AFRICAN SLAVES numbered in the tens of thousands in the British colonies. Before the first shots are fired at Lexington and Concord, they totaled in the hundreds of thousands. The cries for liberty by the colonial leaders that were to follow turned out to be merely white cries. In the first decades of European settlement in America, the physical labor of establishing homes, agriculture, and commerce was carried out by "bound" laborers—that is unpaid workers who were owned by ("bound" to) a "master" who controlled not only their labor, but also all other aspects of their lives. These workers were "indentured servants" from Europe, who were freed after some years of service, or indigenous native Americans (who often knew how to escape into areas where European "masters" could not find them), or by laborers bought in Africa and stranded in America, unable to return to their homes, and easily identifiable by their dark skins. Sometimes African workers were treated like indentured servants, and freed after some years of service. But after 1690, the status of slavery hardened: bound labor, based on race, became a lifetime sentence, inherited from generation to generation.