The institution of slavery in the colonies of British America developed through a combination of factors, but primarily from a boom in industrialized agriculture and the early existence of large slave labor populations on nearby European-colonized Caribbean islands. Before the 1650s, however, African-based industrial slavery had not developed within the colonies. During this time, Native Americans were the main target for servitude by British American colonists.

By the 1650s, several Southern colonies were known to have begun enslaving both local Native Americans and African Americans for work on industrial plantations. As indigenous peoples suffered massive population losses due to imported diseases, Europeans turned to the importation of African slaves, initially, from European-owned West Indies (Caribbean) sugar plantations, primarily to work on tobacco, rice or indigo plantations.

Ancient methods of European slavery and racist ideologies were handed down to the British American colonies shortly after agriculture became industrialized in the South. Most African American colonists eventually succumbed to slavery and were legally defined by hereditary traits as chattels of property.

There was a period of about 50 years during which industrialized slavery was mostly absent from the colonies. The 1587 Roanoke Colony attempt by around 112 English colonists on a Virginia island was found abandoned in 1590. Jamestown was the second English colony, founded in 1606 by around 214 colonists. The first documented Africans to arrive in English America first lived in Jamestown and were captured from a slave ship and transported on the frigate known as the White Lion in August 1619. The Virginia colonists traded provisions to obtain the Africans. The two early colonists are described in the 1624 census as an African man and woman named Antoney and Isabella.

Most early European colonists were indentured laborers who signed away their freedom to an English investment company known as the Virginia Company. Many were escaping famine and debt in Europe and paid their way to the "New World" by entering into contracted servitude for a paid ticket to America. Known as the Headright System, new colonists were promised 50 acres (0.20 km2) in return for years of indentured labor. Most early colonists were not of the same economic class as European slave owners and did not own slaves during their indenture. Years after living as colonists, few were able to fully pay their debt and, as a result, never received their promised plot of land. The main barrier was a lack of resources in the colonies and corruption within the Virginia Company. Early colonists were unsuccessful in finding the anticipated gold and proper soil to grow European crops. To cover its losses, originally agreed-upon periods of indentured servitude were often fraudulently extended by the Virginia Company for years without justification. Over half the population of Jamestown perished from starvation in 1618, still in debt to the Virginia Company. The one crop appearing to be most successful for colonists was tobacco. In 1614, John Rolfe began to raise the tobacco seeds he carried from Bermuda to Jamestown. Over the next decade, tobacco became the colonies' first cash crop and likely opened the door to African American slavery within some colonies in later decades, mainly in regions where tobacco grew successfully.

In 1624, the charter of the Virginia Company was revoked and the British Crown took over direct administration of the colony. Estimates suggest there were under 100 African Americans in the colony, or less than 2 percent of the population, through the 1650s. Up until then, early laborers of African descent were brought to the colonies, out of the Atlantic slave trade, and as there were yet no local slavery laws, placed mainly under the Headright System working alongside their white counterparts as indentured laborers. However, African Americans unlike others in the colony were not considered subjects of the Crown but foreigners and suffered a higher level of mis-treatment than whites and only a handful escaped systematic corruption to briefly experience freedom and a precarious legal system, especially as chattel slavery for Africans was established under the Crown and grew in importance in the colony. There are accounts of few African American colonists, freed under the Headright System, who later owned African American slaves and as chattel slavery grew in the 17th century even these few accounts cease.

By the Revolutionary War, most Southern colonies had developed large slave-based plantation systems, largely based on British-taught methods of slavery. Prohibitions on the importation of new slaves from the Caribbean and Africa, between 1776 to 1808, had little effect on American slavery, as it was already well established in the South. Slavery in the Northern colonies—which did not have the warm climates and ideal conditions for plantations to exist—primarily took the form of domestic labor, including other forms of unpaid work alongside non-enslaved counterparts. The American Revolution led to the first abolition laws in the Americas, although the institution of chattel slavery would continue to exist and expand across the Southern United States until finally being abolished at the time of the American Civil War in 1865.James A. Cox, "Bilboes, Brands, and Branks: Colonial Crimes and Punishments", Colonial Williamsburg Journal, Spring 2003.E.g., Alisha Ebrahimji, "Slavery as a punishment for crimes is in the books in Ohio and lawmakers have been trying to change that for years", CNN, June 24, 2020; accessed 2021.10.18.Oxford Journals

Native Americans

Native Americans enslaved members of their own and other tribes, usually as a result of taking captives in raids and warfare, both before and after Europeans arrived. This practice continued into the 1800s. In some cases, especially for young women or children, Native American families adopted captives to replace members they had lost. Among those native to the modern Southeastern United States, the children of slaves were considered free. Slaves included captives from wars and slave raids; captives bartered from other tribes, sometimes at great distances; children sold by their parents during famines; and men and women who staked themselves in gambling when they had nothing else, which put them into servitude in some life cases.

In three expeditions between 1514 and 1525, Spanish explorers visited the Carolinas. They enslaved Native Americans, who they took to their base on Santo Domingo. The Spanish Crown's charter for its 1526 colony in the Carolinas and Georgia was more restrictive. It required that Native Americans be treated well, paid, and converted to Christianity, but it also allowed already enslaved Native Americans to be bought and exported to the Caribbean if they had been enslaved by other Native Americans. This colony did not survive, so it is not clear if it exported any slaves. Native Americans were enslaved by the Spanish in Florida under the encomienda system. New England and the Carolinas captured Native Americans in wars and distributed them as slaves. Native Americans captured and enslaved some early European explorers and colonists.

Larger societies structured as chiefdoms kept slaves as unpaid field laborers. In band societies, owning enslaved captives attested to the captor's military prowess.Gallay, Alan. (2002) The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South 1670–1717. Yale University Press: New York. , p. 29 Some war captives were subjected to ritualized torture and execution.Gallay, Alan. (2002) The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South 1670–1717. Yale University Press: New York. , pp. 187–190. Alan Gallay and other historians emphasize differences between Native American enslavement of war captives and the European slave trading system, into which numerous native peoples were integrated."Europeans did not introduce slavery or the notion of slaves as laborers to the American South but instead were responsible for stimulating a vast trade in humans as commodities." (p. 29) "In Native American societies, ownership of individuals was more a matter of status for the owner and a statement of debasement and "otherness" for the slave than it was a means to obtain economic rewards from unfree labor. … The slave trade was an entirely new enterprise for most people of all three culture groups [Native American, European, and African]." (p. 8) Gallay, Alan. (2002) The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South 1670–1717. Yale University Press: New York. , p. 29 Richard White, in The Middle Ground, elucidates the complex social relationships between Native American groups and the early empires, including 'slave' culture and scalping.White, Richard. (1991) The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region. Cambridge University Press. Robbie Ethridge states, Let there be no doubt...that the commercial trade in Indian slaves was not a continuation and adaptation of pre-existing captivity patterns. It was a new kind of slave, requiring a new kind of occupational specialty ... organized militaristic slavers.Ethridge, From Chicaza to Chickasaw (2010), p. 93.

One example of militaristic slaving can be seen in Nathaniel Bacon's actions in Virginia during the late 1670s. In June 1676, the Virginia assembly granted Bacon and his men what equated to a slave-hunting license by providing that any enemy Native Americans caught were to be slaves for life. They also provided soldiers who had captured Native Americans with the right to "reteyne and keepe all such Indian slaves or other Indian goods as they either have taken or hereafter shall take." By this order, the assembly had made a public decision to enslave Native Americans. In the years to follow, other laws resulted in Native Americans being grouped with other non-Christian servants who had been imported to the colonies (Negro slaves) as slaves for life.

Puritan New England, Virginia, Spanish Florida, and the Carolina colonies engaged in large-scale enslavement of Native Americans, often through the use of Indian proxies to wage war and acquire the slaves. In New England, slave raiding accompanied the Pequot War and King Philip's War but declined after the latter war ended in 1676. Enslaved Native Americans were in Jamestown from the early years of the settlement, but large-scale cooperation between slave-trading English colonists and the Westo and Occaneechi peoples, whom they armed with guns, did not begin until the 1640s. These groups conducted enslaving raids in what is now Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, and possibly Alabama.Ethridge, From Chicaza to Chickasaw (2010), pp. 97–98. The Carolina slave trade, which included both trading and direct raids by colonists,Ethridge, From Chicaza to Chickasaw (2010), p. 109. was the largest among the British colonies in North America,Ethridge, From Chicaza to Chickasaw (2010), p. 65. estimated at 24,000 to 51,000 Native Americans by Gallay.Figures cited in Ethridge, From Chicaza to Chickasaw (2010), p. 237.