The article, “Drawing the Color Line,” claims that slavery in AMerica was a result of a historical force, and not nature. This historical force included various factors: colonist’s starvation, jealousy of the Indian’s success, need to feel superior, the African’s displacement, profit from plantations, and the separation of serfs and slaves.
Early on, colonists went through the “starvation time”(Zinn 1) where many died, and after that winter they still struggled to harvest enough food to survive as they needed a larger work force. They could not use Indians because they were too defiant and they better understood the land, so they turned to African slaves who were removed from their homeland, and people. “ The blacks had been torn from their land and culture, forced into a situation where the heritage of language, dress, custom, and family relations was bit by bit obliterated except for the remnants that blacks could hold on to by sheer, extraordinary persistence.”(Zinn 2) Colonists could better control a group of lone slaves than a tribe of Indians. …show more content…
Colonists had viewed Indians as savages because they lived in the wild, and did not possess the same technology. Once the colonists realized that, despite their civilized ways, the Indians were far better of, they grew resentful because of their own incompetence. “There may have been a kind of frustrated rage at their own ineptitude, at the Indian superiority at taking care of themselves that made the Virginians especially ready to become the masters of slaves.”(ZInn 1) They took their anger out on the Indians with massacres and then on the slaves with racism and claims of