To Honestyandreality guy: Since you're clearly a history buff, let's talk about indentured servants in colonial America. Many indentured servants were contracted for by American colonists with the British government for a certain number of men, women or children of various age groups. How these contracts were fulfilled wasn't important. Many quotas were met by kidnapping or duping individuals.
A ******* child of an indentured servant, even if the Master's, could be sold off for up to 31 years and taken from the mother, who would THEN receive 5 more years added to her indentureship for having had the child (despite her almost certainly not the one initiating sexual contact). If families came to the colonies together, any members who died during the voyage were have their indentureships served by the surviving members, and even then those families were often separated, never to see each other again. Those for sale could be made to strip naked, and have every part of their bodies examined like a piece of livestock. Once paid for, they must do whatever task the master asked. Punishments for servants were identical to those of slaves.
Indentured servitude differed very little from formal slavery, and the Transatlantic slave trade as such has been in existence for over a century by the time of Anthony Johnson's case. Incidentally, an earlier case had ended with a black man named John Punch being declared a slave for life as a punishment for trying to escape his indentured servitude. His fellow escapees, who were white, were not punished in this way.) So to answer your disingenuous rhetorical question: Yes, slavery would have happened without Mr. Johnson's court case. It had already been happening.
Please explain the inappropriate content below.
