APUSH: Unit 1 Chapter 4 Vocab

Indentured Servants

Migrants who, in exchange for transatlantic passage, bound themselves to a colonial employer for a term of service, typically between four and seven years. Their migration addressed the chronic labor shortage in the colonies and facilitated settlement.

Headright System

Employed in the tobacco colonies to encourage the importation of indentured servants, the system allowed an individual to acquire fifty acres of land if he paid for a laborer's passage to the colony.

Bacon's Rebellion

Uprising of Virginia backcountry farmers and indentured servants led by planter Nathaniel Bacon. Initially a response to Governor William Berkeley's refusal to protect backcountry settlers from attacks by Indigenous peoples, the rebellion eventually grew into a broader conflict between impoverished settlers and the planter elite.

Royal African Company

English joint-stock company that enjoyed a state-granted monopoly on the colonial slave trade from 1672 until 1698. The supply of slaves to the North American colonies rose sharply once the company lost its monopoly privileges.

Middle Passage

Transatlantic voyage enslaved people endured between Africa and the colonies. Mortality rates were notoriously high.

Slave Codes

Set of laws beginning in 1662 defining racial slavery. They established the hereditary nature of slavery and limited the rights and education of slaves.

Congregational Church

Self-governing Puritan congregations without the hierarchical establishment of the Anglican Church.

Jeremiad

Often-fiery sermons lamenting the waning piety of parishioners first delivered in New England in the mid- seventeenth century; named after the doom-saying Old Testament prophet Jeremiah.

Half-Way Covenant

Agreement allowing unconverted offspring of church members to baptize their children. It signified a waning of religious zeal among second- and third-generation Puritans.

Salem Witch Trials

Series of witchcraft trials launched after a group of adolescent girls in Salem, Massachusetts, claimed to have been bewitched by certain older women of the town. Twenty individuals were put to death before the trials were put to an end by the governor of Massachusetts.

Leisler's Rebellion

Armed conflict between aspiring merchants led by Jacob Leisler and the ruling elite of New York. One of many uprisings that erupted across the colonies when wealthy colonists attempted to re-create European social structures in the New World.

William Berkeley

(1606-1677) Royal governor of Virginia, with brief interruptions, from 1641 until his death. Berkeley, a member of Virginia's seaboard elite, drew the ire of backwater settlers for refusing to protect them against Indian attacks. This friction eventually led to Bacon's Rebellion.

Nathaniel Bacon

(1647-1676) Young Virginia planter who led a rebellion against Governor William Berkeley in 1676 to protest Berkeley's refusal to protect frontier settlers from Indian attacks.