USH: Unit 2 | Colonies to Independence: Race and Slavery Quiz #1 Study Guide

Vocabulary flashcards covering the key terms, historical dates, and foundational concepts for Unit 2: Colonies to Independence (Race and Slavery).

Unit 2 Essential Question

Who was included in – and excluded from – the new political community imagined by the American Revolution?

Jamestown (1607)

The first permanent English settlement established in North America in the year 1607.

"Starving time"

A catastrophic period of famine and disease during the winter of 1609–1610 in Jamestown that resulted in the death of the majority of the colonists.

Cash-crop economy

An agricultural economy centered on growing commercial crops for market sale and profit rather than for direct subsistence or local consumption.

Tobacco

The primary cash crop of colonial Virginia that created economic viability for Jamestown and drove the demand for unfree labor systems.

Transatlantic slave trade

The oceanic commercial network that forcibly captured, transported, and sold millions of enslaved Africans into the Americas.

Middle Passage

The horrific, forced maritime voyage of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas as part of the transatlantic slave trade.

Indentured servitude

A contractual labor system where individuals agreed to work for a fixed number of years in exchange for passage to the colonies, food, clothing, and shelter.

Slavery

A permanent, legal system of hereditary unfree labor where human beings are categorized and treated as chattel property with no legal rights.

Freedom dues

The customary commodities, land, clothes, or tools promised to an indentured servant upon completing their term of service.

Reasons Virginia transitioned from servitude to slavery

Three primary factors during the late 1600s: a decrease in the availability of English indentured servants, increasing life expectancy that made enslaved laborers a better long-term investment, and the desire to prevent alliances between landless poor laborers and servants following Bacon's Rebellion.

Bacon’s Rebellion (1676)

An armed uprising in 1676 led by Nathaniel Bacon uniting poor white servants and Black laborers against Virginia's ruling planter elite, which spurred the legal construction of racial slavery to prevent future multiracial rebellions.

Race

A socially constructed system of categorizing humans based on arbitrary physical characteristics, developed historically to establish social hierarchies and justify inequality and slavery.

Anthony Johnson

An African man in early colonial Virginia who completed his servitude, acquired land, and held legal status as a free property owner, illustrating that racial boundaries and hereditary slavery were not yet fully fixed in the early 1600s.

Virginia laws constructing race

Statutes passed in the late 1600s that codified racial hierarchy, notably establishing that a child's legal status followed the condition of the mother and legally differentiating the rights and punishments of white servants from Black enslaved individuals.