After years of service, these individuals, black, white, and Indian, eventually gained their freedom. Some of the blacks, when freed, bought property, but because of racial prejudice were unable to rise beyond the lowest level of colonial society.

Through the years, the transition from limited servitude to a lifetime of slavery for Negroes was legalized in the colonies by Massachusetts in 1641, followed by Connecticut in 1650 and Virginia in 1661. Statutes legalizing slavery soon were passed in the rest of the colonies. In the late 1700s, the demand for workers on plantations in the South was further increased by the 1793 invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney (this was a machine for separating cotton fibers from the seeds). Whitney’s gin could clean as much cotton in a day as could 50 people working by hand and helped meet the growing demand for cotton. More and more workers were then needed on the plantations which led to a tremendous growth in the slave population.