Week 3 — Building Slavery into Law: Years, Contracts, and a Colony's Frame — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 3 of the term — measure the decades in which colonial law built slavery, read the week's document the historian's way, and explain the difference between servitude and slavery to someone new to history.

This week you learned how indentured servitude differed from slavery, what the National Park Service reports about 1619, how the Atlantic slave trade and the Middle Passage carried captive Africans to the Americas, and how colonial law made slavery hereditary and racial, read through the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina. In this assignment you work four short problems on the week's chronology and the chapter's illustrative contract, interpret each one, and explain servitude and slavery to someone who has never studied them. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Primary Source Workshop practice the same ideas from other angles.

The task

Your shared data is the week's chronology, five years in order:

• 1606 — the First Charter of Virginia
• 1607 — the founding of Jamestown
• 1619 — the Africans brought to Virginia, as the National Park Service reports
• 1620 — the Mayflower Compact
• 1669 — the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, dated in the Avalon Project's heading

Beside it sits the chapter's illustrative contract: a servant signs at age 17 for a term of 5 years, and the contract says nothing about the servant's children.

Work these four problems, showing your arithmetic and citing your evidence:

1. Jamestown was founded in 1607, and the Mayflower Compact was signed in 1620. How many years passed between the two?
2. The Mayflower Compact was signed in 1620, and the Avalon Project's heading dates the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina to 1669. How many years separate the two?
3. The week's chronology runs from the First Charter of Virginia in 1606 to the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina in 1669. How many years does it span?
4. Jamestown was founded in 1607, and the Avalon Project's heading dates the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina to 1669. How many years passed between the two?

Beside each answer, add one brief interpretation:

• Problem 1: the arrival of 1619 falls inside that span; state what the National Park Service reports about 1619, quoting "20 and odd" with its source and adding nothing to it, then explain why 1619 marks an arrival rather than a finished legal system of slavery.
• Problem 2: source the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (who made them, the date and whose heading gives it, what type of document they are, and which host keeps them), then say what Avalon's notes do and do not say about who drafted the article on slavery.
• Problem 3: name the three things colonial law made slavery over the seventeenth century, then place the Middle Passage: where most captives were carried, with the death toll stated in words and no figure.
• Problem 4: use the contract to explain the difference between indentured servitude and hereditary racial slavery: whether each status ends, and whether it passes to children.

Explain it to a non-expert

A coworker says, "Most enslaved Africans were shipped to the American colonies, and an indentured servant was a slave by another name." Write a 3–5 sentence message that corrects both parts of that claim in everyday words, using this week's evidence about the Middle Passage and about servitude and slavery, and names one limit of what you can say after this week (for example, that the week's document speaks in the proprietors' voice, not in the voices of the people they enslaved). Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one good answer is possible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a friend asking whether a company's founding mission statement "tells you how the company treated its workers." Model answer: "A mission statement shows what the founders wanted people to believe about the company, written when they started it. It is real evidence, but of their goals, not of daily life on the job. To learn how workers were treated, I would look for records made by or about the workers themselves, such as pay records or letters, and compare them with the statement. Read side by side, the statement shows the plan, and the workers' records show what happened."

Use that pattern for your message to the coworker, with your own wording and evidence.

Show your arithmetic and cite your evidence. A reader should be able to reproduce every number you report, and check every date and quoted word against Chapter 3, without guessing which values, steps, or sources you used.

Deliverables

Submit a single report containing:

• the four answers, each with the arithmetic shown and the brief interpretation the task names for that problem;
• your message to the coworker, correcting both parts of the claim in everyday words and naming one limit; and
• a one-line restatement of the values you used (the five years of the week's chronology), so your results are reproducible.

Keep it to roughly one page. Clear and correct beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your report as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about three minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled timeline sketch that places the five years and marks the 49 years from the Mayflower Compact to the Carolina frame, with a short note. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the computations, the interpretations, and the writing yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. Take every date and every quoted word from Chapter 3, and quote only the course's pinned words: "20 and odd", with the National Park Service as its source, and the slavery article of the Fundamental Constitutions. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's work, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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