Page "Delaware" Paragraph 25

Many colonial settlers came to Delaware from Maryland and Virginia, which had been experiencing a population boom.

The economies of these colonies were chiefly based on tobacco culture and were increasingly dependent on slave labor for its intensive cultivation.

Most of the English colonists arrived as indentured servants, hiring themselves out as laborers for a fixed period to pay for their passage.

In the early years the line between indentured servants and African slaves or laborers was fluid.

Most of the free African-American families in Delaware before the Revolution had migrated from Maryland to find more affordable land.

They were descendants chiefly of relationships or marriages between servant women and enslaved, servant or free African or African-American men.

As the flow of indentured laborers to the colony decreased with improving economic conditions in England, more slaves were imported for labor.