My dearest brother,
I am writing to inform you of my journey to the New World. I have settled into the colony established here in the Chesapeake and write to warn you of the problems here. Pestilence, Indian attacks, and bad water are common. I am now an indentured servant and I am hoping to push through my seven years long servitude as quickly as possible. I am concerned for my health. I urge you to stay home, for if illness does not kill you, an Indian attack or similar battle will—and even if we do survive our service, we may not be able to receive good land. Please remain at home; I worry that if you are to suffer as I do, our family will not be able to survive.
The environment in the Chesapeake is harsh. The area is swampy, humid during…show more content… This system pushes colonists to not only take more land away from surrounding Indian communities, but also results in some colonists receiving less than ideal plots of land. This infuriates colonists, especially those who worked for seven or more years in indentured servitude in an attempt to become tobacco farmers and to be granted their own land through their freedom dues after their struggle. The colonists grow even more restless…show more content… Tobacco was truly valuable cash crop that was highly addictive and was in high demand in England and in the rest of Europe. Unfortunately tobacco can be very finicky and requires long hours of tending to the fields. This arduous labor was expedited and cheapened by instead making slaves tend to the fields as opposed to an indentured servant. Slowly, slaves have become the primary people working on tobacco plantations, compared to their numbers forty years ago. As a result of this transformation, the glorious, leading light of tobacco begins to fade towards the end of the 1660s. This is a time now where indentured servants are now few and far between and the hard, manual labor on plantations is done almost entirely by slaves. It is now more difficult than before for the poor to be able to be able to gain a greater income. Those who own small tobacco farms can be destroyed in a single growing season should anything go wrong, whereas the larger plantations can fare just as well as they had