I know it is properly explained in the article but liberals keep on pushing the falsehood that slave trades started with white Americans.
Under the ill-defined practice of indentured servanthood, a father could "apprentice out" his son by contractually giving lawful mastery to an employer, either getting or giving monetary assurance for that child to live with, be fed, housed, and gain practical knowledge of how to earn his/her own living while still a minor under the law. Any wages would go back to the parent, not to the apprenticed laborer.
This kind of control over a minor child was not shy of similarity overlapping with out-and-out slavery, as if one were a chattel destined to be used as the owner's or leased master's discretion.
It is called "apprenticeship," of which more can be learned from sources such as Apprenticeship in the United States(click here). Here is an excerpt from it:
"Apprenticeship's distinguishing feature was its contract of indenture, which elaborated the terms of the arrangement. This contract differed in two major ways from the contracts of indenture that bound immigrants. First, the apprenticeship contract involved young people and, as such, required the signature of their parents or guardians. Second, indentured servitude, which Galenson (1981) argues was adapted from apprenticeship, substituted Atlantic transportation for trade instruction in the exchange of a servant's labor. Both forms of labor involved some degree of mutuality or voluntary agreement. In apprenticeship, however, legal or natural parents transferred legal authority over their child to another, the apprentice's master, for a substantial portion of his or her youth. In exchange for rights to their child's labor, parents were also relieved of direct responsibility for child rearing and occupational training. Thus the child's consent could be of less consequence than that of the parents.".Back in the 1940s as a child, I had access to a number of nineteenth century Horatio-Alger-type "youth novels" ( written about the turn of the (20th) century of which the core of the attraction was the story of a maturing youth wiggling out of and escaping such apprenticeship, and through fortune and hard work with diligence was able to gain successful adulthood without the domineering control of a mean master.
These narratives of a relatively unknown and unappreciated aspect of American history ought to be featured now, for the effects of it keep ringing in the ears of truly well-founded conservatives who still approve of the benificence of Constitutional order that was in force in America early on, having begun about three centuries ago, of which the Revolutionary War of Independence was only an milestone along the way that resulted in overcoming the overwhelming burdens of serf-hood, slavery, aristocracy, and state-supported religiosity, the times when the term "freedman" was not merely a token but very real and meaningful to the ordinary inhabitant.
Should we legislate that the exposure of that phase of America's cultural progress be forcefully included in our grade-school educatiobal syllabus?
(If it were up to me, yes.)
Today all but three of those hundred-odd novels are out of print. Alger himself is considered a dinosaur of popular literature, a writer whose “strive and succeed” philosophy is as cringe-making as that of his contemporary, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (“Life is real! Life is earnest!/And the grave is not its goal”). A pity: for Alger was at the forefront of a phenomenally successful experiment in social reform and improvement, a broad movement that inspired poor kids to take advantage of America’s social mobility and that led tens of thousands of New York’s post-Civil War juvenile delinquents into productive lives. Those who care about the future of the city’s poor should re-examine Alger’s message: it worked once, and could work again.