It’s 2019. That makes it four hundred years since “20 and odd Negroes” were brought to Point Comfort, on the James River in Virginia, in 1619 by privateers from a Spanish slave ship they had, um, “intercepted”. Lots of folks, even those that should know better, use this as the date that slavery came to America.
The Italians were importing Slavs (the origin of the word slave) as early as the Middle Ages. The trade in humans shifted to the Atlantic and by the fifteen hundreds there were ten thousand Black people in Lisbon alone. When Christopher Columbus set out on the Santa Maria in 1492 one of his crewmen was a Black man named Juan Las Canaries.
Not long after, the first enslavement occurred in what would become the United States. In 1508 Ponce de Leon established the first colony near present-day San Juan, Puerto Rico. He promptly set about enslaving the Tainos, the people indigenous to the island. A people who are quickly driven to extinction by the European colonizers. Not even a decade passes before, in 1513, the first Africans are imported to Puerto Rico as slaves.
The first enslaved African people were brought to the continental US in 1526. Specifically, to the San Miguel de Gualdape colony founded by Spanish explorer Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón. During a fight over leadership most of the enslaved persons revolted escaping to find refuge with the locals and becoming free people. Later, in 1556, St. Augustine, Florida was founded by Spanish conquistador Don Pedro Menendez de Aviles. With him were three enslaved Africans.
St. Augustine would go on to become the hub of the slave trade in Spanish colonial Florida throughout the 16th and 17th centuries and the first permanent community in what would become the continental United States to include enslaved Africans. Throughout their territories Spanish colonists exploited Black people’s labor in fields, mines, and in their homes. By 1600, half of the population of Lima, Peru was black.
Historian Ira Berlin notes that a notable percentage of the original colonists of the Americas, including those of the storied thirteen, were comprised of those who were descendants of African women and Portuguese or Spanish men who worked in African ports. So, by the time the 20 and odd Africans arrived in Jamestown Black people, free and enslaved, had been a presence in the Americas for well over a hundred years.
The Spanish generally baptized in Africa the African people that they would force into enslavement in their colonies. In the British colonies in 1619 baptized Christians were exempted from slavery. Further, there were no laws enforcing slavery in Virginia in 1619. In fact, in 1619 there were no laws at all enforcing slavery in all English Colonial America. That wouldn’t happen until 1641. The British colonists of the time chose to rely on indentured servants rather than enslaving people. In fact, most of the white immigrants to the English colonies in the 17th century were convicts or indentured servants. Therefore, the colonists treated these Africans liberated from the Spanish slave ship as indentured servants.
Indentured servants were laborers under a contract with a master to serve for an established period of time. Usually no more than seven years. In exchange for their service, they received shelter, food, passage across seas, and accommodations. At the end of their contracts they were given a parcel of land to start their new lives. The Africans received the same treatment as the other thousand or so mostly English, Irish, and Scottish indentured servants in the colony.
In 1640, the Virginia courts sentences one of the first Black indentured servants to slavery. In 1641, when Massachusetts became the first state to legislate slavery, the law stated:
“There shall never be any bond slaverie, villinage or captivitie amongst us unless it be lawfull captives taken in just warres, and such strangers as willingly selle themselves or are sold to us. And these shall have all the liberties and Christian usages which the law of God established in Israell concerning such persons doeth morally require. This exempts none from servitude who shall be judged thereto by Authoritie.”
These were religious Christians, many of them Puritans, and the reference to strangers is thought to derive from Leviticus 25: 39-55. This section of Leviticus basically says that they are not allowed to enslave each other but other folks were not protected. These other folks quickly came to mean indigenous people and Africans but in 1641 this still wasn’t an automatic assumption. There was no explicit mention of Blackness. The 1641 law was a precursor to race-based chattel slavery, not the start of it.
By 1654 Black indentured servant John Casor becomes the first person enslaved for life in the thirteen colonies of British America when Northampton County grants Casor Anthony Johnson’s petition to enslave Casor for life. Ironically, Anthony Johnson, a Black man from Angola, arrived in Virginia in 1621 as an indentured servant himself.
But it is the series of laws that would become the Slave Codes of Virginia that become the blueprint for the race-based chattel slavery that would bind Black people in the US. They begin in 1650 with the barring of the “Negro” from laws requiring men to be armed. Then in 1656, Elizabeth Key Grinstead, a mixed-race woman, successfully petitions for her freedom and that of her son by claiming the status of a baptized Christian daughter of free Englishman Thomas Key. Her trial, and other similar challenges, lead to the Virginia law passed in 1662 which determines that a child of an enslaved mother is born into slavery. This is a reversal of common law practice in England which dictates the father as the determiner of a child’s heritage.
At this time indentured servants still become free and obtain their own land, but they are given the land that no one else wants. This discrimination leads to their support of Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676. You can read more about the rebellion here but what scared the aristocracy of Virginia at the time was not the reasons behind the rebellion but that Bacon was able to get Blacks and whites working together.
Shaken by the fact that a rebel militia that united white and Black servants and slaves had destroyed the colonial capital and profoundly anxious about the possibility of future multiracial alliances Virginia’s lawmakers double down on the separation people through made up racial categories accelerating and broadening the legal distinctions between “white” and “black” inhabitants. The planter elites also shift from indentured servitude and focus on enslaving more Africans.
They hope that by legally separating the two groups they will be less likely to unite again in rebellion. In permanently enslaving Virginians of African descent and slightly elevating the status of poor white indentured servants and farmers the planter aristocracy aim to make it less likely that whites will consent to work with Black people, free or enslaved. It is an effective strategy that has lasted into the modern era.
These laws combine to become the Virginia Slave Codes. They codify the status of the enslaved, further limit their freedom and the freedom of free Black people, and define some rights of slave owners. Among other things the Codes strip enslaved people of the protections of Christianity and allow slave owners to punish enslaved people without fear of legal repercussions. It enshrines into law the process of divesting people of their humanity and establishes slavery into perpetuity for generations.
Some of you reading this will think this is all very interesting but it happened four and even five hundred years ago. Slavery has been around for as long as civilization, if not longer. Hell, people are still being enslaved today. What does it matter if the date chosen as the start of slavery in the US is 1619, 1641, or 1492?
I think that this is important because the pernicious idea that Africans were *always* enslaved in the US does several things. It makes slavery seem accepted when there was actually a great deal of resistance to it, even during the height of the trade in human flesh. Many people, including Europeans and their colonists, found the idea of enslaving fellow human beings inexcusable. In February of 1688, almost a hundred years before the American Revolution, Pennsylvania Quakers adopted the first formal anti-slavery resolution in American history. Countless people beyond those of the famed ship Amistad resisted capture by escaping, revolting, or by jumping overboard from European slave ships. In Africa Queen Nzinga of Angola and King Maremba of the Kongo, among others, fought directly against slave traders.
In the backlash against Bacon’s Rebellion ideas of freedom and of slavery are formed in the same historical moment. It is important to understand the complexity of this. The very concept of whiteness is born out of European colonization and the transatlantic slave trade. This is the reason that the Oxford English Dictionary dates the first use of white as an adjective reference to “a white man, a person of a race distinguished by a light complexion” in print to 1671. The parallel evolution of these two concepts, of freedom and of enslavement, of who is more or less deserving of humanity, continue to influence America, and American policy to this day.
It normalizes the American enslavement of African people and dismisses the responsibility of people, of Americans, to recognize that the transformation of the social status of Africans from indentured servitude, to an enslaved people, to chattel slavery, and finally into a racial caste system that still exists to this day happens over generations though still incredibly quickly by historical standards. American slavery has European roots but race based, hereditary, chattel slavery did not arrive onto our shores a fully developed ideology. It evolved from a series of deliberate and self aware economic choices made and maintained by white men in power.
It lessens the accountability of the American leaders who took conscious steps to strip the humanity from a people while at the same time developing the philosophy that all men are created equal and have the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The transatlantic slave trade was controversial from its conception. There was never a moment that the propagators of this moral travesty did not have to fight for its existence. The United States of America is a country that has consistently prioritized the economic prosperity of the few over the needs of the many. A nation that sacrifices the humanity of its people on the altar of political expediency. Its participation and continued glorification of slavery is one of its most egregious examples of this flaw.
America was also born of an idea. An ideal. That we human beings are born free and remain free and equal in rights. That all of us, every American, shall have the right to contribute personally or through our representatives to the formation of the laws that govern us. That laws that are not fair and just, laws that do not see us as equal, are laws that punish all of us as a people. That every American should have equal access to education, employment, and public spaces. Our freedoms only end when they encroach up on or cause harm to another. That these constraints can be determined only by the law and that the law is the expression of the general will of every single one of us.
It is these ideas, these ideals, we continue to fight for. These ideas for which we resist the draw of avarice, of inequity, of racism, of sexism, and of white supremacy. We cannot fight for these ideas, fight against the pull towards nostalgia and narcissistic nationalism, if we don’t understand our history. If we remain unknowing of our history. This lack of understanding is the reason that we, yet again, see the fascism on the rise around the world and within our borders. If we can’t see, if we are ignorant to the fact, that the system is broken we cannot even begin to imagine ways in which to fix it.
Sources
https://ehne.fr/en/article/europe-europeans-and-world/slavery-european-colonies/slavery-european-colonies
https://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/atlantic-slave-trade
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States
https://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/timeline/slavery.htm
http://originalpeople.org/san-miguel-de-gualdape/
https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~arihuang/academic/abg/slavery/history.html
http://www.masshist.org/teaching-history/loc-slavery/essay.php?entry_id=504
http://www.constitution.org/bcp/mabodlib.htm