Early slavery in North America

Significance: The establishment of institutionalized slavery in the British colonies of North America would have untold consequences for the history of the continent.

In August of 1619, a Dutch warship carrying “20 and odd” Africans landed at Point Comfort, Virginia. These Africans, the first to arrive in the North American British colonies, were probably put to work not as slaves but as servants. Neither the laws of the mother country nor the charter of the colony established the institution of slavery, although the system was developing in the British West Indies at the same time and was almost one hundred years old in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies. To be sure, African servants were discriminated against early on—their terms of service were usually longer than those of white servants, and they were the object of certain prohibitions that were not imposed on white servants—but in the early seventeenth century, at least some black servants, like their white counterparts, gained their freedom and even acquired some property. Anthony Johnson, who labored on Richard Bennett’s Virginia plantation for almost twenty years after he arrived in Virginia in 1621, imported five servants in his first decade of freedom, receiving 250 acres on their headrights. Another former servant, Richard Johnson, obtained one hundred acres for importing two white servants in 1654. These two men were part of the small class of free blacks that existed in Virginia throughout the colonial period.

Such cases as the two Johnsons were rare by midcentury. As early as the 1640s, some African Americans were in servitude for life, and their numbers increased throughout the decade. In 1640, for example, in a court decision involving three runaway servants, the two who were white were sentenced to an additional four years of service, while the other, an African named John Punch, was ordered to serve his master “for the time of his natural Life.” In the 1650s, some African servants were being sold for life, and the bills of sale indicated that their offspring would inherit slave status. Thus, slavery developed according to custom before it was legally established in Virginia.

Slave Codes

Not until 1661 was chattel slavery recognized by statute in Virginia, and then only indirectly. The House of Burgesses passed a law declaring that children followed the status of their mothers, thereby rendering the system of slavery self-perpetuating. In 1667, the Virginia Assembly strengthened the system by declaring that in the case of children that were slaves by birth “the conferring of baptisme doth not alter the condition of a person as to his bondage or freedome; that divers masters, freed from this doubt, may more carefully endeavor the propagation of christianity.” Until this time, Americans had justified enslavement of Africans on the grounds that they were “heathen” and had recognized conversion as a way to freedom. This act closed the last avenue to freedom, apart from formal emancipation, available to African American slaves. In 1705, Virginia established a comprehensive slave code that completed the gradual process by which most African Americans were reduced to the status of chattel. Slaves could not bear arms or own property, nor could they leave the plantation without written permission from the master. Capital punishment was provided for murder and rape; lesser crimes were punished by maiming, whipping, or branding. Special courts were established for the trials of slaves, who were barred from serving as witnesses, except in the cases in which slaves were being tried for capital offenses.

In the other British colonies, the pattern was similar to that of Virginia. African racial slavery existed early in both Maryland and the Carolinas. Georgia attempted to exclude slavery at the time of settlement, but yielding to the protests of the colonists and the pressure of South Carolinians, the trustees repealed the prohibition in 1750. The Dutch brought slavery to the Middle Colonies early in the seventeenth century. The advent of British rule in 1664 proved to be a stimulus to the system in New York and New Jersey; but in Pennsylvania and Delaware, the religious objections of the Quakers delayed its growth somewhat and postponed legal recognition of slavery until the early eighteenth century. In seventeenth century New England, the status of Africans was ambiguous, as it was in Virginia. There were slaves in Massachusetts as early as 1638, possibly before, although slavery was not recognized by statute until 1641, which was the first enactment legalizing slavery anywhere in the British colonies. New England became heavily involved in the African slave trade, particularly after the monopoly of the Royal African Company was revoked in 1698. Like Virginia, all the colonies enacted slave codes in the late seventeenth century or early eighteenth century, although the New England codes were less harsh than those of the Middle or Southern Colonies. In all the colonies, a small class of free blacks developed alongside the institution of slavery, despite the fact that formal emancipation was restricted.

Slavery grew slowly in the first half of the seventeenth century. In 1625, there were twenty-three Africans in Virginia, most of whom probably were servants, not slaves. By midcentury, a decade before the statutory recognition of slavery, the black population was only three hundred, or 2 percent of the overall population of fifteen thousand. In 1708, there were twelve thousand African Americans and sixty-eight thousand whites. In a little more than fifty years, the black population had jumped from 2 percent to 15 percent of the total Virginia population. In the Carolinas, blacks initially made up 30 percent of the population, but within one generation outnumbered whites, making South Carolina the only mainland colony characterized by a black majority. In New England, blacks numbered only about one thousand out of a total population of ninety thousand. The eighteenth century would see the rapid development of the system of African racial slavery, particularly in the Southern colonies, where it became an integral part of the emerging plantation economy.

Bibliography

Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1966. Print.

Greene, Lorenzo J. The Negro in Colonial New England, 1620–1776. New York: Columbia UP, 1942. Print.

Jordan, Winthrop D. White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812. New York: Norton, 1968. Print.

Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: Norton, 1975. Print.

Wood, Peter B.Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion. New York: Knopf, 1974. Print.