First Enslaved Africans Arrive in Virginia
In August 1619 a Dutch privateer vessel traded 'twenty and odd' Africans to English colonists at Point Comfort, Virginia, in exchange for food—the first recorded arrival of enslaved Africans in the English colonies of North America. These individuals had been captured from a Portuguese slave ship bound for Mexico. The event is sometimes cited as the origin of American slavery, though legal chattel slavery was not formally codified in Virginia until the 1660s. Within decades, enslaved African labour became the foundation of tobacco, then rice and indigo cultivation across the southern colonies.
- Year: 1619 CE
- Category: Social
