First Enslaved Africans Arrive in Virginia
A privateer called the White Lion, sailing under a Dutch letter of marque, put into Point Comfort in Virginia in late August 1619 and sold about twenty-odd Africans for provisions. John Rolfe recorded the transaction in a letter, and the phrasing — twenty and odd Negroes — is the earliest documentary trace of Africans in the English mainland colonies. They had been taken from a Portuguese slave ship, the São João Bautista, bound from Angola to Veracruz, which the White Lion and a consort had intercepted in the Gulf of Mexico. Their origins are known with unusual precision: they were Kimbundu-speaking people from the kingdom of Ndongo, captured in Portuguese wars there, and several had been baptised, which is how some of their names survive. Their legal status on arrival was not slavery as it later existed in Virginia. English law had no category for chattel slavery, and the colony's records show some of these people and their children holding property, suing in court, marrying and, in the case of Anthony Johnson, acquiring land and servants of his own. The system hardened over the following decades. Virginia's assembly made slavery hereditary through the mother in 1662, closed baptism as a route to freedom in 1667, and by 1705 had codified a comprehensive slave law. The economic driver throughout was tobacco and the demand for labour that the diminishing supply of English indentured servants could no longer meet. Some 400,000 Africans were carried to what became the United States. The 1619 landing is often treated as the beginning of American slavery, which compresses a process that took most of the century. What it marks with certainty is the arrival.
- Year: 1619 CE
- Category: Social
