October 19, 2023
Troy D. Smith
“1619: How Slavery Started in the English Colonies”
In the last couple of weeks, I have talked about the
Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, how it started, and the role Portugal and Spain
played in its expansion. This week I’m going to discuss it in the context of
England and her colonies -the antecedent of the United States, so closer to
home for most of us.
England was late getting into the colonizing game (if
you don’t count Ireland and Scotland). The first successful English colony in
the New World was Jamestown, established in 1607. As we’ve discussed before,
most of the labor in the early days of that colony was performed by poor white
indentured servants, who had essentially sold themselves into servitude
(usually for seven years) for passage to the colony, in hopes of one day being
free and owning land.
Twelve years later, a ship called the White Lion landed in the Virginia
colony. It was an English privateer operating under a Dutch letter of marque
-in other words, the ship and its sailors were English, but they had a license
from the Netherlands authorizing them to attack Dutch enemies in their name.
The English and Dutch were allies against the Spanish and Portuguese. The White Lion had captured a Portuguese
ship and taken her cargo, which included African slaves (remember how active
Portugal was in the slave trade). The White
Lion’s captain traded about two dozen of these slaves to the Virginia
colonists for food and supplies. This was the first incidence of the slave
trade in English colonies. It is NOT correct that this was the first instance
of slavery in North America, as many modern sources claim; the Spanish had been
bringing African slaves to North America for a century or more by that time. It
was the first slavery in an ENGLISH colony in North America.
Being new to the game, it took the Virginia colonists
a while to get the hang of it. They treated these first Africans as indentured
servants, freeing most of them after a few years; they and their children were
the beginning of a population of free blacks in the Virginia colony. Meanwhile,
starting in earnest after the bloody war with the Powhatans of 1622, the
Virginians were enslaving captured Native Americans. A shipment of over a hundred
more African slaves arrived in 1628, and before very long the consensus was
that Africans were to be enslaved for life, not temporarily. For roughly fifty
years, the forced labor in Virginia tobacco plantations was a shared experience
between three groups: African slaves, poor white indentured servants, and
Native American captives. They worked in the fields together, socialized together,
and frequently intermarried. Free blacks, meanwhile, had many of the same
rights as other colonists.
Meanwhile, in the Caribbean, the English established
colonies in Barbados in 1627, the Bahamas in 1648, and had taken Jamaica from
the Spanish by 1661. These colonies became home to sugar plantations, and were
operated in the same way the Spanish operated theirs- with a high death rate
for the African slaves due to harsh treatment.
A scholar named Gary Taylor did a fascinating study
about twenty years ago, published as “Buying Whiteness.” He did a computerized
search through digital copies of everything published in London in the 1600s,
looking for instances of people being referred to as “white.” He found
virtually no such instances in the early 1600s, then they started popping up in
the mid-1600s, and by the late 1600s they were extremely common. In other
words, the timeline of English people thinking of themselves as “white” (which
no one, really, is) perfectly matched the timeline of the growth of slavery in English
colonies. Paintings changed, too- instead of having ruddy complexions in
portraits, English were painted as almost alabaster white. Did their complexion
change? No. Their self-perception changed. They were now defining themselves
AGAINST someone -someone they had come to view as inferior.
--Troy D.
Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at
Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.
Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE
You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE
A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE
Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com
The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE
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