Part III: African Slavery to North America
United States | The Gradual Construction of a System
The arrival of Africans in English North America in 1619 has often been remembered as the beginning of American slavery. Yet history rarely begins so abruptly. When a Dutch vessel carrying enslaved Africans reached Jamestown that year, the system that later generations would recognize as American slavery had not yet fully taken shape.
These men and women were almost certainly from Ndongo in Angola. They had first been captured in the wars that accompanied Portuguese expansion in West Central Africa, sold into bondage by Portuguese traders, and then seized by privateers before finally being transported to Virginia. Their forced journey formed one small link in a widening Atlantic system of violence and commerce.
Yet their arrival did not immediately establish slavery as a permanent institution within the colony.
At the time, the dominant labor arrangement in Virginia was indentured servitude. The colony desperately required labor — particularly for the cultivation of tobacco — but the rigid racialized system that would later define slavery in Virginia emerged slowly. For this reason, the first Africans brought to the colony entered its labor structure under conditions that resembled indentured servitude rather than lifelong slavery.
For some of the earliest Africans who survived these difficult years, the possibility of freedom remained real.
Records indicate that several eventually secured their liberty. A number of these individuals went on to become tobacco farmers who owned land and, in certain cases, even held slaves of their own. Yet the surviving documents also reveal an unmistakable social boundary. However limited their success might have been, Africans were never regarded as the equals of English colonists or of the Indigenous peoples who already inhabited the region.
The gradual transformation of labor into slavery can be traced through the colony’s laws.
By the time Virginia enacted its first statute related to slavery in 1640, slavery had already appeared in Massachusetts. The Virginia law itself did not directly mention slaves. Instead, it referred simply to “blacks.” At the time, free inhabitants of the colony were expected to possess weapons for its defense. The statute of 1640 exempted blacks from this requirement.
More legislation soon followed. One law authorized the taxation of black women.
Then, in 1662, Virginia passed its first statute explicitly addressing slavery. The law declared that blacks could be held as servants for life. It also made clear that Indians could likewise be enslaved.
Another difficulty soon emerged — one that troubled the consciences of certain colonists. If an enslaved person converted to Christianity through baptism, could that individual still be held in bondage? Some colonists believed that the ownership of a Christian was morally questionable. In a few instances, slaveholders chose to free slaves who had been baptized rather than continue to hold them in captivity.
In 1667, the colony resolved the question. The law declared that baptism would not lead to freedom.
With this decision, the legal structure of slavery began to harden. Laws regulating enslaved people became more numerous and increasingly severe. If a slave died accidentally while being punished, the act was not considered a crime. Gradually, the association between blackness and lifelong servitude became embedded in colonial law and custom.
Soon afterward, the principle of hereditary slavery followed. A child born to an enslaved woman would automatically inherit the condition of slavery.
Additional statutes reinforced the system. In 1680, a slave who threatened a Christian could receive thirty lashes. Harsh punishments were imposed on those who attempted to escape. Separate slave codes increasingly governed the lives of the enslaved. A white person who married a slave could be banished from the colony.
By 1705, the transformation had reached its legal conclusion. Slaves were defined as real estate. Masters possessed the authority even to dismember enslaved individuals deemed unruly.
The demographic record reveals how rapidly the system expanded. In 1625, only 23 black people were recorded in Virginia. Seventy-five years later, the number had risen to more than 16,000. The driving force behind this expansion was unmistakable — the insatiable demand for inexpensive labor within the tobacco economy.
The institution of slavery is most often associated with the plantation South of the nineteenth century, where enslaved populations eventually reached into the millions. Yet such an association, while understandable, obscures an important reality. Slavery was not confined to the southern colonies. Throughout the colonial era, enslaved people also lived and labored in New England.
Indeed, slavery entered the region almost as early as English settlement itself and remained a part of New England society until the coming of the American Civil War.
The first enslaved Africans arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1638. They were exchanged for captives taken during the Pequot War. During the first four decades of slavery in New England, the enslaved population remained relatively small. But between 1677 and 1710, the number of enslaved people in the region doubled.
Participation in the system extended even to some of the colony’s most prominent leaders. John Winthrop, the well-known governor of Massachusetts Bay, owned slaves at his estate, Ten Hills Farm. He also helped shape one of the earliest legal recognitions of slavery in North America.
That statute appeared in the Massachusetts Body of Liberties of 1641. It declared:
There shall never be any bond slaverie, villinage or Captivitie amongst us unles 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…which the law of god established in Israell concerning such persons.
Two decades later, Wait Winthrop — the governor’s grandson — wrote to his brother about an enslaved African who had recently arrived, advising him:
“Have an eye to him…and [if] you think it not worthwhile to keep him, sell him or send him to Virginia or the Barbadoes.”
Visitors to Boston during the late seventeenth century remarked upon how common slaveholding had become. One observer recorded:
“you may…own Negroes and Negresses…There is not a House in Boston, however small be its Means that has not one or two. There are those that have five or six.”
A general census conducted in 1715 suggested that roughly one enslaved person existed for every six families in New England. Yet the population was not evenly distributed. Instead, enslaved people tended to cluster along the seacoast, within the major port cities, and in agricultural regions of Rhode Island and Connecticut.
By the 1770s, slavery had become particularly significant in several parts of the region. Enslaved individuals constituted thirty percent of the population of South Kingston, Rhode Island. They also formed notable portions of urban populations — ten percent in Boston and nine percent in New London.
Many of New England’s wealthiest merchants accumulated their fortunes through the slave trade or through commercial networks closely tied to it.
Yet the character of slavery in the northern colonies differed from that of the plantation South. The diversified economy of New England required many kinds of labor. Enslaved people therefore worked in a wide variety of occupations rather than primarily on large plantations.
Many performed domestic service, while others practiced skilled trades. Enslaved laborers could be found in shipbuilding, carpentry, printing, tailoring, shoemaking, blacksmithing, baking, and weaving. Some became so proficient in these crafts that free white laborers occasionally lost employment to them.
Like New England, the development of slavery in the Carolinas cannot be understood in isolation. It formed part of a much larger Atlantic system that linked England, the Caribbean, and North America.
In 1669, the first colonists sailing under the new Carolina charter departed from England. Their voyage included a stop at Barbados, an island in the Lesser Antilles east of the Caribbean Sea. Barbados had been an English colony since 1624 and had already developed a plantation economy dependent upon enslaved labor.
By the late 1660s, however, the island faced a problem familiar to many expanding colonies — land had grown scarce. Opportunities for ambitious planters were narrowing. As a result, several men from Barbados decided to seek new prospects in the Carolina colony.
They carried with them both practical experience in establishing plantations and a firm conviction that slavery offered the most effective solution to the chronic labor shortages that confronted plantation agriculture.
In Carolina, as elsewhere in the English colonial world, land distribution reflected social rank and economic resources. A man of wealth and standing could obtain extensive land grants, while settlers of more modest means — provided they financed their own passage — could still receive substantial acreage.
After pausing briefly in Bermuda, the ships carrying these settlers continued toward the coast of what is now South Carolina. Their destination lay where the Ashley and Cooper Rivers converge. Sailing up the Ashley River, the colonists established a settlement in 1670 known as Charles Town, named in honor of King Charles II.
The early years of the colony required careful preparation simply to survive. Settlers devoted their efforts to constructing the town, building commercial relationships with nearby Indigenous peoples, and attempting to make the colony economically self-sufficient.
Meanwhile, the Lords Proprietors who governed Carolina from afar confronted difficulties of their own. They were responsible for supplying the colony and attracting additional settlers. Yet rumors circulated that Carolina was an unhealthy place to live.
Such rumors carried practical consequences. Prospective migrants might choose instead to settle in rival colonies — particularly those of New England. Part of the Proprietors’ task, therefore, was to counter these reports and advertise the advantages of settlement in Carolina.
In 1680, Charles Town was relocated to its present site, a location possessing a large and favorable natural harbor. The decision soon proved strategically significant. When Spanish forces captured Port Royal — a colony farther south along the coast — in 1686, Charleston suddenly became the southernmost English seaport on the North American continent.
Its position made the port commercially valuable, but it also rendered it vulnerable. Charleston faced potential threats from Spanish fleets, French rivals, and the pirates who prowled the Atlantic trade routes.
Among these pirates, the most famous was Edward Teach, remembered to history as Blackbeard. His exploits soon became legendary in the waters surrounding the colony.
These dangers forced Charleston to develop into a fortified city capable of resisting attack.
As slavery expanded across the English colonies, regional variations inevitably emerged. Just as systems of indentured servitude differed from colony to colony, so too did the institution of slavery. In the middle colonies, the system resembled New England's more than the plantation South's, though slave ownership remained widespread.
Gentlemen, merchants, small farmers, and artisans commonly owned slaves. Masters typically held two or three enslaved laborers. Surviving records also reveal a relatively high rate of turnover, suggesting that many northern slaveholders viewed slavery as only one among several available labor arrangements.
Nevertheless, enslaved labor remained an essential component of the colonial economy. The demand for additional enslaved workers continued throughout the colonial period.
Bibliography | Notes
Locks, Catherine; Mergel, Sarah; Roseman, Pamela; Spike, Tamara; and Lasseter, Marie, “History in the Making: A History of the People of the United States of America to 1877“ (2013). History Open Textbooks.
Locke, Joseph L., and Ben Wright, eds. The American Yawp: A Massively Collaborative Open U.S. History Textbook. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019.
Gallagher, Brendan. “Africans: Virginia’s First,” Encyclopedia Virginia.