Who brought in the first slaves?
Sometime in late August of 1619, more
than a year before the Pilgrims arrived
at Plymouth Rock, an English privateer
ship named the White Lion carrying
between 20 and 30 Africans in chains
landed at Point Comfort in Virginia.
The crew traded the human cargo to
colonists from nearby Jamestown in
exchange for food. This was the first
documented instance of enslaved people
setting foot in one of the 13 colonies
that became the United States. African
slavery, however, was already firmly
established in the Western Hemisphere.
The Portuguese and Spanish empires
began enslaving Africans to work in
the Caribbean and Central and South
America beginning in the early 1500s
to replace enslaved native people who were dying in droves from
brutal overwork and imported diseases. The White Lion, essen-
tially a state-sponsored pirate ship, actually plundered the souls it
carried from a Portuguese slave ship off the coast of Mexico, the
San Juan Bautista, which had set out from present-day Angola.How were these people treated?
At first, the Africans were considered indentured servants, not
slaves, because many of them had been baptized Christian when
they were seized. They were forced to work in the tobacco fields,
laboring in the hot sun alongside about 1,000 white indentured
servants. Conditions were brutal. Many workers died before their
terms of service expired, with disease rampant in the malarial
lowlands. White Europeans, however, at least had some choice
in the matter. They sold themselves into servitude, usually for a
period of four to seven years, in exchange for transportation to the
New World and the chance to eventually own land and enjoy the
rights of other colonists. A handful of Africans also managed to
work their way to freedom. But the ambiguity about their status
as property, not contracted servants,
was erased over a few decades. “These
two words, ‘negro’ and ‘slave,’” the Rev.
Morgan Godwyn of Virginia wrote in
1680, have “by custom grown homoge-
neous and convertible.”What changed?
Whites gradually imposed a rigid racial
caste system that locked Africans and
their descendants into perpetual status
as lesser beings with no rights. By the
1650s, many enslaved Africans were
held to service for life. In 1662, the
colony decreed that children born to
enslaved women would inherit their
mother’s status. Subsequent laws made it
legal for colonists to kill enslaved people
for not following orders or for resisting
arrest. Bacon’s Rebellion, a 1676 upris-
ing by white and black workers on the
frontier, deeply alarmed the aristocracy
and hardened its determination to keepslaves powerless. The colonial elites
sought to divide the races to keep the
servant class from making common
cause, including forbidding interracial
marriage. By the early 18th century,
Virginia and other American colonies
had passed comprehensive slave codes
stripping enslaved blacks of virtually all
rights. Masters could do as they pleased
with their human property, including
beating and whipping them into sub-
mission. Rape was commonplace. The
genetic makeup of the average black
person in the U.S. today is an estimated
16.7 percent European in large part
because of that brutal legacy.Why did slavery spread?
It made slave owners rich. In this pre-
industrial era, Southern planters growing labor-intensive crops
like tobacco, rice, and indigo had an insatiable need for human
toil, and slaves were cheaper than indentured servants. Slavery
soon spread to all of the American colonies, with enslaved people
in New England and the mid-Atlantic colonies working as house
servants, laborers, and craftsmen in such industries as glassblow-
ing, ironwork, and weaving. In 1756, enslaved people made up
more than a quarter of the population in and around the city of
New York. Slaves enriched their owners in a second way—by hav-
ing children, who became the property of the masters. Only about
388,000 people out of the 12.4 million Africans forcibly taken to
the New World were sent to North America. Yet by 1860, there
were 4.4 million black people living in the U.S., of whom 3.9 mil-
lion were enslaved.How did slavery affect the U.S.?
Slave labor was critical to the economic success of the American
colonies and the early republic. Enslaved workers even built the
Capitol and the White House in Washington, D.C. Although the
institution gradually declined in the
North, the invention of the cotton gin
cemented it in the South and in the
nation’s economic life. Throughout
the antebellum period, cotton made
up more than half of all U.S. exports.
Southern cotton fed Northern looms
and made Northern investors rich, too.
Enslaved workers laid nearly 10,
miles of railroad tracks, a third of the
nation’s total by the time of the Civil
War. Slaves were the country’s biggest
asset class in 1860, valued at more
than $3.5 billion in that era’s dollars—
more than the manufacturing and
railroad sectors combined. “The idea
that the commodification and suffering
and forced labor of African-Americans
is what made the United States power-
ful and rich is not an idea that people
necessarily are happy to hear,” wrote
historian Edward E. Baptist. “Yet it is
the truth.”Briefing NEWS^11
Slaves on a plantation in South Carolina in 1863America’s original sin
The Granger Collection
Slavery’s imprint on the present
The abolition of slavery did not end white
supremacy. Wealthy white Southerners lost
most of their wealth right after the Civil War,
but regained most of it by re-establishing the
region’s aristocracy and oppressive racial hierar-
chy. When federal troops were pulled out of the
South in 1877, ending Reconstruction, the newly
freed slaves were violently locked out of politi-
cal and economic life. Many were forced into
sharecropping, an exploitative form of pseudo-
slavery. Northern politicians embraced legal and
de facto segregation as well. African-Americans
fleeing apartheid regimes in the South were
squeezed into economically depressed slums by
dis crimi na tory lending laws. A century of legal
dis crimi na tion crippled black families’ ability to
get decent educations, find jobs, buy homes,
and build wealth. That legacy endures. In 2016,
the average black family had a net worth of
$17,600, compared with $171,000 for the aver-
age white family.The first enslaved people arrived in Virginia 400 years ago this month. How did slavery shape our country?