Slavery in North America

Slavery in North America was not something the colonists brought with them fully formed. It was built, statute by statute, over roughly eighty years — and that is what makes it possible to watch precisely how a society constructs an arrangement it later calls natural.

The starting point was unclear

The first Africans reached Virginia in 1619, taken from a Portuguese ship. What they were in law is not obvious from the sources. English law did not recognise slavery. Some of them gained freedom, owned land and sued in court — Anthony Johnson, who arrived around 1621, became a substantial landowner on the Eastern Shore.

At the same time thousands of English indentured servants worked the same fields, under terms that were often brutal but that ended after five or seven years.

Timeline

1619

the first Africans are sold at Jamestown; status unsettled

1640

John Punch is sentenced to service for life, while his two white fellow runaways get four years

1662

Virginia rules that a child's condition follows the mother, not the father

1667

baptism no longer confers freedom

1669

killing an enslaved person during "correction" is made unpunishable

1676

Bacon's Rebellion: poor white and Black people make common cause against the elite

1691

manumission barred unless the freed person leaves the colony

1705

Virginia's slave code gathers it all into a single body of law

1793

the cotton gin; demand for labour multiplies

1808

importation banned; the population thereafter grows by birth

1865

the Thirteenth Amendment abolishes slavery

The three decisions that made it heritable

The statute of 1662 is the single most important provision. English law had always had a child follow the father. Virginia reversed it for this one purpose, and the effect was that children of enslaved women were born enslaved whoever the father was — which simultaneously made sexual abuse financially profitable for the owner.

The statute of 1667 removed the last religious objection: that a Christian could not hold another Christian in slavery. After 1667, baptism had no legal effect.

The statute of 1669 removed the last protection of life. Together the three convert a labour arrangement into an inherited condition.

Why it was tied to skin colour

Bacon's Rebellion in 1676 is often identified as the turning point. Poor white and Black people joined against the colony's elite and burned Jamestown. Afterwards the legislation began systematically to separate them: white servants gained rights and arms, Black people gained neither. Historians disagree about how deliberate this was, but the pattern in the statutes is plain.

The scale

Around 388,000 people were carried directly from Africa to North America, of an estimated 12.5 million shipped across the Atlantic. That is a small share — Brazil and the Caribbean received far more. But the North American enslaved population was the only one that grew by birth rather than by continual importation, and at emancipation in 1865 it stood at four million, the largest in the Americas.