barnhart wrote:This is just nit picking, but it bothers me a little to see 1619 presented as the start of African slavery in America, it is rather the begining of African slavery in Anglo America. Africans were enslaved and imported to Florida for nearly 100 years before the English adopted the practice.
Yes, slavery was fundamental to the
Spanish Empire.
... by the time the English colony of Virginia was founded in 1607, Africans and people of African descent had already been present in the Americas for more than a century. Recent estimates suggest that by 1625, approximately 475,000 enslaved Africans had been involuntarily transported to the Spanish Americas and Brazil—more than the number of Africans who disembarked in British North America and the United States during the course of the entire transatlantic slave trade. Though most research on Africans’ involuntary migration to the Americas focuses on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the roots of the transatlantic slave trade are much deeper, stretching back to Iberia (Spain and Portugal), Atlantic Africa, and Latin America during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Unlike other areas of western Europe, slavery played a significant role in Iberian society at the dawn of the early modern era. In Lisbon and Évora, and throughout much of southern Portugal, slaves comprised roughly 10 percent of the population by the mid-1550s. A comparable scenario existed in parts of southern Spain; 44,000 slaves made up nearly 10 percent of the population of the entire archbishopric of Seville in 1565. Rural slave labor in Iberia during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries mainly involved herding livestock, guarding fields and flocks, clearing land, and harvesting and processing crops. Enslaved people also commonly worked as sailors and boatmen on small vessels designed for coastal trade and river traffic. In urban areas, slaves performed a wide range of occupations, laboring as artisans and apprentices, domestic servants, stevedores and porters, construction workers, and street vendors.
And for what it's worth, 1619 was not the same system of slavery that we think of in the Civil War era. Those laws evolved over time.
Those laws
developed over time.
Joanne: You’ve depicted this image, a wonderful image of these people who obviously are free, have their own culture, their own skills, are captured, are brought to North America, and then are deploying those skills in this new environment, as you put it, often to this elite population. Here’s my question: I understand that you… kind of along the lines of stressing their independence… you prefer to call these people un-free rather than enslaved. I wonder if you could explain what that means.
Cassandra: Because Virginia did not have a legalized system of slavery, the first slave laws in Virginia would not be passed until 1662, though there were signs that slavery was emerging by the 1640s. I prefer not to focus on the system of slavery until we would actually see it emerging.
Joanne: It’s an institution.
Cassandra: As an institution, but even as a practice, because you had a number of people who were obtaining their freedom, and they were obtaining their freedom in the first 20 years because they had finished 20 years of service. You would see this written in the documents. You have, for example, Anthony and Mary Johnson who were bonded on the Bennet Plantation in Virginia on the James River. After they served that 20 years they were given land through the head rights system: land on the eastern shore. Anthony Johnson prospered so much that he could have, if the general assembly did not change the laws… or, at that time they called it the House of Burgesses… he could have become the first black freeholder. But the moment that he had the requirements by law, the general assembly… or, I should say, the House of Burgesses… met and changed the law, saying that this only applies to white men.
Joanne: Which gets back to a point you made earlier about a series of laws being passed in Virginia that are setting in place a pattern that doesn’t exist at the outset.
Cassandra: Yes. For example, in 1662, same year that there would be a clear law saying that all incoming Africans brought into the colony would be enslaved. That same year, this law said that black women’s children would take after the condition of their mother, while in that same law saying that for white women the children would continue to take after the status of their father, because England was a patriarchal and patrilineal society. But what America did, and what Virginia in particular did, was it changed that law for black people only.
Cassandra: This was a way, also, to continue any sexual exploitation that happened to black women with impunity. White men could force themselves on these women or have children… just have children… with these women and not worry about growing the free black population, instead actually growing their wealth that way.
Joanne: So there’s a series of these laws. You mentioned the earlier one about the amount of wealth that you need to be able to vote. It sounds like bit by bit these are codifying slavery into becoming some kind of institutionalized, legalized system.
Cassandra: Yes. I think there are two of the most heinous laws that were passed during this period: one in 1669 and the other in 1672. The first one allowed for the, quote, “Casual killing of black people by their owners.” In 1672, the law said that if any black person who was in bondage resisted arrest, that they could be killed with impunity. It set in motion what some legal experts have called a muscle memory. It set in motion a national way of regarding blacks before the law, and when it came to law enforcement in particular.