Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade in Colonial America

The institution of slavery did not spring fully formed into existence in British North America. Rather, it developed gradually over the course of the seventeenth century through a complex interplay of economic necessity, racial ideology, legal innovation, and colonial politics. To understand how chattel slavery came to dominate the labor systems of the American colonies, it is necessary to consider the broader context from which it emerged and the alternatives that initially existed before it crystallized into the comprehensive legal framework that would define American life for two and a half centuries.

When English colonists first arrived in Virginia in 1607, they established a colony desperately in need of labor. The cultivation of tobacco, which emerged as the colony's primary cash crop in the second decade of the seventeenth century after John Rolfe's successful experiments with a West Indian variety of the plant, was enormously labor-intensive. Tobacco fields required constant and skilled attention through every phase of the agricultural cycle, from the preparation of seedbeds in the winter to the transplanting of seedlings in the spring, through the summer labor of weeding, suckering, topping, and worming, to the fall harvest, curing, and packing of the crop for export. The soil of tidewater Virginia, while fertile initially, was rapidly exhausted by continuous tobacco cultivation, necessitating the regular clearing of new land, which added yet another layer of labor demand to an already demanding agricultural regime. The colonists who survived the brutal early years of Jamestown were few in number and largely unaccustomed to agricultural labor, while the local Powhatan Confederacy was unwilling and ultimately unable to be pressed into sustained agricultural servitude on behalf of the English.

The English colonists initially turned to indentured servants from England to meet their labor needs. These were men and women, predominantly young and poor, who contracted to work for a Virginia planter for a period typically ranging from four to seven years in exchange for passage to the New World and, at the end of their indenture, a small freedom payment that might include money, tools, clothing, or in the early period sometimes land. During the term of their indenture, servants occupied a legally defined status of unfreedom. They could be bought and sold along with the remainder of their contract, they could be punished for running away or for various forms of insubordination, and they had significantly limited legal rights compared to free persons. However, their servitude was explicitly time-limited, and upon the expiration of their contract they were, in principle, released from their obligations and were free members of colonial society, entitled to acquire land, form families, and participate in the civic and economic life of the colony.

The indentured servant system carried significant problems for the planter class that became increasingly apparent as the seventeenth century progressed. Servants had to be fed, clothed, and housed during their period of indenture, representing a continuous cost to the planter. At the end of their terms, servants became free laborers who had to be paid for their work or who went to establish their own farms. As the seventeenth century progressed, it became increasingly difficult to attract servants from England, where economic conditions were gradually improving and where the reputation of Virginia as a place of brutal labor and early death was well established. The colony also produced a growing population of former servants who were free but poor, landless, and deeply resentful of the wealthy planter class that controlled the best lands and the political institutions of the colony. This social tension exploded catastrophically in Bacon's Rebellion of 1676, when a coalition of free poor whites, discontented servants, and enslaved Africans nearly overthrew the colonial government of Virginia, burning Jamestown and forcing the royal governor to flee to the Eastern Shore. The aftermath of Bacon's Rebellion clarified for the planter class the political dangers of relying on a labor system that produced large numbers of free but discontented workers, and it accelerated their turn toward African slavery as a more reliable, controllable, and perpetual source of labor.

The shift from indentured servitude to African slavery was also facilitated by a broader Atlantic context in which the slave trade was already well established. The Portuguese had been transporting enslaved Africans to their sugar colonies in Brazil and the Cape Verde Islands since the early sixteenth century, and by the mid-seventeenth century, English colonies in Barbados, Jamaica, and other West Indian islands had already developed a fully articulated system of race-based chattel slavery that was generating enormous profits for its planter class. The Barbados model in particular would prove directly influential on the development of slavery in the Carolinas, as we shall see. As the prices of enslaved Africans declined relative to the costs of indentured servants during the latter half of the seventeenth century, particularly after the breaking of the Royal African Company's monopoly in 1698 opened the slave trade to all British merchants, and as the supply of willing English servants dried up, Virginia planters increasingly turned to the transatlantic slave trade as their primary source of bound labor. By the first decade of the eighteenth century, the transformation was complete, and Virginia's plantation economy rested squarely on the foundation of African chattel slavery.

The First Africans in Virginia (1619)

The history of African Americans in the territory that would become the United States began in late August 1619, when a small group of Africans arrived at Point Comfort, the English settlement near the mouth of the James River in Virginia, today known as Fort Monroe in the city of Hampton. Their arrival was recorded by the prominent colonist John Rolfe, who noted in a letter to the Virginia Company that "about the last of August came in a Dutch man of war that sold us twenty and odd Negroes." This sparse and somewhat inaccurate account has generated centuries of scholarly inquiry, because the precise legal status of these earliest African arrivals in Virginia and the full circumstances of their coming remain among the most debated questions in early American history.