Michael Wood on 'ngland’s first #merican colony
In summer 1619, by the steamy creeks of the James river on Chesapeake Bay in Virginia, the General Assembly of Jamestown met in the settlement’s newly built church, the first representative governing body of the English settlers within the future United States. The 400th anniversary of this event was commemorated recently by President Trump, amid bitter demonstrations and boycotts by black legislators.
In more ways than one, it was a very charged moment in American history. And a few weeks later something no less momentous happened. Two battered English privateers reached the Virginia coast escorting a captured Portuguese slave ship carrying the first African slaves to arrive in English America. Seized in the Caribbean, the ship had come from Luanda in the Portuguese colony of Angola, where in 1618–19 the dreadful wars of the conquista were underway. Of 350 African prisoners on board, a third had died en route. The English ships took 50 or 60 as captives and left the rest to their fate.
Heirs to buccaneers like Francis Drake and Walter Ralegh, these privateers had made their fortunes attacking Spanish and Portuguese ships, and had no qualms about dealing in slaves. At the end of August, they sold them in Virginia “at the best and easiest rates they could”. In September, more followed. They are recorded in the General Muster of Virginia the following year: “Indians in the service of several planters: 4; Negroes in the service of several planters: 32.” Living in English settler households, these captive Angolans were “the most proper and cheap instruments for this plantation that could be”.
So 1619 – 400 years ago – was the de facto beginning of the enslavement of Africans in what would become the
United States. Slavery and legislated racial prejudice evolved in Virginia over the next half century, but in the first few decades it was still possible for Africans who escaped bondage to establish themselves and their families as free planters. In the 1660s, for example, 10 men and three women are listed as free households. Among them was Anthony Johnson, a black planter and former indentured servant who had arrived in 1619. His later life with his wife, Mary – “a Negro woman” – and his family, can be traced in plantations along the eastern edge of Virginia into Maryland, where Anthony died in the late 1660s or 1670, and where his grandson John named a farm after Anthony’s native Angola. What we wouldn’t give for the memoirs of these black 17th-century pioneers.
But they lived on the edge. They were the exceptions. The early laws of the Virginia colony were discriminatory: there was, for instance, to be no mixing of races. In 1640, the early modern conception of slavery was formalised in the John Punch case, when an African indentured servant tried to run away and was sentenced to serve as a slave for the rest of his life. Slavery was entrenched in Virginia by 1660, expanding quickly across the Atlantic coast and the Caribbean. In 1698, the Virginia parliament opened up the slave trade to all Englishmen. Through this act, and the drawing up of a slave code, the practice was institutionalised. In the Chesapeake Bay area, by the mid-18th century, slaves made up half the population of the new capital, Williamsburg, while in Virginia they constituted a large majority. Founding fathers Jefferson, Madison and Washington did nothing to alter the situation.
So this year’s 400th anniversary is a powerfully symbolic moment: a primer for the history of America. The beginning of the British empire and the root of the United States, it marks too the start of the destruction of the indigenous peoples, who in Virginia were wiped out within a century. It takes us back to the beginning of the US’s slavery narrative, and the source of much of the drama unfolding today. Slavery’s corrosive legacy – the deliberate and systematic discrimination against African-Americans through segregation, mass incarceration, prejudicial housing and employment law, and educational disadvantage – has afflicted the States ever since. It is an ongoing source of shame that threatens the whole body politic of the republic. We should not forget 1619. As Thomas Jefferson – himself a slave owner – once said: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free… it expects what never was, and never
will be.”