After the failure of the Roanoke Colony and finding that tobacco could be potential cash crop to help Jamestown succeed, John Rolfe notes the arrival of enslaved African people...
1619? How did we get here? Let's take a giant step backwards in time. Slavery has a long, storied human tradition. It appears in the Bible: from the captivity in Egypt to the Apostle Paul telling slaves to be obedient to their masters and masters to be good to their slaves. (See Ephesians 6) The ancient kingdoms from Persia, to Egypt, to Greece had well organized systems of slavery. Roman slavery is well documented and studied, and initially it seems for many of the ancient kingdoms, slavery is the result of one kingdom conquering another.
Slavery persists in Europe after the Roman Empire, and as the continent becomes mostly Catholic and transitions to feudal forms of government, slavery is largely phased out and replaced with serfdom. There's a nuanced distinction between a slave and serf to clarify. The slave is the direct property the master or the master's family, the serf is more bound to the master's land or manor. The serf worked the master's land in exchange for security, justice, and some of land of their own to farm. To be clear serfdom was still pretty miserable and was another way for the wealthy, gentry or noble classes to benefit from free or mostly free labor.
Throughout the Middle Ages, slavery in form of one Christian owning another is largely done away with, but slavery is known to have existed in the form of Christians owning Muslims or Muslims owning Christians. As Europeans begin navigating beyond the Mediterranean in the 15th Century, the nature of the European slave trade changes and is legitimized by the Roman Catholic Church.
Pope Nicholas V in 1452 in the Dum Diverseas authorized that Saracens and pagans could be kept enslaved perpetually, and in 1455 in the Romanus Pontifex authorized King Alfonso:
"to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to apply and appropriate to himself and his successors the kingdoms, dukedoms, counties, principalities, dominions, possessions, and goods"
This is the approach Columbus takes when he sails to the Americas, meets the Taino, and by day 3 has seven people captive on his ship to be brought back to Spain as servants for Queen Isabella. Initially slavery in the Americas uses the local people as the workforce. This system smells a little more like feudal serfdom, these Native Americans live on this land, this land has been claimed for Spain, therefore these people work the land for Spain. There's one major problem with the plan for leveraging the Native Americans for slave labor, epidemic.
As noted in an earlier post, the indigenous people of the Americas had not been exposed to diseases from the Eastern Hemisphere and within 50 years, various American nations are devastated. Diseases like influenza and smallpox spread not only to the nations which have had direct contact with the Europeans but also to other nearby nations as peoples engaged in travel and trade.
Europeans had already explored along the west coast of Africa (remember Dias made it south around Africa to reach in India in 1488), with the new colonies in the Americas short on labor, Europeans turned to another source of slaves, Africa.
At the time European encroachment into Africa was primarily limited to coastal colonies (pretty much true until the development of quinine). It is here that the Europeans are able to trade goods for slaves. Like many other parts of the world, slavery existed in Africa, and like many other parts of the world it was part of the spoils of war, "Those sold by the Blacks are for the most part prisoners of war, taken either in fight, or pursuit, or in the incursions they make into their enemies territories..To conclude, some slaves are also brought to these Blacks, from very remote inland countries, by way of trade, and sold for things of very inconsiderable value - John Barbot.
The Spanish and Portuguese start the Atlantic slave trade very simply by trading European made goods to coastal African kingdoms. And as these people are sold as property, they marked as such, "These being set aside, each of the others, which have passed as good, is marked on the breast, with a red- hot iron, imprinting the mark of the French, English, or Dutch companies, that so each nation may distinguish their own," These enslaved people are now marked for shipping and ready to sail across the Atlantic as property, as Barbot notes, "Many of those slaves we transport from Guinea to America are prepossessed with the opinion, that they are carried like sheep to the slaughter". Their primary job upon reaching the colonies is to grow whatever the local cash crop is, whether growing sugar in the Caribbean or tobacco in Virginia.
That brings us back to Jamestown. The Spanish may have started bringing slaves over, and the English are all too eager to follow suit. The slave trade is a product of religious supremacy as noted in the papal bulls form 1452 and 1455 but also as seen Queen Elizabeth's charter for Walter Raleigh's Roanoke colony. The lives of Saracens, heathens, pagans, etc are simply are not of value, and Christians of the time feel perfectly justified committing violence against people or lands that are not Christian (keeping in mind that it means their particular version of Christianity, as noted in earlier posts on European religious unrest). There's also a practical problem they are trying to solve, colonies across the Atlantic are expensive and difficult to prop up, especially if you don't strike gold upon landing. Massive, industrialized farming appears to be needed in order for agriculture to make colonial profit, and the expense of being a free European who wants to cross the ocean is largely cost prohibitive. The age old, tried and tested, and now religiously approved use of slave labor is the solution. Other solutions will be tried as well and will be discussed in future posts, but the economic foundation of the Virginia colony, the first English colony in the US, is built on slavery.
Jamestown is the first successful English colony in the US. The first enslaved Africans arrived in 1619, right at the point when the colony realizes tobacco is the future, and within a little more than a decade after its founding. We may never know what languages these first slaves spoke or what religions they practiced, although some google searching will suggest they came from Angola. What we can know is that these slaves are amongst the first people to settle in the English colonies, the first lasting English colony to more precise. This American society started culturally pluralistic, and we have often failed to recognize it.
We also shouldn't assume that the Atlantic slave trade was inevitable. It was a convenient solution to be sure, and one which Europeans could easily encourage by trading manufactured goods and helping to prop up kingdoms that were willing to capture and sell slaves. In many ways, it's a precursor to later Imperialism and certain subtler forms of modern day Imperialism and global trade. In the 18th Century, John Wesley writes, "It was some time before the Europeans found a more compendious way of procuring African slaves, by prevailing upon them to make war upon each other, and to sell their prisoners," as he rebukes the rationale for starting and maintaining the slave trade. The choice to start and continue the slave trade was deliberate, and well before Wesley, there were voices of dissent.
One hundred years after the papal bulls which gave legitimacy to slavery, Pope Paul III believing that Jesus intended believers to spread the Gospel to the corners of the Earth, flatly condemns the slave trade:
"Hence Christ, who is the Truth itself, that has never failed and can never fail, said to the preachers of the faith whom He chose for that office 'Go ye and teach all nations.' He said all, without exception, for all are capable of receiving the doctrines of the faith. The enemy of the human race, who opposes all good deeds in order to bring men to destruction, beholding and envying this, invented a means never before heard of, by which he might hinder the preaching of God's word of Salvation to the people: he inspired his satellites who, to please him, have not hesitated to publish abroad that the Indians of the West and the South, and other people of whom We have recent knowledge should be treated as dumb brutes created for our service, pretending that they are incapable of receiving the Catholic Faith."
As we leave Jamestown and 1619, we leave a colony populated with Anglican Englishmen who owe their very survival to the local Powhatan, and who will build their tobacco fortunes on the backs of African men and women. In just this one colony the face of America is already many, but we will explore the other early colonies, we'll see how other peoples formed the foundation of the pluralistic society that we live in today.
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