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Slavery in Virginia began with the capture and enslavement of Native Americans during the early days of the English Colony of Virginia and through the late eighteenth century. They primarily worked in tobacco fields. Africans were first brought to colonial Virginia in 1619, when 20 Africans from present-day Angola arrived in Virginia aboard the ship The White Lion.

As the slave trade grew, enslaved people generally were forced to labor at large plantations, where their free labor made plantation owners rich. Colonial Virginia became an amalgamation of Algonquin-speaking Native Americans, English, other Europeans, and West Africans, each bringing their own language, customs, and rituals. By the eighteenth century, plantation owners were the aristocracy of Virginia. There were also a class of white people who oversaw the work of enslaved people, and a poorer class of whites that competed for work with freed blacks.

Tobacco was the key export of the colony in the seventeenth century. Slave breeding and trading gradually became more lucrative than exporting tobacco during the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century. Black human beings were the most lucrative and profitable export from Virginia, and black women were bred to increase the number of enslaved people for the slave trade.

In 1661, the Virginia General Assembly passed its first law allowing any free person the right to own slaves. The suppression and apprehension of runaway slave labor was the object of 1672 legislation.^[1] Additional laws regarding slavery of Africans were passed in the seventeenth century and codified into Virginia's first slave code in 1705. Over time, laws denied increasingly more of the rights of and opportunities for enslaved people, and supported the interests of slaveholders.

For more than 200 years, enslaved people had to deal with a wide range of horrors, such as physical abuse, rape, being separated from family members, lack of food, and degradation. Laws restricted their ability to learn to read and write, so that they could not have books or Bibles. They had to ask permission to leave the plantation, and could leave for only a specified number of hours. During the early period of their American captivity, if they wanted to attend church, they were segregated from white congregants in white churches, or they had to meet secretly in the woods because blacks were not allowed to meet in groups, until later when they were able to establish black churches. The worst difficulty was being separated from family members when they were sold; consequently, they developed coping mechanisms, such as passive resistance, and creating work songs to endure the harsh days in the fields. Thus they created their own musical styles, including Black Gospel music and sorrow songs.

In 2007, the Virginia General Assembly approved a formal statement of "profound regret" for the Commonwealth's history of slavery.

Overview

When English settlers arrived in the seventeenth century in what became the colony of Virginia, there were 30 or so tribes of Native Americans, in a loose confederacy led by Powhatan. He lived in the region of the James River^[2] and was the father of Pocahontas, who later married a colonist.^[3] Numerous colonists starved during the colony's early years.^[4] Kathryn Knight, author of Unveiled - The Twenty & Odd, about a group of captives from the Kingdom of Ndongo who were the first Africans in Virginia, says of the English settlers: "Basically all of those people were right off of the streets in England... didn't know how to grow anything. They didn't know how to manage livestock. They didn't know anything about survival in Virginia... saved them by being able to produce crops, by being able to manage the livestock. They kept them alive."^[5] The English settlers and traders began enslaving Native Americans soon after founding Jamestown.^[6]

Africans were brought by Dutch and English slave ships to the Virginia Colony. The plantation system developed over the seventeenth century and was increasingly inequitable, with the institution of slavery evolving gradually, at first by custom and then through the imposition of laws, from regulating indentured servitude to eventually making life-long servitude legal.^[7] Laws and practices limited the behavior of African Americans, for example, by not allowing blacks to meet in groups, have firearms, or raise livestock. They could only leave plantations for four hours, and needed written permission to travel. Over time, being a Christian did not prevent African Americans from suffering life-long servitude.^[7] Laws vacillated over time concerning the enslavement of Native Americans.^[6] Algonquin-speaking Native Americans, English, other Europeans, and West Africans brought customs and traditions from each of their home countries and "loosely-knit customs began to crystallize into what later became known as the Tuckahoe culture".^[8]

During the colonial period, settlements were established in the James River valley at major river crossings. There were few stores, and churches, and no public schools, and churches.^[9] The valley was known for its large tobacco plantations of thousands of acres in the Tidewater coastal plain and on the Piedmont plateau.^[8][9] On these plantations, tobacco planters treated field, household and skilled workers like chattel (owned property). Growing the labor-intensive tobacco crops, and later the cotton crops, of the South required large tracts of land and relied on slavery to be profitable. Social and political inequality between the planters and the other classes became more pronounced as planters became wealthier.^[10] In 1860, there were 20,000 enslaved people that lived in Arlington, Fairfax, Loudoun, and Prince William counties.^[11]

Plantation owners in Virginia became wealthy during the eighteenth century, as well as members of a new planter aristocracy, by growing tobacco and employing unpaid enslaved people to perform this and other agricultural and domestic labor.^[12][13] The planters were far outnumbered by indentured servants, slaves, and poor white people.^[10] Thomas Anburey, an English officer, visited Colonel Randolph's house in Goochland in 1779 and opined that Virginia plantations were owned and operated by refined, educated people. He thought the class of whites who had the most interaction with their slaves were uneducated and unworldly, and generally "hospitable, generous, and friendly", but qualified his estimation with the statement that they were "accustomed to tyrannize with all their good qualities, they are rude, ferocious, and haughty, much attached to gaming and dissipation".^[9]

Plantations were few in number in colonial Virginia, but were key to the economic welfare of the colony. History often obscures the realities of slavery during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by focusing on the history of the plantation owners and the architecture of the plantation manors, relegating enslaved people to the margins of the history of the plantations.^[14] As historical plantation sites such as Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, George Washington's Mount Vernon, and other plantations throughout the South attempt to provide a fuller picture of colonial life and slavery, some visitors prefer not to hear it.^[15]

Slavery continued until the passage of the 13th Amendment that abolished slavery in 1865. There were laws enacted and other practices that limited African Americans rights and opportunities after the Emancipation Proclamation.^[12]

Slavery

Native Americans

After the first Africans arrived at Jamestown in 1619, slavery and other forms of bondage were found in all the English colonies; some Native Americans were enslaved by the English, with a few slaveholders having both African and Native American slaves,^[16] who worked in their tobacco fields. Laws regarding enslavement of Native Americans vacillated between encouraging and discouraging slavery. The number of enslaved native people reached a peak at the end of the seventeenth century.

The colony of Virginia formally ended Indian slavery in 1705. The practice had already declined because Native Americans could escape into familiar territory, and also suffered from new infectious diseases introduced by the colonists, among whom these were endemic. The Atlantic slave trade began to provide numerous African captives to replace them as laborers. The enslavement of indigenous people continued into the end of the eighteenth century; by the nineteenth century, they were either incorporated within African-American communities or were free.^[6]

Europeans sold guns for slaves in an existing indigenous trading market, and encouraged allied tribes to provide the slaves by targeting Indian groups on the periphery of English settlements.

— Indian Enslavement in Virginia ^[6]

Indigenous people were generally taken in the greatest numbers during battles between the English and Native Americans.^[6] They attacked or fought one another for years, partly because of the English people's lack of food and the Native Americans' distress that they were losing their land. On March 22, 1622, 347 or more colonists were killed and English settlements were set on fire during an Indian massacre. Approximately 20 women were taken from Martin's Hundred plantation on the James River and were said to have been put into "great slavery".^[17] To prevent escape, the English sent captured Native Americans to British colonies in the West Indies to work as slaves.^[18][19][a]

First Africans

In late August 1619, twenty or more Africans were brought to Point Comfort on the James River in Virginia. They were sold first in exchange for food and then sold in Jamestown as indentured servants.^[21][b] The Africans came from the Kingdom of Ndongo, in what is now Angola.^[5] Angela, an enslaved woman from Ndonggo, was one of the first enslaved Africans to be officially recorded in the colony of Virginia in 1619.^[24]

By 1620, there were 32 Africans and four Native Americans in the "Others not Christians in the Service of the English" category of the muster who arrived in Virginia, but that number was reduced by 1624, perhaps due to the Second Anglo-Powhatan War (1622–1632) or illness.^[21][25] William Tucker, born in 1624, was the first person of African descent born in the Thirteen Colonies.^[26]

There were 906 Europeans and 21 Africans in the 1624 muster. By 1625, the Africans lived on plantations;^[21] many of them were baptized as Christians and took Christian names. In 1628, a slave ship carried 100 people from Angola to be sold into slavery in Virginia, and consequently the number of Africans in the colony rose greatly.^[21][25][27]

The Atlantic slave trade had been in existence among Europeans before Africans landed in Virginia and according to custom, slavery was legal. Unlike white indentured servants, blacks could not negotiate a labor contract, nor could African Americans effectively defend their rights without paperwork. By the mid-1600s, seven legal suits had been filed by African Americans asserting their claim to a limited period of service. In six of the cases, their enslavers claimed that they were bound for life.^[28] Since 1990, after over 30 years of scholarly debate, the dominant consensus is that "the vast majority" of Africans were treated like slaves by their slaveholders. It was very rare for blacks to have a legal indenture, but there were some people who attained freedom in a number of different ways.^[29]

Mary and Anthony Johnson were among the few African Americans who were able to gain their freedom, herd livestock, and establish a prosperous farm.^[30] In 1640, one black servant, John Punch, ran away and was sentenced by the Virginia courts to slavery for the rest of his life. Two white indentured servants who ran away with Punch had four more years added on to their servitude.^[31]

Unpaid servants

Household and farm work was performed by indentured servants and enslaved people, including children.^[12][c] Indentured servants, generally brought from England, worked without pay for a specific length of time.^[33] They exchanged their labor for the cost of their passage to the colony, room and board, and freedom dues, which were stipulated to be provided to the servant at the end of the indenture period, and could include land and supplies that would help them become established on their own.^[27][34] In the seventeenth century, the tobacco fields of Virginia were mostly worked by white indentured servants. By 1705, the economy was based upon slave labor imported from Africa.^[35]

Enslaved people were generally held for their lifetimes. Children of enslaved women were enslaved from birth per the legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem.^[33] Some commentators hold that since the muster and other records used the term "servant" that it meant that blacks who landed in Virginia were indentured servants. Unlike indentured servants, slaves were taken against their will. When slaves were first sold in exchange for food, it was clear that they were considered property. The term "indentured servitude" was often a euphemism for slavery when referring to white people.^[36] Enslaved blacks were treated much more harshly than white servants. Whipping of blacks, for instance, was common.^[33][d][e]

Domestic, field, and skilled labor

From Monday through Saturday, enslaved people were assigned specific duties. Most people, including children, were farm hands.^[38] Domestic work, another duty, included preparing and serving food, cleaning, and caretaking of white children; others were trained to be blacksmiths, carpenters, and coopers.^[38] Those who had livestock or gardens tended to them on Sunday. It was also a day to be with family and for worship.^[38]

Children also worked; for instance, by the late eighteenth century at Monticello, small black children helped with tasks at the main house and looked after enslaved toddlers until they were ten years of age. At that time, they were assigned to work in the fields, the house, or to learn a specific skill such as the making of nails or textiles. At the age of 16, they might be forced into a trade.^[39] Domestic work was not as onerous as field work and provided opportunities to overhear gossip and news. Life was more difficult for children who worked in the fields, particularly on large plantations, but it was most difficult when family members were sold away from the farm or plantation. Some planters cruelly mistreated those in their charge.^[40]

Offenses against slaves

Enslavers had control of the people that they enslaved. They could favor some, make life miserable for others, tease them with hollow promises of emancipation, brutally rape, and severely punish slaves. They could also control what happened to their children, which was a very powerful tactic. Slaves could not testify against their masters in a court case, making their situation more difficult.^[41] In 1829, the North Carolina v. Mann case was brought before the North Carolina Supreme Court, which ruled that slaveholders had the right to treat enslaved people in any way that they chose, including killing them, in order to better the "submission" of the enslaved to their masters.^[42]

Into the first half of the nineteenth century, it was common practice at southern universities, such as the University of Virginia (UVA), for white men to rape the enslaved women and children who served them. Over the years, between 100 and 200 black men, women and children who worked at the university were mistreated and beaten.^[43][f] The behavior was accepted by law enforcement and schools.^[43] In September 1826, two students at the university, George Hoffman and Turner Dixon, caught the same sexually transmitted disease, which they deduced was caught from the same girl, who had been raped by both men. They and other classmates found the 16-year-old victim and beat her until she was bloody. After her owner complained to the college, the young men were reprimanded and ordered to pay $10 to the slaveholder.^[43][g]

After 1808, when Congress made the Atlantic slave trade illegal, prohibiting importation of slaves from the West Indies or Africa, the domestic slave trade increased. The slave trade grew in the country through breeding enslaved women so that their children could be sold for profit.^[44]

Progeny

From the 1600s until 1860, it was common for white planters, overseers, or other white men to rape enslaved women. Because of the disparity of power between enslaved women and the men who fathered their children, and the fact that the men had unlimited access to such forced sex, "all of the sex that took place between enslaved women and white men constituted some form of sexual assault."^[42]

Since children followed their mother's status, the children of enslaved women increased a slaveholder's work force. It met the economic needs of the colony, which suffered perpetual labor shortages because conditions were difficult, mortality was high, and the government had difficulty attracting sufficient numbers of English indentured servants after economic conditions improved in England.^[45] This resulted in generations of black and mixed-race enslaved people. Among the most notable were Sally Hemings and her siblings, fathered by planter John Wayles, and her four surviving children by Thomas Jefferson.^[46] This was in contrast to English common law of the time.^[h]

Formalized slavery

Zdroj:https://en.wikipedia.org?pojem=History_of_slavery_in_Virginia
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