http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17700/17700-h/17700-h.htm
Please read. a great history of this subject.
THE SUPPRESSION OF THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE TO THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
1638-1870
Volume I
Harvard Historical Studies 1896
Longmans, Green, and Co., New York
John Philip Adams
-----Original Message-----
From: Discussion of research and writing about Virginia history
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Anita Wills
Sent: Sunday, September 10, 2006 4:27 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: "20 and odd Negroes"
Harold,
I have done research on the descendants of Antonio Johnson, looking for
links to my lines. My Johnson ancestors came from Maryland into Southeastern
Pennsylvania prior to the Civil War. They were free blacks, and part of the
Underground Railroad. Some of the relatives remained in Maryland, and
traveled across the Mason/Dixon freely. I know that Antonio Johnson moved
from Virginia into Southern Maryland, where he raised his children. I am
still working on that line to see if there is a connection there.
Anita
>From: Debra Jackson/Harold Forsythe <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: Discussion of research and writing about Virginia history
> <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: "20 and odd Negroes"
>Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2006 15:32:04 -0400
>
>I would like to join this discussion regarding the first Africans landed in
>Virginia but mind you I am working from memory. As I remember it there was
>more than one entry by Rolfe on this matter. Elsewhere he notes that the
>men and women were purchased for "victuals" from a Dutch privateer but the
>English declined to buy any Africans from the English privateer for fear of
>starting trouble with the Spanish. (Privateers were officially licensed to
>raid a particular foreign realm, in this case Spain and its colonies.)
>Those Africans (or Afro-Cubans) whose names were listed in the 1625 census
>of Virginia had in many and perhaps all cases Spanish names.
>
>The conclusions I drew when I examined documents related to this incident
>about 1980 were 1) the Dutch sailors were starving and willing to trade
>their captives for food; 2) the Africans were captured in Cuba and held as
>slaves by the Dutch; 3) as Paul Finkelman notes, there was no law
>establishing or regulating slavery in Virginia in 1619; 4) colonial
>officials were afraid of provoking a Spanish attack and thus would not buy
>Africans taken from Spanish lands from Englishmen; and, 5) that the
>introduction of a small number of Africans into a white indentured labor
>system did not immediately produce any change in the labor regime on
>Virginia plantations.
>
>Morgan, Breen, and Innis tell a fascinating tale of this first generation
>of Africans in Virginia. Antonio and Maria from 1625 became Anthony and
>Mary Johnson, landowners in Accomack County by the 1650s. One of their
>grandchildren owned a farm he named "Angola." One thing worth noting here
>is that Morgan argues that during the VA Company period, the local company
>leaders choose the healthiest indentured servants sent over to Virginia for
>their own private use, while assigning the sickliest to land farmed for the
>Company. This must also have happened to the arriving Africans, 1619-1624.
>
>But all of this is a small though interesting oddity, between the
>immensities of the Atlantic slave trade on the one hand, and the 300,000
>enslaved black people in Virginia in 1790. The Chesapeake was a latecomer
>to the extensive exploitation of Africans in the western European
>reinvention of chattel slavery in the Western Hemisphere but made up for it
>with vigor after 1700. The enslavement of Africans reshaped Virginia in
>the 18th and 19th centuries and as Morgan notes in his conclusion, that new
>Virginia had decisive importance in shaping the United States at its
>founding.
>
>Harold S. Forsythe
>
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