The standard source for the status of 
the earliest Africans in Virginia is T.H. Breen and Stpehen Innes, Myne Own 
Ground, but there is also an excellent study by Douglas Deal


 --




Race and Class
in Colonial Virginia: Indians, Englishmen, and Africans on the Eastern Shore
During the Seventeenth Century. By J. Douglas
DEAL. Studies in African-American History and Culture. (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1993. Pp. xxiv, 452.
$96.00.)




 


 

-----Original Message-----
From: David Kiracofe <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Fri, 26 Sep 2008 10:22 pm
Subject: Re: [VA-HIST] Origins of Slavery










I think it is useful to make a distinction about those first Africans imported 
into Virginia.  The Dutch traders who acquired them in the Carribean surely 
regarded them as slaves when they unloaded them in Jamestown.  It does appear 
that those African workers were not then bound legally as slaves by the 
Virginians, however, but under terms like those of white English indentured 
servants.  I suspect the Virginia Company was not prepared in 1619 to codify a 
status of chattel slavery, but were ready to use their existing system of 
indentures.

For a good discussion for the shift to slavery, I would suggest, Anthony S. 
Parent's Foul Means as a place to start.  The standard source for the status of 
the earliest Africans in Virginia is T.H. Breen and Stpehen Innes, Myne Own 
Ground, but there is also an excellent study by Douglas Deal -- (though I regret 
my memory cannot recall the title! -- mea culpa).

David Kiracofe






 


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