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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