Emily Rose asks a very important question. Unfortunately, there is far less direct evidence than Joe Hunter supposes --evidence of a kind that might permit us to make a stab at answering the question in an empirical manner. What we do have are very scattered and disparate records, very little on the most crucial early years, and most on the latter half of the 17th century. To fill all the gaps in the record, we are forced to make inferences on the basis of this or that shard of evidence, or worse yet on the basis of the *absence* of this or that shard. 

I think most of the earliest Africans to arrive in the Virginia colony were probably either slaves or at least servants with terms of indeterminate length. Why would they be treated like, or given the status of indentured servants? Take the first "twenty and odd" in 1619: they were robbed from a slaver. "Indentured servitude" barely had any history yet in that colony. The ship captains who brought these Africans to Virginia presumably knew what the slave trade was all about. Unless we assume they were consciously "liberating" them by stealing them and then selling them as servants with limited terms in Virginia (a remote possibility), we are left with a kind of default guess that the Africans were treated as what they were on board that ship (San Juan Bautista): slaves. Even if that guess is correct, we still don't know what it meant in practice. What did those in Virginia who acquired the Africans understand the terms "servant" and "slave" to mean (if they even used the latter term at all to describe their laborers in the early years)? I would argue that, with precious few examples or precedents to follow, the early Englishmen and early Africans in the colony themselves determined what the relationship would amount to. After a few decades, the burgesses began to weigh in with relevant pieces of legislation. And there is, of course, the famous case of John Punch who is sentenced in 1640 to be a slave for life, allowing us to infer (perhaps) that up to that point he had the status of a servant with a more limited term. But that is just one case, and the entire body of evidence about is is one short paragraph.

There were a few Africans on the Eastern Shore of Virginia (discussed in my Race and Class in Colonial Virginia) who did evidently enter into contractual agreements with their employers, which agreements included provisions for manumission. I saw no indentures per se for African servants. In 1654, the black servant, John Casor, of the free black, Anthony Johnson, claimed in court that his master had held him illegally a full seven years beyond the end of  his original seven-year indenture, but the indenture itself was not produced and Johnson claimed that there was no indenture at all. In the county court records, there is a great deal of testimony by and about English servants (indentured and not) dealing with issues of treatment, terms of indenture, freedom dues, and the like. When the early Africans appear in these same records--which is far less often, as a general rule, the matters in dispute are rather different: those Africans who are clearly free are involved in matters of the sort that occupied other free people in the colony, while those Africans who are unfree (as far as I can tell) are treated mainly like slaves or long-term servants of some sort. The records I am referring to here are those of the 1640s and succeeding decades. 

We haven't truly resolved the issues embedded in the questions posed by Professor Rose. Neither Edmund Morgan nor Ira Berlin nor I have discovered a sufficient body of evidence to do much more than make some educated guesses. To my mind, the fact that a number of blacks on the Eastern Shore managed to become free does *not* constitute evidence that all or most Africans in Virginia had the status of (indentured) servants, not slaves, up to the 1650s or 1660s. 

Doug Deal
History/SUNY Oswego

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