Part of the reason is that slavery requires all sorts of institutional
support -- probate courts to insure the intergenerational transmission
of propertry; rules about the children of slaves and their status; rules
on what happens when they runaway; etc.  Slavery can evolve (as it did
in VA) without all of these things in place but it takes time to do that
and in the 1620s there is no evidence of this; moreover, to the extent
that slavery is racial in Va. there are no clear rules on race -- blacks
in VA testify against whites, intermarry with whites, etc.  Moreover,
the British, unlike their Roman law neighbors, have no heritage of
slavery or traditions of enslaving people or any rules and laws to
govern slavery.  We don't see any evidence of slaveholding until the
mid-1630s and nothing significant until about 1640 and even that is
pretty slim.

Paul Finkelman

Paul Finkelman
President William McKinley Distinguished Professor of Law
     and Public Policy
Albany Law School
80 New Scotland Avenue
Albany, New York   12208-3494

518-445-3386
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>>> [log in to unmask] 09/04/06 7:58 PM >>>
Paul et al.:

How do you (or we) *know* these first Africans in Virginia were
indentured
servants, not slaves? It does seem clear that some became free after a
period of years, but none of these cases is well documented for those
first years in the colony. Did any ship leave the African coast between
1500 and 1800 with a cargo of free, voluntary African migrants who had
signed contracts to be servants in some American colony? The Africans
taken by the "Treasurer" and "White Lion" off the slaver "San Juan
Bautista" in 1619 had been enslaved in Angola to be delivered in Vera
Cruz. Are we to imagine that the Dutch and English ships that captured
these Africans before they reached Vera Cruz were in fact engaged in
liberating them from slavery by unloading them in Virginia? The absence
of
a slave code early in the history of the colony does not mean a
slave-like
status could not have existed for Africans (e.g., servitude for terms of
indeterminate length). My sense, after working through thousands of
pages
of Virginia county court records from the 1630s to 1700 and beyond is
that
much happened de facto that was not authorized de jure. The biggest
problem about the early years from 1619 to, say, the 1650s is the
paucity
of conclusive evidence. Neither you nor I, nor Morgan, nor Breen and
Innes
have found enough evidence to state with certainty that the first "20
and
odd" Africans to arrive were all "indentured servants" or "slaves" or
something else. I would speculate the "default" status to have been
slavery but can offer only a mass of circumstantial evidence to support
that speculation.

The Post story is correct in emphasizing the relative newness of a) the
connection with the "San Juan Bautista", and b) the details on the
Angolan
background of these first "slaves" in Virginia. The books by Morgan and
Breen and Innes had neither of these.

Douglas Deal
Professor of History
State University of New York at Oswego
Oswego, NY 13126
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(315)-312-3441

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