DIVERSITY | Offering a place for everyone
29 December 2008
Slavery Takes Hold
African slaves arrive in British North America
This article is excerpted from the book Free At Last: The U.S. Civil Rights Movement, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. View the entire book (PDF, 3.6 MB).
The very first slaves in British North America arrived by accident. Twelve years after the 1607 founding of the first permanent British settlement, at Jamestown, Virginia, a privateer docked there with some “20 and odd Negros” it had captured from a Spanish ship in the Caribbean. The settlers purchased this “cargo,” the original slaves in the future United States.
For the next 50 years, slaves were not a prominent source of labor in the fledgling Virginia colony. The landowning elites preferred to rely on “indentured” white labor. Under this arrangement, potential European immigrants signed an indenture, or contract, under which they borrowed from an employer the price of transportation to America. In return, they agreed to work several years to pay off that debt. During this period, the sociologist Orlando Patterson writes, relations between the races were relatively intimate. A small number of particularly resourceful blacks even obtained their freedom and prospered in their own right.
Beginning in the second half of the 17th century, however, both the price of slaves and the supply of immigrants willing to indenture themselves decreased. As slave labor became cheaper than indentured labor, slavery grew and spread. By 1770, African Americans comprised about 40 percent of the population in the southern colonies and a majority in South Carolina. (Slaves were also found in the northern colonies, but the slave population there never exceeded about 5 percent.) Faced with such a large, oppressed, and potentially rebellious minority, southern elites encouraged a hardening of social attitudes toward African Americans. The children of slave women were declared to be slaves. Masters were permitted to kill slaves in the course of punishing them. Perhaps most importantly, white Virginia elites began to promote anti-black racism as a means of dividing blacks from less wealthy white workers.
Most African-American slaves labored on farms that produced staple crops: tobacco in Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina; rice in the Deep South. In 1793, the American inventor Eli Whitney produced the first cotton gin, a mechanical device that removed cotton seeds from the surrounding cotton fiber. This spurred a dramatic expansion in cotton cultivation throughout the Lower South, one that expanded westward through Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana and into Texas. About one million African-American slaves moved westward during the period 1790-1860, nearly twice the number carried to the United States from Africa.
