Quoting
John Rolfe’s account of the event, John Smith noted that “About the
last of August came in a Dutch manne of warre that sold us twenty
Negars.” Thus began the importation of Africans to America though their
early status of servants or slaves may still be questioned.
Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
"Unsurpassed Valor, Courage and Devotion to Liberty"
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
White and Black Servants in Early America:
“Thanks
to John Smith we know that Negroes first came to the British
continental colonies in 1619.
What we do not know is exactly when
Negroes were first enslaved there. This question has been debated by
historians for the past seventy years, the critical point being whether
Negroes were enslaved almost from their first importation or whether
they were at first simply servants and only later reduced to the status
of slaves.
During
the nineteenth century historians assumed almost universally that the
first Negroes came to Virginia as slaves. So close was their
acquaintance with the problem of racial slavery that it did not occur to
them that Negroes could ever have been anything but slaves.
Philip
A. Bruce, the first man to probe with some thoroughness into the early
years of American slavery, adopted this view in 1896, although he
emphasized that the original difference in treatment between white
servants and Negroes was merely that Negroes served for life.
James
C. Ballagh . . . took the position that the first Negroes served merely
as servants and that enslavement did not begin until around 1660, when
statutes bearing on slavery were passed for the first time. Writing on
the free Negro in Virginia for the Johns Hopkins series, John H. Russell
in 1913 tackled the central question and showed that some Negroes were
indeed servants but concluded that “between 1640 and 1660 slavery was
fast becoming an established fact. In this twenty years the colored
population was divided, part being servants and part being slaves, and
some who were servants defended themselves with increasing difficulty
from the encroachment of slavery.”
[Author]
Ulrich Philips of Georgia, impressed with the geniality of both slavery
and twentieth-century race relations, found no natural prejudice in the
white man and expressed his “conviction that Southern racial asperities
were mainly superficial, and that the two great elements are
fundamentally in accord.”
[Sociologists
and social psychologists] . . . “Liberal on the race question almost to
a man, [tended] to see slavery as the initial cause of the Negro’s
current degradation. The modern Negro was the unhappy victim of long
association with base status. Sociologists, though uninterested in
tired questions of historical evidence, could not easily assume a
natural prejudice in the white man as the cause of slavery. Prejudice
must have followed enslavement, not vice versa; else any liberal program
of action would be badly compromised.
Ironically
there might have been no historical controversy [regarding when racial
prejudice began] if every historian dealing with the subject had
exercised greater care with facts and greater restraint in
interpretation. Too often the debate entered the realm of inference and
assumption. For the crucial years after 1619 there is simply not enough
evidence to indicate with any certainty whether Negroes were treated
like white servants or not. No historian has found anything resembling
proof one way or the other. The first Negroes were sold to the English
settlers, yet so were other Englishmen.
That
some Negroes were held as slaves after about 1640 is no indication,
however that American slavery popped into the world fully developed at
that time. Many historians . . . have shown slavery to be a gradual
development, a process not completed until the eighteenth century.
[Some] Negroes served only the term usual for white servants, and others
were completely free. One Negro freeman, Anthony Johnson, himself owned
a Negro. Obviously the enslavement of some Negroes did not mean the
immediate enslavement of all.”
(Modern
Tensions and the Origins of American Slavery, Winthrop D. Jordan,
Journal of Southern History, Volume XXVIII, February, 1962, pp. 18 -25)
