Читать книгу Freedom Facts and Firsts - Jessie Carney Smith - Страница 46

In August of 1619, twelve years after English colonists established the first permanent English settlement in North America, Jamestown received Africans as involuntary laborers. The 20 Africans who were put ashore by the captain of a Dutch ship were not slaves in the legal sense, but rather indentured servants, who, like their European counterparts, became free after their contractual period ended. The colony’s inhabitants, however, did not appear to grasp the all-encompassing effect of the induction of Africans into the fledgling colony. As an institution, slavery did not exist in the colony. As an economic system the “peculiar institution,” as slavery came to be called, developed gradually from indentured servitude to lifelong and heritable bondage as Virginia increasingly failed to meet its labor needs with Native Americans and indentured servants.

Once the Virginia colony recognized that blacks could not easily escape without being identified, could be strictly controlled and persecuted because they were not Christians, and seemed available in endless supply, the colony felt it had found the answer to its labor shortage problem. Like other colonies, Virginia had no statutes against the perpetual and inherited servitude of people from the continent of Africa or of African descent. While Jamestown, Virginia, was the first of the North America British colonies to receive Africans as involuntary laborers, it was not the first colony to codify the institution of slavery. Massachusetts preceded Virginia by twenty years when its code of laws, the Body of Liberties, recognized the enslavement of Africans as not only legal but also moral in 1641.

Virginia was evolving into a slave society with a racially based system of thralldom …

Two decades later, the Virginia Assembly indirectly provided statutory recognition that blacks were to serve durante vita, or for life. Virginia was evolving into a slave society with a racially based system of thralldom subjugating all aspects of slaves’ lives. In 1705 Virginia’s planter-dominated House of Burgesses codified slave laws that sought to accomplish three things: confirm the perpetual and inherited bondage of people of African decent; establish an entirely separate penal code and judicial system for enslaved people; and create mandatory service in slave patrols by non-slaveholders to force them to protect the property rights of those who owned blacks. This last provision was designed to segregate the colony’s black and white labor forces. The effort to accentuate racial diversity to the detriment of class unity was also manifested in the terms used by legislators to explicate and substantiate why the 1705 slave code was considered necessary. Imbued with racially slanted language, it sought to debase humans of African descent and repudiate their humanity.

Linda T. Wynn