The Atlantic Slave Trade in the United States
Spanish conquerors established the framework for the Atlantic slave trade over a century before the first chained Africans arrived at Jamestown. Even Bartolomé de Las Casas, celebrated for his pleas to save Native Americans from colonial butchery, for a time recommended that Indigenous labor be replaced by importing Africans. “Race” followed the expansion of slavery across the Atlantic world. Skin color and race suddenly seemed fixed. Englishmen equated Africans with categorical blackness and blackness with sin. More and more Europeans embraced the notion that Europeans and Africans were of distinct races. Others now preached that the Old Testament God cursed Ham, the son of Noah, and doomed Black people to perpetual enslavement.
And yet in the early years of American slavery, ideas about race were not yet fixed and the practice of slavery was not yet codified. The first generations of Africans in English North America faced miserable conditions, but, in contrast to later American history, their initial servitude was not necessarily permanent or inherited. Africans were definitively set apart as fundamentally different from their white counterparts and faced longer terms of service and harsher punishments, but, like the indentured white servants whisked away from English slums, these first Africans in North America could also work for only a set number of years before becoming free landowners themselves.
Slavery developed differently in different places. European slave traders sent most kidnapped Africans to plantations in Brazil and the Caribbean. Relatively smaller numbers were sent to the U.S. colonies and elsewhere in the Americas. This led to different systems where in many places enslaved peoples were worked to death and then replaced, in the U.S. colonies owners often demanded slaves reproduce while then not respecting the resulting families.
The John Punch Case
An indentured servant was someone who had their passage paid for to come to the United States in exchange of working off the debt for an agreed upon number of years. The practice was very common until Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 (See Below) with poor blacks and whites coming to Britain’s American colonies as indentured servants. During the time of their servitude, indentured servants were beholden to the demands and violence of their masters. Unlike a slave, however, indentured servants were granted their freedom after their “debt” was paid off.
In 1640 three indentured servants ran away from their “master” before their time had been completed. They were captured and placed in front of a tribunal to be judged for their crime of running away. The first two runaways, both white, received three years added to their service. The final indentured servant who had fled, a black man named John Punch, was sentenced to a lifetime of service. This was the first time in U.S. history that different treatment based on race found its way into the legal system of the American colonies.
Bacon’s Rebellion
Many historians point to an event known as Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 as a turning point. Nathaniel Bacon was a wealthy white property owner and relative of Virginia’s governor, William Berkeley. But Bacon and Berkeley did not like each other, and they disagreed over issues pertaining to how the colony should be governed, including the colony’s policy toward Native Americans. Bacon wanted the colony to retaliate for raids by Native Americans on frontier settlements and to remove all Native Americans from the colony so landowners like himself could expand their property. Berkeley feared that doing so would unite all of the nearby tribes in a costly and destructive war against the colony. In defiance of the governor, Bacon organized his own militia, consisting of white and black indentured servants and enslaved black people, who joined in exchange for freedom, and attacked nearby tribes. A power struggle ensued with Bacon and his militia on one side and Berkeley, the Virginia House of Burgesses, and the rest of the colony’s elite on the other. Months of conflict followed, including armed skirmishes between militias. In September 1676, Bacon’s militia captured Jamestown and burned it to the ground.
Although Bacon died of fever a month later and the rebellion fell apart, Virginia’s wealthy planters were shaken by the fact that a rebel militia that united white and black servants and slaves had destroyed the colonial capital. Legal scholar Michelle Alexander writes:
“The events in Jamestown were alarming to the planter elite, who were deeply fearful of the multiracial alliance of [indentured servants] and slaves. Word of Bacon’s Rebellion spread far and wide, and several more uprisings of a similar type followed. In an effort to protect their superior status and economic position, the planters shifted their strategy for maintaining dominance. They abandoned their heavy reliance on indentured servants in favor of the importation of more black slaves.”
After Bacon’s Rebellion, Virginia’s lawmakers began to make legal distinctions between “white” and “black” inhabitants. By permanently enslaving Virginians of African descent and giving poor white indentured servants and farmers some new rights and status, they hoped to separate the two groups and make it less likely that they would unite again in rebellion. Historian Ira Berlin explains:
“Soon after Bacon’s Rebellion they increasingly distinguish between people of African descent and people of European descent. They enact laws which say that people of African descent are hereditary slaves. And they increasingly give some power to independent white farmers and land holders . . .”
The Development of Racial Categories in the United States
The racial classification laws of the 17th century codified differential treatment between white and black people living in the American colonies. Legally and socially, Black Americans became officially outsiders. It is from this point that modern conceptions of race developed in the United States.
Racial categories are not natural, and race is not biologically constructed. Racial categories were created and codified in law over time to develop and maintain a social and economic system that benefited those at the top—wealthy white men.
As the status of people of African descent in the British colonies was challenged and attacked, and as white indentured servants were given new rights and status, the word white continued to be more widely used in public documents and private papers to describe the European colonists. Historian Robin D. G. Kelley explains:
“Here you get the emergence of this idea of a white race as a way to distinguish themselves from those dark-skinned people who they associate with perpetual slavery.”
The division in American society between black and white that began in the late 1600s had devastating consequences for African Americans as slavery became an institution that flourished for centuries. American slavery was often brutal, barbaric, and violent. In addition to the hardship of forced labor, enslaved people were maimed or killed by slave owners as punishment for working too slowly, visiting a spouse living on another plantation, or even learning to read. Enslaved people were also sexually exploited.
Leaders and scientists from the United States and around the world would increasingly rely on the supposed differences between the black and white races to justify the brutal and inhuman treatment of slaves. The 17th conceptions of race imbued with racist tropes to justify the unequal condition of Black and white followed Americans well beyond emancipation in 1865 and the dismantling of Jim Crow in the 1950s and 1960s. The racist structures created in the 1600s to protect the wealth and status of colonial are deeply embedded in the structures of U.S. society and continue to shape the everyday experiences of African-Americans.
