Between Slavery and Freedom Read Online Free Page B

slaves would have to rely on luck, determination, and courage to gain their liberty, and free blacks would have to be equally resourceful to hold on to it. Slavery took root more quickly in some of Britain’s colonies than in others, but within a generation the institution existed in all of them, along with a patchwork of laws and practices that kept most black people from achieving freedom.
    The white planters who converged on the wharf of Jamestown, Virginia in the summer of 1619 to inspect an enterprising Dutch captain’s human cargo were not personally familiar with slavery. They knew, though, that the Spanish practiced it, and that the Dutch and the Portuguese were competing with one another to keep Spain’s colonies throughout the Americas fully stocked with slaves. They also knew that for decades some of their countrymen had been trying to muscle their way into the African trade. A few of the Virginia planters had seen black people because some aristocratic households in England had acquired them as dependents or servants. What exactly those early white Virginians thought about darker-skinned people is a subject that has intrigued historians for decades. Certainly the thought uppermost in the minds of the planters that day in 1619 was that here was an excellent opportunity to solve their most pressing problem, namely the labor shortage. They could never get enough white indentured servants from Britain, or hold on to those they got for long enough to make a profit, and they wereuneasy about the idea of coercing Native Americans into working for them. It was impractical and it was dangerous in a region where Indians vastly outnumbered whites. The Dutch captain offered them a “parcel” of Africans they could purchase and send into the fields to cultivate the tobacco on which the colony’s prosperity depended.
    Given the economic and social patterns that had developed in Virginia by the mid-eighteenth century, it is tempting to assume that the English planters bought all of the Africans on that unidentified Dutch ship as slaves, that they kept them in lifelong bondage, that they continued buying African slaves as more ships arrived in their ports, and that slavery emerged as a fully developed labor system almost immediately. That is a highly inaccurate picture, though, and represents the dangers of judging one era by the customs and practices of another. The Virginia that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson knew in the 1750s and 1760s was not the Virginia that the planters of the 1620s and 1630s knew or that the colony’s earliest black settlers knew.
    Laboring long hours without pay was certainly something those first black immigrants to Virginia experienced, but it was not what every one of them endured for the rest of their days. African Anthony Johnson, for instance, arrived on another Dutch ship one year after that first cargo of slaves struggled ashore in Jamestown. He gained his freedom—how we do not know—acquired land, and married a free black woman. Anthony and Mary Johnson raised their children in freedom and purchased black slaves as well as the services of white indentured workers. The Johnsons were not alone. Up and down Virginia’s Eastern Shore there were several dozen free black farmers in that first generation or two of settlement who were free because they had bought their way out of bondage, usually by raising their own crops of tobacco on their masters’ land and using that tobacco as currency in what was essentially a barter economy.
    Those early free African people and their American-born children interacted on many levels with English settlers. They traded with them, fought with them, slept with them, and labored alongside them. However, at least some of the influential white men in the colony were uneasy about their presence. These black people were free, but somehow their blackness made them different .The law codes Virginia’s House of