In February 2019, Virginia governor Ralph Northam, in the fight of his political life, after being caught on camera as a college student dressed in blackface, appeared across from Gayle King, the Black cohost of CBS This Morning. The embattled governor, attempting to offer an apology, said, “We are now at the 400-year anniversary—just 90 miles from here in 1619. The first indentured servants from Africa landed on our shores in Old Point Comfort, what we call now Fort Monroe, and while—”
An indignant King would have none of it. “Also known as slavery,” she cut him off.1
And the media had a field day with yet another tone-deaf remark on race by the governor, who then suffered a well-deserved, on-screen drubbing by a sharp Black female journalist.
But history, it turns out, gets the last word, if not the last laugh. For both Northam and King were right—and both were wrong! Though so many Americans, Black and White, believe, as does Gayle King, that those first Africans came here as slaves, Anthony and Isabella, and the other first Africans to arrive in Virginia in 1619 aboard the White Lion, were sold, or bartered, into an ambiguous netherworld of bondage somewhere between indentured servitude and slavery; an indeterminate purgatory with implications that cut to the very quick of the founding of America and her institutions; a fluid yet dangerous limbo with ramifications that still confound us to this day.
Many feel that calling these Africans indentured servants somehow whitewashes slavery’s legacy. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, calling them slaves obliterates a quintessential aspect of the legacy of slavery in America by removing a cornerstone from understanding where we began as a nation still divided by race. But, then, calling them indentured servants obliterates the legacy of the differential, unequal, brutal treatment singled out for Black Americans in this land of liberty, equality, and fraternity.
So, the truth, as it frequently does, lies somewhere in between; in between white and black; in between indentured servitude and slavery; in between eventual freedom and perpetual bondage. But determining that in-between line, that status of Africans in America, was an important first step in ordering the hierarchy of power and wealth in the colony and then in the nation.
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A tidewater itself is an in-between place; a region of transition between rivers and the sea; a zone where saltwater ocean tides affect freshwater rivers. A casual glance at a chart of the Tidewater area of Virginia shows a confluence of rivers pouring into Chesapeake Bay. In the south bay, the James River has traveled 350 miles from the Appalachian Mountains to join the Elizabeth and Nansemond rivers, near Newport News Point, where they form Hampton Roads Harbor. Then, cutting a deep channel, the waters squeeze between the tip of the Virginia Peninsula to the north, and shallow Willoughby Spit to the south, before welcoming Chesapeake Bay, and a few miles farther east, emptying into the Atlantic.
A careful mariner, coming into the south part of Chesapeake Bay, would favor the peninsula’s northern shore, thus avoiding its southern shoals. Looking for safe harbor from the winds and a tempestuous Atlantic, that mariner would recognize the small bight just to starboard around the tip of the peninsula and anchor a ship there. On April 28, 1607, when the crew of Christopher Newport’s flagship, Sarah Constant (by some accounts the Susan Constant), found the channel around the peninsula’s tip leading to safety it put them in “good comfort,” and so they named the adjacent land Cape Comfort.2 Long before these Englishmen, the Algonquian Chesepian people of the area used the word Chesepiooc, referring both to the “Great Water” of the Atlantic and a village at the mouth of the bay; in that village most likely the Kecoughtan tribe lived.3
Where a prudent sailor would see safety in Cape Comfort, a prudent soldier would see a fort on the long stretch of land sixty feet above the cape where the Kecoughtan made their village. Fort Algernon was the first fort built by the English at the tip of the cape in 1609, and this led to war with the neighboring Kecoughtan village. When the Kecoughtan captured and killed colonist Humphrey Blunt in July 1610, Sir Thomas Gates, who’d just made his way from England to be governor of the Virginia colony, used it as pretense to mount a vicious revenge attack, known as the Kikotan Massacre. Many natives were killed as Gates pushed the Kecoughtan inland, establishing two forts to secure and maintain the colonists’ advantage. Fort Charles was built two miles inland from Cape Comfort; Fort Henry, a small garrison of fifteen, was built nearby.4 A young, up-and-coming colonial merchant-planter named William Tucker was placed in charge of the garrison at Fort Charles, with orders to continue the war against the Kecoughtan.
William Tucker was a colonial, colloquial “man for all seasons.” Though he had no naval or military background prior to his arrival in Virginia in 1610, he was put in charge of subduing local Native American tribes, which he did with often brutal and ruthless efficiency, such as offering wine laced with poison at peace talks with the Powhatan.5 He was a prominent merchant in London, a shareholder in the Virginia Company, a colonial tobacco planter, a sassafras trader, and owner of the Sea Flower, a merchant vessel he used for annual trading runs to England, which may have earned him the honorific “Captain,” by which he was referred.6
Tucker was also an “ancient planter,” a colonial-era term used to describe those who’d arrived in the Virginia colony prior to 1616, entitling them to a share of profits of the Virginia Company. But the Virginia Company showed no profits, so land was distributed in lieu of hard cash. Through these land grants of one hundred acres to ancient planters, and through a number of real estate purchases and sales, William Tucker amassed an estate of more than 850 acres in Elizabeth City, where he grew tobacco on what has been referred to as “the first plantation” on colonial American soil.7
So, there is little surprise to learn the first plantation owner soon met the first Africans to arrive in bondage.
As commander of the garrison at Point Comfort, Tucker was there, right there in the late summer of 1619, as White Lion rounded Cape Comfort, lowered her sails, threw her anchor, and came to rest in a small bight below his fort. Rolfe tells us that those “20. and odd Negroes . . . the Governor [Sir George Yeardley] and Cape Marchant [Abraham Piersey] bought for victualls (whereof he [Capt. Jope] was in greate need as he pretended) at the best and easyest rates they could.” Tucker obtained Anthony and Isabella, most likely for work on his plantation, either from Yeardley or Piersey, both of whom he knew well.8
Tucker acquired Anthony and Isabella not really as servants but, then, not quite as slaves.
Some point to underlying European racism to support their claims that colonial America was predisposed to view these first Africans as slaves, and treat them accordingly. Muslim-turned-Christian Johannes Leo Africanus, whose sixteenth-century travel accounts were widely read by educated Europeans, like William Tucker, spoke derisively of sub-Saharan Africans: “Negros likewise leade a beastly kinde of life, being vtterly destitute of the vse of reason, of dexteritie of wit, and of all artes. Yea they so behaue themselues, as if they had continually liued in a forrest among wilde beasts.”9 This thinking is further buttressed by citing the racism rampant in the centuries-long war of Catholics to drive North African Muslims from Portugal and Spain.10 Furthermore, the reasoning goes, Christianity itself has deep, racist roots in the view that Africans descended from the cursed Ham of the Book of Genesis.11 Racism came first, this school says, then came slavery.
Captain William Tucker’s muster12 recorded in the self-reported Virginia census of 1624/25, is used to back up these claims. The muster shows Tucker’s family and beneath them his servants, and beneath them a native man, and beneath him, Anthony and Isabella and their child. The age of the servant, the ship that brought them to the colony, and the year they arrived, are shown for White Europeans but not for the native man, or for Anthony, Isabella, or their child. This, these observers note, is evidence that natives and Africans of that time did not have a status equal to Whites. Without ages, how were the lengths of their indentures known?
Not so fast, say others. While Tucker’s muster is one of the larger, there are other musters where individual White servants are shown without a ship or without an age. The muster of Dr. John Potts (who supplied Tucker with the poison used at peace talks with the Powhatan) shows Ivie Banton, a maidservant arriving on the Abigaile in 1622, but does not show her age.13 The muster of Edward Blany shows servant Randall Smallwood without an age or a ship.14 It’s doubtful that Banton or Smallwood were Africans, for Africans were almost always listed with a designation “Negro” or “Negroe” or “Negar” affixed.
This second group believes that “[s]lavery was not born of racism,” as Eric Williams, prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, famously said, “rather, racism was the consequence of slavery.”15 It’s largely an economic argument applied to early English and Dutch colonies in America, where the first Africans had essentially the same worth to planters as indentured servants until it seemed clear that slavery gave a better profit margin.16
Furthermore, there were no laws in early colonial Virginia that distinguished African from European servants; hence, in all likelihood they were treated equally until those laws began to change somewhere around 1640. Of course, Indians and Africans had no age associated with their entries in colonial musters because they had no birth records. Finally, this second group might point out that Anthony, Isabella, and their child were not included with the real property Tucker possessed, shown at the very bottom of his muster, hence, they were not considered chattel slaves, as many after them would be considered and so listed.
Still, a third group says be wary of the other two. First, historians should be very cautious of bias, lest they bring modern prejudices and aspirations to bear on examining the past. Use of the word negro or its various derivatives, for example, should not be taken as a sign of racism, at least not in early colonial history. The word was merely descriptive of people with darker skins, although over time, as people with darker skins became the only ones enslaved, negro became the equivalent of slave.
Furthermore, this third group says, a distinction should be made between the first generation of Africans arriving in the American colonies and those who came after.17 For the first group of Africans, English and Dutch colonists had the concept of indefinite but not inheritable servitude, while for those Africans who came after, colonists applied the concept of lifetime, inheritable slavery.
Religion also played a factor. These observers, looking at Tucker’s muster, would point out the word baptised associated with William Crashaw, a native man, and William, the child of Anthony and Isabella. Baptised implies that some, if not all, of the early Africans were Christian, or had at least adopted Christianity in some form prior to, or during, their bonded service. This was known to be the case in Angola, from where Anthony, Isabella, and most of the first generation of Africans came, and where Christianity had been prevalent since the early 1500s. So, this third group stakes out a slightly different position from the other two: the first generation of Africans were regarded as slaves by the early colonists, but slavery had not yet been fully defined as it would be later.18
Is there that much difference between slavery, with the term undefined, and servitude, with the length undetermined? Furthermore, why does any of this matter?
Human systems—economic, political, legal, social, cultural—do not suffer uncertainty well. If the abbreviated discussion above shows anything, it is the uncertainty surrounding the status of the first Africans in America. If modern scholars, with the benefit of a greater knowledge than their predecessors, and, therefore, greater hindsight, are at odds in their designation of this first generation of Africans, imagine the confusion of early colonists. Human systems evolve to eliminate ambiguity and remove confusion. And, it is out of this movement to reduce the uncertainties surrounding the status of these first Africans that principal economic, political, legal, social, and cultural institutions and industries of power and wealth in America were born. Institutions and industries still with us today. Whether the first Africans in America were servants or slaves matters. How America evolved from the uncertainty of their status into a nation of certain slavery, for those Africans coming after them, matters even more.
In reading William Tucker’s muster, my attention is drawn to something I’ve rarely seen reported by others—the hierarchical class arrangement of the groups beneath his family. In almost every muster reported in the 1624/25 census, a class hierarchy is set: White planters and their families on top, then White servants, followed by Indian servants, followed by African servants, followed by personal property. One historian who did pick up on this hierarchy was my friend and mentor Lerone Bennett, Jr. “Before the invention of the Negro or the white man or the words and concepts to describe them,” Bennett wrote, “the Colonial population consisted largely of a great mass of white and black [and native] bondsmen, who occupied roughly the same economic category and were treated with equal contempt by the lords of the plantations and legislatures.”19 Bennett goes on to say,
Curiously unconcerned about their color, these people worked together and relaxed together. They had essentially the same interests, the same aspirations, and the same grievances. They conspired together and waged a common struggle against their common enemy—the big planter apparatus and a social system that legalized terror against black and white bondsmen. No one says and no one believes that there was a Garden of Eden in Colonial America. But the available evidence, slight though it is, suggests that there were widening bonds of solidarity between the first generation of blacks and whites. And the same evidence indicates that it proved very difficult indeed to teach white people to worship their skin.20
Here, when Bennett talks of “white people” he does not mean the Tuckers, Yeardleys, and Pierseys of colonial Virginia, he means the ordinary White European indentured servants who worked for them.
Choice crafts character, whether for a person or a nation. Early American colonists, like the Tuckers, Yeardleys, and Pierseys, made fundamental choices that coalesced to craft the character of this nation. One choice, as Bennett points out, open at least for a while, was the road to universal justice. Though never seriously considered, this choice would have entailed engagement with the first Americans, Native Americans, in a partnership to mutually develop the vast resources of North America. Instead, Europeans arrived on this continent touting a legacy of manifest destiny, of papal bulls and religious convictions that anyone before them was not a partner to engage with diplomatically, but an adversary to conquer violently, through subterfuge, poison, or a gun.
Another choice, Bennett notes, also never seriously considered, was the road to universal equality, wherein all immigrants, Black and White, and Native Americans already in America, would be given the right to participate in a free and cooperative system of labor. But this would have required the abandonment of social and cultural notions of masters and servants, imported into early America with colonists as they stepped from their boats.
A third choice, though less robust than the other two, would have been the road to universal opportunity, wherein even in a system of masters and indentured servants, all servants, regardless of color, would be afforded the same opportunities to work off their indentures, then assisted to successfully strike out on their own. For a while, this road was actually taken until colonial masters encountered a roadblock: freedom dues.
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For a moment, let us step back to remind ourselves what was at stake for men like William Tucker, John Rolfe, George Yeardley, Abraham Piersey, and the other planter-merchants of colonial Virginia. Many recall that in December 1606, some one hundred Englishmen set sail from London on a flotilla of three ships led by Captain Christopher Newport aboard the flagship Sarah Constant, bound for the coast of Virginia. They arrived at Cape Henry, the southern entrance to the Chesapeake Bay, on April 26, 1607, and from there made their way up the James River to Jamestown Island, where they determined to establish a settlement.
Few realize that the men on these ships were members of an elite group, most of them shareholders in the Virginia Company, a joint-stock, limited-liability company granted a charter by King James I for the settling of Virginia. In modern terms, we would call these men members of a start-up, whose purpose was making money for its investors or shareholders, which included, for the most part, them.
With survival their first goal, Jamestown Island proved a poor choice. On this swampy lowland, mosquitoes and malaria thrived, game ran low, and inhospitable soil made growing crops nearly impossible. But instead of finding ways to make peace with the local Algonquin tribes who’d long understood how to survive, colonists engaged in bloody contests with them, intent on displacing them from their homelands. William Tucker arrived on the Mary & James in 1610 near the tail end of the “Starving Time,” a period that winter when three-quarters of Jamestown succumbed to disease brought on by starvation, and those left resorted to eating nearly anything—cats, dogs, horses, and even each other. For the first ten years of their existence, the colony relied on resupply ships from the Virginia Company in England to keep them going.
But in August 1619, when Anthony and Isabella stepped onto Virginian soil, they stepped into a colony beginning to move past survival. Colonists had gained the upper hand in pushing natives from lands so colonists could occupy them. They began growing crops, often copied from natives, more suitable for Virginia’s soil. This meant they could turn their attention to the real business they’d come to Virginia for: making wealth for the Virginia Company, and for themselves. While the Company failed in 1624, and James I took direct control over the colony, the business of making wealth never ceased for men like William Tucker.
Colonial wealth had a formula: (a) a crop, from which to make a product; (b) a market for that product; (c) a means to get that product to market; (d) land to grow the crop; (e) investment to secure and expand the preceding; and, (f) most important, labor to grow and process the crop. By 1620, Virginia’s colonists had nailed down most portions of this formula: tobacco was the crop; pipe tobacco, cigars, and snuff the products; Europe the market; ships plying the Atlantic a means to market; land could be taken from Native Americans; and, investment was supplied by shareholders of the Virginia Company. Which left only one, huge question: What about labor? The first answer was indentured servitude.
Said in the lofty terms of economics, indentured servitude collateralized debt financing for transporting Europeans across the Atlantic to work in British colonies. Said simply: the colonies needed labor, European workers couldn’t get to the colonies, European banks couldn’t lend workers because there was no way to enforce such transatlantic transactions, so the Virginia Company allowed workers to borrow against future wages to pay for their voyage to America.
The Company experimented with several variations on this theme. First, workers signed on with the Company, which transported them at Company expense to the colonies, where they continued to work for the Company for seven years in order to pay off their transportation costs, and actually accumulate a share in the Company at the end of their time of service. But in the early years of the Virginia colony, working conditions were harsh, food was scarce, disease and illness rampant. Many workers died or ran off for a better life with nearby Native American tribes, which meant a total loss of the Company’s investment. The Company’s initial response to runaways was punishment by death, but the realization soon set in that a better solution to the labor problem needed to be found.21
Next, the Company introduced a “rent a worker” program, whereby workers, still sent to the colony at the Company’s expense, could be rented out for a year by the Company’s planters. One problem with this new system was that some planters tried and succeeded in seducing rented workers away from other planters, leaving the original renters with the bill. Another problem concerned who was responsible for the upkeep and maintenance of the workers. When you rent a car, for example, other than returning it with a full tank of gas, you generally don’t think about bringing the car in for maintenance—that’s the company’s problem and its expense passed on to you in the cost of the rental. But the workers were three thousand miles away from the Company, which had no means of enforcing contracts, so the Company demanded that planters be responsible for the health and welfare of the workers. If a worker fell ill or died, the planter would still be responsible for rental payments to the Company, though at a negotiated reduced rate. In short, the renters were responsible for protecting the Company’s investment, which the Company soon realized was not sustainable.22
So, when a new group of Company officers were seated in London in 1619 with a realization that Virginia’s population desperately needed to grow, they determined a new system of indentured servitude that served as the model for the next two hundred years. Workers were transported at Company expense from England to Virginia; the cost of the voyage was advanced to the workers, who were bound for a fixed term of years and sold outright to planters for this term, once they arrived in the colony. It was a huge success, with planters enthusiastically acquiring workers at what appeared to be a bargain. It was a huge success for the Company, which, once it received a lump sum from the planter, no longer had to concern itself with the worker’s health or welfare.23
This refined version of indentured servitude also introduced the idea of derivatives into British capitalism. A derivative is a new financial product created on an underlying real asset. Indentured servants were the underlying real asset. Packaging and selling contracts for their supply to the colonies was the new financial product, which the Virginia Company then sold to individual investors in England and in the colonies. Purchasing bundled labor contracts increased the Company’s revenue stream. In other words, indentured servitude created a labor market where workers were viewed as simply a commodity. And in a later chapter, we will see how exactly the same packaging of slave labor was used in the American stock market.
“They were worked hard, were dressed in the cast-off clothes of their owners, and might be flogged as often as the master or mistress thought necessary,” said J. B. McMaster in a series of 1903 lectures on colonial America. “Father, mother and children could be sold to different buyers. Such remnants of cargoes as could not find purchasers within the time specified, were bought in lots of fifty or more by a class of speculators known as ‘soul drivers,’ who drove them through the country like so many cattle and sold them for what they would bring.”24
No, not slaves!
A professor of American history at the University of Pennsylvania, McMaster depicted the lives of White indentured servants in colonial Virginia. But just as Anthony and Isabella’s lives began in the recesses of Angola, the lives of colonial White indentured servants began in the recesses of England.
You’re one of many homeless children wandering the streets of London, when a kindly woman stops you, and offers you food if you’ll only follow her. Moments later, several men sweep you off your feet and toss you into a warehouse filled with other crying children. Or, perhaps you’re simply poor, out of work, a beggar. Men step from the shadows, grab you, gag you, carry you off to the sounds of your muffled screams, then toss you into a depot where you await transport to a ship’s hold.
That next morning, or a few mornings later, you find yourself trapped on a vessel, far out to sea, bound for the American colonies.
You have just been “spirited away” by men and women known throughout seventeenth-century England as “Spirits.” In fact, merely calling out “Spirits!” in a seventeenth-century London crowd was enough to cause instant pandemonium as people scurried to safety for fear of being scooped up, and sent across the sea to America.
Spirits worked as agents on behalf of ship captains, merchants, politicians, English nobility, courtiers, and even members of the royal court. When caught, rarely were Spirits prosecuted. The court cases that do exist indicate how widespread the practice was. In 1643, the Middlesex County Court sentenced Elizabeth Hamlyn to jail and to be whipped “for taking of diverse little children in the street and selling them to be carried to Virginia.” In 1655, Christian Chacrett was accused of being “one that taketh up men and women and children and sells them on a ship to be conveyed beyond the sea.” Chacrett specialized in spiriting away families to Virginia. In 1671, John Stewart stood accused of spiriting away five hundred individuals a year for more than a decade, with a bounty paid to anyone who supplied him with victims. In the same year, William Thiene, an East Smithfield cobbler, was accused of spiriting away 840 people in a year.25
But Spirits were not the only means to fill the coffers of a ship with White men, women, and children destined to be sold.
You could also have been a sex worker, trolling London’s streets after dark, when the clipetty-clop of horses over cobblestone catches your ear. A fine carriage stops. Lace curtains part. A gentleman beckons you with a wink and the curl of his index finger. Alone with him in the cabin’s soft crushed velvet, you’re trapped. And, the next thing you know, he’s seized you, gagged you, then tapped the outside of the carriage, as the horses trot off toward the wharf.
Or, you might be a woman inside London’s notorious Clerkenwell House of Correction, there for no other reason than asking a well-stocked merchant for food for your starving young children. Your jailer slips a large skeleton key into the lock, tumblers click, and the door to your cell creaks open. A sailor appears, by leave of his captain, he says. You’re terribly thirsty. He’s carrying a large bottle of liquor. He pours you a glass. Then another. And another. And another. Until your legs feel like they’re giving out from under you. And the last thing you remember as the sailor lifts you in his arms is passing a smiling warden who waves to the sailor as he carries you out of the prison.
Then, maybe, you’re in front of a white-wigged magistrate, facing a death sentence for stealing a pail of milk from your employer, even though you accidentally kicked over the pail and spilled it instead. The magistrate offers you a stark choice: death by hanging or penal transportation to the Americas to work fourteen years as a servant. Is there any doubt which choice you would make?
Political prisoners, Irish Catholic priests, Quakers, captured soldiers, dissenters, and undesirables of any kind rounded out the ranks of those contracted, coerced, or connived into making the passage to America, and working there as indentured servants.
Most White indentured servants did not come to America through the polite exchange of contracts and signatures over a pint in a seaside pub. They came by way of skulduggery. And most perpetrators of crimes contributing to this trade in White servants were not prosecuted because White servitude fit neatly into a larger British plan: drive the poor and the undesirables from the kingdom’s shores, into her colonies, if necessary. It’s an idea with an old history in England. Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who unsuccessfully sought the Northwest Passage to Asia, wrote in 1576, “[a]lso we might inhabite some part of those Countreys, and settle there such needie people of our Countrie, which now trouble the common welth, and through want here at home, are inforced to commit outrageous offences, where they are dayly consumed with the Gallowes.”26
In a letter to his king in 1611, Don Alonso de Velasco, the Spanish ambassador to England, put it succinctly, “Their principal reason for colonizing these parts is to give an outlet to so many idle, wretched people as they have in England, and thus prevent the dangers that might be feared of them.”27
This system by which White landowners accrued wealth and power through the labors of others was enacted, even perfected, on Europeans, not Africans. Early on, when there were no Africans in the American colonies, poor White lives mattered in creating rich White wealth and power. Slowly, that changed. But Anthony and Isabella arrived at a colony where the vast majority of White colonists were servants living just beyond the reach of the manacle and chain.