AUGUST 1619
EDWARD DOTY and Edward Leister were among several English servants who landed at Plymouth in November. The Mayflower brought no slaves to the new colony. Fifteen months earlier, however, English pirates had landed some twenty to thirty African captives at Jamestown, Virginia. The exact status of these captives is unclear. It is likely that they were considered slaves on board the pirate ship, but because slavery was not recognized by English common law, once the captives landed their status became fuzzy. In Bermuda, also founded by the Virginia Company, slaves brought by outsiders were considered to be indentures with a life tenure of service. In Virginia, the records show that many of the captives were, after a term of indenture, set free. None were recorded as slaves.
Because the New York Times in its 1619 Project has declared that the arrival of these captives “inaugurated a barbaric system of chattel slavery that would last the next 250 years,” the event deserves careful scrutiny. The Times argues that the captives were sold as slaves and that the event is best understood as the true founding of America. “America was not yet America, but this was the moment it began.”
The situation, however, is murkier than that. The primary source for what happened in August 1619 is a report from a Virginia settler,John Rolfe, who in January 1620 told the Virginia Company treasurer:
About the latter end of August, a Dutch man of Warr of the burden of a 160 tunnes arrived at Point-Comfort, the Commandors name Capt Jope, his pilott for the West Indies one Mr Marmaduke an Englishman. They mett wth the Trier [the ship Treasurer] in the West Indyes, and determyned to hold consort shipp hetherward, but in their passage lost one the other. He brought not any thing but 20. and odd Negroes, wch the Governor [Sir George Yeardley] and Cape Merchant [Abraham Peirsey] bought for victualle (whereof he was in greate need as he pretended) at the best and easyest rate they could.1
Rolfe was a figure to be reckoned with. He is also remembered for his marriage in 1614 to Pocahontas and for his introduction to Virginia of a Trinidadian variety of sweet tobacco that proved to be the colony’s first successful export.
Trading food to Captain Jope for captive people certainly sounds like slavery, but the colony at the time had no system of slavery as such. When the records of this time refer to “slaves,” they generally mean Englishmen who had been convicted of crimes and who were punished by a period of involuntary servitude. In May 1618, for example, the deputy-governor of the Virginia colony proclaimed that residents who failed to attend compulsory church services would “be a slave the following week.”2 Human labor could not be wasted by imprisoning those who broke the law.
So what happened to the “20 and odd Negroes” that Captain Jope brought to Jamestown? It is a matter of debate. Many historians have long held that they were assimilated to the status of indentured laborers, which was the colony’s primary source of human labor. Under that system, they would have earned their freedom after a period of years doing mainly agricultural work. Not every form of forced labor is “slavery” in the sense we commonly think. The status of these African captives appears to have fallen into a vaguely defined middle ground. Unlike English indentured servants, they had not signed up for an excursion to Virginia. But unlike the slaves of later times, they had a genuine opportunity to work their way out of bondage, and they had basic rights under the law. A major scholarly examination of the African Americans at Jamestown, published in 2003, suggests that the best term for the condition of the involuntary immigrants of 1619 is “servitude,” and that the transition to slavery lay years into the future.3
Not all historians agree. Most notably, Alden T. Vaughan, writing in the 1980s, concluded that all the Negroes who were brought to Virginia in this early period were considered slaves, not indentured servants.4
Tim Hashaw, who styles himself an “investigative journalist,” is even more insistent that the captives were enslaved. Hashaw’s 2007 book, The Birth of Black America: The First African Americans and the Pursuit of Freedom at Jamestown, has become the go-to source for those who endorse the Times’ 1619 narrative. But it is an odd book, in the form of an elaborate conspiracy theory indicting as a liar John Rolfe, the one named witness we have to the arrival of Captain Jope’s ship that year. Hashaw believes he has uncovered “a secret Puritan conspiracy at the highest levels of seventeenth-century Europe.”5 It is an entertaining story that, like any good conspiracy theory, weaves together an abundance of well-established facts with threads of sheer invention. We do now know quite a bit about the circumstances that led to the arrival of that ship in Jamestown, but it requires some leaps of imagination to reach Hashaw’s conclusion that Rolfe was helping to run a clandestine pirate base out of Jamestown as part of a transatlantic operation by Puritans to undermine King James I.
More likely what we have in the arrival of that pirate ship is just another instance of the clumsy opportunism of high-seas brigands. The fuller story of what happened, however, does deserve attention.6 A few days or weeks after Captain Jope’s arrival at Jamestown on his ship the White Lion, a second pirate ship, the Treasurer, arrived and landed about six more African captives. The White Lion and the Treasurer had together intercepted the Spanish slave ship San Juan Bautista, which was headed to the port of Veracruz, Mexico. The pirates between them appropriated about sixty of the captives. The Treasurer apparently sold some of these captives in Bermuda before heading northwest to Jamestown.
A census of Jamestown taken in March 1620 reported fifteen African men and seventeen African women, presumably all the survivors of the San Juan Bautista’s original cargo of 350 captives. These thirty-two individuals had suffered terrible hardships, but they were fortunate in one respect. Had the San Juan Bautista arrived in Veracruz, its human cargo would have been sold to labor in the Mexican silver mines – and almost certain early death. Jamestown offered them an opportunity to live and even to thrive. The oppression they were to bear as involuntary captives in the British colony was the less onerous yoke compared to what they had already been through and what other African captives faced under Spanish rule.
How much less onerous is evident in the subsequent careers of some of those who endured servitude along the shores of the Chesapeake. An especially well-attested case was an individual known as Antonio, who may have been among those individuals sold by Captain Jope in 1619, though he doesn’t enter the historical record until two years later when he was set to work on the Bennett family plantation.7 He was eventually freed, renamed himself Anthony Johnson, got married, raised children, became a plantation owner himself, and acquired African slaves of his own. He successfully sued one of his white neighbors in a Virginia court.8 Plainly, Virginian “slavery” was not a total institution then, nor would it ever become so in the antebellum South.
DO THE FACTS MATTER?
The Times’ 1619 Project commences with a historical claim that doesn’t match the known facts. Jake Silverstein writes that the arrival of those “20 to 30 enslaved Africans” in Virginia “inaugurated a barbaric system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years.”9
A social system based on chattel slavery that was frequently barbaric did eventually arise in some of the British North American colonies, but in Virginia it did not arise until more than half a century later, and even then in small steps. The New York Times’ sloppiness about historical facts is one reason to approach with caution its claims about 1619 as the decisive moment in America’s descent into racial despotism. But it is hardly the only reason. The Times sets alarm bells ringing because they don’t seem to care whether their facts are correct.
The Times’ attitude can fairly be summarized thus: What difference does the year make? Slavery commenced at some point during the English colonization of the Atlantic seaboard – if not in 1619, then a little later. The year 1619 is a convenient date because it was exactly four hundred years before the New York Times proclaimed it as the origin, and because it is well-established as the point when captive Africans were introduced to Jamestown. In other words, even if the Times is mistaken on what actually happened, for the paper’s editors the symbolic value of the story outweighs any concerns about its factual accuracy.
Both the Times, and those who brush aside its factual sloppiness from sympathy with its larger aims, open themselves to self-deception. The Times’ willingness to embrace fake-but-accurate history means they are all too likely to embrace history that is both fake and inaccurate – and not even realize how far they have strayed from the true record of the past.
Moreover, when the editors responsible for the 1619 Project have been confronted with the errors and contradictions of the Times’ portrayal of history, they have retreated into a postmodern claim that it is all a matter of interpretation. This is exactly what Silverstein, the Times magazine’s editor in chief, wrote in response to five major historians whose letter to the magazine was published on December 29, 2019. The letter expressed the historians’ “strong reservations about important aspects of The 1619 Project.” The letter, by Victoria Bynum, James M. McPherson, James Oakes, Sean Wilentz, and Gordon S. Wood – five of America’s most prominent academic historians – is important in its own right, and I will come back to it later in this book. But Silverstein’s response is jaw-dropping. Refusing to correct any of the inaccuracies, he explains:
Historical understanding is not fixed; it is constantly being adjusted by new scholarship and new voices. Within the world of academic history, differing views exist, if not over what precisely happened, then about why it happened, who made it happen, how to interpret the motivations of historical actors and what it all means.10
Historical understanding indeed changes as new facts are brought to light and contexts are better established, but that is never a license to ignore facts that are already established. Silverstein’s defense that “historical understanding is not fixed” is a sleight of hand, because the five historians challenged the Times about its errors concerning well-known, uncontroverted facts. Silverstein, however, used this specious rationale as warrant to bask in the complacent comfort that the Times has accomplished “what we hoped our project would do: expand the reader’s sense of the American past.” He is blind to the difference between expanding the reader’s sense by presenting real history and expanding it into the realm of pseudohistorical polemic.
Silverstein’s gambit, alas, is likely to fool most readers. Americans may have become familiar with the dangers of “fake news,” but fake history is more insidious. Fake news is typically met with rebuttals by many people who know the facts. Fake history, by contrast, often settles into the background as something “everybody knows.” Professional historians and others who have a keen interest in a topic will raise protests, but these can seem like pebbles of fact tossed against an ocean of falsehood. The 1619 mythology in particular will reach millions of Americans who never read the original Times declarations of August 2019 and never heard of the 1619 Project itself, but who have been exposed to hundreds of the reverberations – the waves in that ocean of falsehood – that wash over popular culture.
I should also note that some critics of the 1619 Project have been willing to shrug at the Times’ 1619 origin myth. For these critics, the more urgent need is to combat the racial rancor and emphasis on victimhood that pervade the 1619 mythology, and to reestablish the Declaration of Independence as the founding moment of the American republic. They point out that scholarly disputes about what happened in coastal Virginia four hundred years ago are unlikely to move the many millions of Americans whose interest is aroused by the prospect of a new way of looking at our history through the lens of racial oppression.
That’s only partly correct. Historical facts still matter to many thousands, and the thousands we can persuade about the facts now will help persuade the millions later. The facts may only be pebbles, but amassing them can make a breakwater to bar the tempest of deceit. So I will take some trouble in these pages to join those professional historians who bear witness to the truth, and summarize what actually happened in Virginia in the early seventeenth century.
Let’s look a little deeper at the point of origin.
SLAVERIES
We twenty-first-century Americans have certain ideas about what slavery was and what it is. The auction block, the whipping post, and the plantation slave quarters come instantly to mind. Images in popular culture alternately picture slavery in the antebellum South as a kind of cross-racial family bond, as in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936) and the Hollywood movie version of it (1939), and as a horrific experience, as in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). Modern views come down decisively in favor of the horrific, which is in keeping with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). But before the advent of modernity, all the world’s great religions, without exception, had given slavery authoritative approval.
What we know of slavery is that it was a system in which members of one race were denied most (but not all) legal rights and were treated as the personal property of their owners. The legal rights of slaves varied over time and from place to place, but masters did not have unlimited power over slaves, at least in the eyes of the law. Slave owners could and did violate those laws. Corporal punishments and separating husbands and wives and selling their children were common. The barbarity of the system was both physical and psychological.
Research on the history of slavery has complicated this picture. We now know that many slaves succeeded in keeping their marriages and their children together. We know that some slaves became skilled artisans who were able to accumulate wealth and sometimes purchase their own freedom. We know that most masters took care of the health of their slaves if for no other reason than the need to protect valuable property. We know that thousands of free persons of color owned slaves. But these qualifications convince no one that slavery was a positive good, as was once argued by figures such as John C. Calhoun.
The contemporary practice of human trafficking for prostitution also contributes strongly to our understanding of antebellum slavery. Campaigns against it claim that up to fifty thousand people a year are trafficked, more than half children, and the majority from Mexico and the Philippines. Estimates of the number of people worldwide caught up in this kind of slavery range from twenty million to forty million.11 This is worth keeping in mind as an example of how the term “slavery” can be extended to widely divergent forms of human exploitation. What nineteenth-century Southern chattel slavery and modern human trafficking for sex have in common is the radical denial of one person’s individual freedom by another.
The brute fact of such oppression makes it hard to get a clear conceptual picture of what slavery is. We wouldn’t ordinarily consider as a form of slavery a religious devotee, such as a cloistered monk or nun, who had voluntarily given up personal freedom. Nor do we think of incarcerated prisoners as slaves, though they may be required to perform labor for nominal pay. A salaried worker who feels unable to leave a job because he needs health-insurance benefits or because he is waiting for his stock options to vest is nobody’s slave, though he may feel his personal freedom is radically denied. Where does human autonomy leave off and slavery begin?
In my academic discipline of social anthropology, the concept of slavery gets even more complicated because the purpose of enslaving others has varied among human societies. Coercing people to perform manual labor, such as working in tobacco or cotton fields, was seldom the point in sub-Saharan Africa. In some African societies the defining feature of a slave was that he or she had no rights over his or her children. Elsewhere, slaves were merely a commodity collected for their value in trade for other commodities. In some West African kingdoms such as Benin, slaves provided the fodder for large-scale human sacrifices, and much the same can be said of the Aztecs in Mexico.12 The Ottoman Turks enslaved Europeans to build their armies. In still other societies, slavery took the form of debt bondage, and a debtor could in principle work his way back to freedom.
This spectrum of possibilities must be kept in mind because the Southern system of plantation slavery did not spring into existence all at once or fully formed. It evolved over time in different contexts according to a host of variable conditions.
Moreover, in the early and middle years of the seventeenth century in Virginia, the subjection of Africans to bondage labor appears not to have resulted initially in any permanent legal disabilities. We know, for example, that men and women released from bondage acquired considerable property and married, often to white settlers. Ira Berlin recounts that “at least one man from every leading free black family – the Johnsons, Paynes, and Drigguses – married a white woman.” And “free black women joined together with white men. William Greensted, a white attorney who represented Elizabeth Key, a woman of color, in her successful suit for freedom, later married her.” Berlin depicts a world, especially prior to 1640, in which black and white laborers could “take shelter in the same laws and customs,” and even as race-specific laws began to be enacted, blacks and whites mingled freely, drinking, gambling, and celebrating together.13
This picture cannot be reconciled with the image of race-based chattel slavery. It seems especially important that the masters in this period had limited rights over the time of their “slaves” and over their bodies. The summer workweek was five and a half days, with holidays off; and “when planters wished to discipline workers, whether black or white, they often used the courts; not until the next century did slave owners presume that they were absolute sovereigns within the confines of their estate.”14 Even then, slave owners faced constraints. Throughout the South in the antebellum period, states moved to qualify the power of individual masters – a movement led by masters themselves to rein in the worst among themselves.
Berlin’s account is disputed by some other authorities, notably James Horn in 1619: Jamestown and the Forging of American Democracy. Horn supplies further details gleaned from the records about the individuals and then turns to the key question: “Did slavery and racial prejudice gradually evolve in Virginia during the half century following the arrival of the Angolans, or did de facto enslavement of Africans begin in 1619?” Horn weighs the evidence carefully, noting the “absence of legislation formally legalizing slavery in early Virginia,” but ultimately concludes that “the condition of Africans, including the first Angolans, was undoubtedly slavery.”15
“Undoubtedly” is often what we say when doubt hangs heavily over a topic and no clear answer is at hand. If what the captives of the White Lion endured in Virginia is rightly called slavery, it was a far more fluid and flexible form of slavery, a form of bondage before slave codes came into existence. That is not a distinction that matters to Nikole Hannah-Jones, the architect of the Times’ 1619 Project. She writes simply, “Those men and women who came ashore on that August day were the beginning of American slavery. They were among the 12.5 million Africans who would be kidnapped from their homes and brought in chains across the Atlantic Ocean in the largest forced migration in human history until the Second World War.”16
This is expressed in bold indignation, but it collapses history into myth. Untold millions of Africans had been trafficked by Arabs and others for perhaps a thousand years before the Atlantic slave trade began. While a heartbreaking 12.5 million Africans were transported across the Atlantic, the number shipped to North America was only 388,000.17 Hannah-Jones fires her indignation at British North America, but she loads her weapon with numbers from Mexico, the Caribbean, and Brazil. The vast majority of the slaves that were later brought to the English colonies on coastal America were purchased (not kidnapped) from the West African slave-trading kingdoms. The slaves taken by the Portuguese for transport to Brazil and Spanish America were largely from West-Central Africa, the kingdoms of Kongo and Ndongo, for example, and had been captured in internal wars. Catholicism had become the state religion of the kingdom of Kongo by the end of the fifteenth century. Thus, some of those enslaved in Africa were at least nominal Christians.
From this distance those distinctions may seem not to matter much, but in fact they point to a history rather different from the one Hannah-Jones conjures. Those men and women who were enslaved were not the “beginning of American slavery” but people who, against all odds, had survived an ordeal. In at least some cases they emerged from servitude to become landowners and independent farmers, and created entirely new lives for themselves. America was not yet a place with a fixed identity or even founding ideals. It was sheer possibility. And in some sense these captives recognized it.
We can all wish that these fluid possibilities would have eventually produced a society not stratified by master and slave and racial oppression. But it is a serious misrepresentation of the past to read into the arrival in Jamestown of “20 and odd Negroes” in August 1619 the beginning of slavery and racial oppression in America. Indeed, nowhere on the planet in 1619 can one find an advanced society or civilization functioning without servitude and forms of prejudice and hierarchy.
Was the arrival of the White Lion at Jamestown really the founding event of what would become the American republic? No. It was something, but not that – a minor incident that casts light on a small-scale society that as yet had no firm boundaries or abiding sense of purpose.
VIRGINIA
On July 30, 1619, a few weeks before the arrival of the White Lion, Virginia’s General Assembly convened for the first time. It was a signal event in American history, sometimes described as “the beginning of self-government” in British North America.18 Under instructions from the Virginia Company, Sir George Yeardly, whom the company had appointed governor of the colony, called a representative government to order. The General Assembly was to consist of himself as governor, a Council of State appointed by the company, and twenty-two elected representatives of constituencies that Yeardly designated. These representatives came two each from various settlements (James City, Charles City, the City of Henricus, etc.) and various plantations (Martin’s Hundred, Captain Ward’s Plantation, Flowerdew, etc.).
Historians have spent considerable effort figuring out the relationships between the English crown, the privately owned Virginia Company, and the instruments of local government that the Virginia Company created in Virginia under English law. The Virginia enterprise was conceived as a “commonwealth,” meant to protect the legal rights of the settlers as well as the company’s interests. Before Yeardly was instructed to convene the General Assembly, the colony had been under martial law and “the largely unrestricted powers of the governor.”19
The creation of Virginia’s General Assembly is rightly understood to be a key event in British colonization. It planted a seed of self-government, but it was a seed planted in a different system, far more commercial in character from the outset than was the “commonwealth” created by the Mayflower Compact, in which forty-one individuals “covenanted” and combined themselves into a new “civil body politic.”
In Virginia, the General Assembly was imposed by a chartered English corporation. At Plymouth, the settlers invented their own government. In Virginia, the representative body was constructed exclusively of members of the established interests. At Plymouth, care was taken to win the consent even of indentured servants and legal minors. In Virginia, the Virginia Company intended to put in place a system of laws that guaranteed “liberty and reward” and under which every person could know “what he or she may forever challenge as their right.” Those words were written by someone initialed “R.F.” in a letter conveying some of the company’s instructions to Governor Yeardly. R.F. continued:
Last they [the laws] set down what lands or immunities every person is presently to enjoy, according to their merit and quality, and what duties they are tied to, besides many other particulars too long here to write.…
And these laws and ordinances are not to be chested or hidden like a candle under a bushel, but in the form of a Magna Carta to be Published to the whole colony, to the end every particular person though never so mean, may both for his own right challenge it and in case he be at any time wronged, through by the best of the country, he may have law to allege for his speedy remedy.20
R.F., speaking for the Virginia Company, plainly conveys some distrust of the colony’s political elite, whom he suspects will not be eager to convey the news to the common folk that they have enforceable rights under the law. The language also makes clear that the new system is intended to uphold the distinctions of “merit and quality” among the colonists, although it gives some protections to those lower on the social scale who had suffered considerably under the previous system of aristocratic domination.
The situation at Plymouth differed profoundly. Daniel Webster, invited to speak at Plymouth’s bicentenary anniversary in 1820, emphasized how the community freed itself from the burden of aristocratic rule, with “no lands yielding rent, and no tenants rendering service.” Plymouth pivoted to “political institutions” that respected private property divided equitably. It abolished primogeniture, and property “was all freehold.”21 This was a small-scale egalitarian community that aimed at something more than just self-rule. It aimed at maintaining the freedom and dignity of individuals. Webster no doubt exaggerates. The Plymouth colonists were not immune to self-interest, but they plainly started out in an egalitarian spirit.
When the Angolan slaves set foot on Virginia soil in August 1619, they happened to arrive at exactly the moment when it had been ordained that “every particular person though never so mean” had legal rights and remedies. Whether we call these individuals slaves or captives or indentured servants or (as the records sometimes put it) simply Negroes, they had rights, and it was not long before some of them realized it and took successful action. The Virginia Company had not foreseen the arrival of “slaves” and had made no special provision for them. The General Assembly appeared in no haste to distinguish these involuntary immigrants from other laborers, and so for several decades the colony accommodated itself to people pursuing their interests with little regard to racial distinction. This fluidity, of course, was not to last, but for a time, race in America harbored an alternative future.