White Cargo - The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America by Don Jordan

Author:Don Jordan [Jordan, Don]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Americas, United States, Civil War, Abolition, Colonial Period, Europe, England, Modern (16th-21st Centuries), 17th Century, 18th Century, World, Slavery & Emancipation, Humanities, Social Sciences, Politics & Social Sciences, Sociology, Race Relations, Discrimination & Racism
ISBN: 9780814742969
Amazon: 0814742963
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2008-03-07T13:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN - THE PLANTER FROM ANGOLA

All through these middle years of the seventeenth century, a vast trade in black slaves was developing but it largely passed by the English colonies on the mainland. The ‘twenty and odd Negroes sold’ in Point Comfort in 1619 were no more or less enslaved than the free-willers or convicts they would have encountered on the shore. It took decades more for the plantation owners of the Chesapeake to begin to buy people in any numbers from the black slave market and much longer for the legal edifice of black bondage to evolve. The story of an African who is believed to have been among those arriving in 1619 shows that the onset of racial slavery in America had the most unlikely twists and turns.

Anthony Johnson, as the African came to be known, not only secured his freedom but also became a successful planter himself and went on to buy servants of his own, white as well as black. Thirty years after Johnson first touched American soil, he got into a dispute with a servant, a fellow African who was demanding his freedom. Johnson resolved it by persuading a court to enslave the man for life. This was one of the first cases of lifetime slavery being imposed in North America - a black man playing one of the villains in the ghastly tragedy that was beginning to unfold.

The Africans from the White Lion are thought to have been bought originally by the two wealthiest planters in Virginia. One was Sir George Yeardley, Governor of the colony, a venal man who seems to have acquired more white servants than anyone else in those early days of the colony.1 The other was Abraham Piersey, the Virginia Company’s trading agent. It is widely claimed that this transaction marked the beginning of slavery: that almost from the start the men and women from the White Lion were a separated class, lower in status than all those around them. The picture is of Johnson and the other Africans suffering greater debilities, subject to more degradation than the white servants: one colour chained and kicked; the other merely chained. English racism was supposedly at work, dividing black and white from the moment the Angolans trooped ashore.

In reality, however, the Africans appear to have been treated as indentured servants, no different from the English servants. Racism may well have existed, but in the rush to profit, the colour of a field labourer was a secondary consideration. Having enough hands to hoe the next 10,000 tobacco hills was paramount. Black mixed with white in the tobacco labour gang and would continue do so into the next century in some places.

As the African-American writer Lerone Bennett Jr puts it:

Not only in Virginia but also in New England and New York, the first Blacks were integrated into a forced labor system that had little or nothing to do with skin color. That came later. But in the interim, a fateful 40-year period of

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