■ WITNESS • 400since1619.com
The “20 and odd” Africans who arrived at Point Comfort in 1619 were not the first Africans in the territory that would become the United States. Africans had been present in Spanish Florida and the Southwest since the sixteenth century, sometimes as enslaved people, sometimes as soldiers, sometimes as free settlers. But 1619 marks the beginning of the British colonial system of race-based chattel slavery that would define the country.
What the first Africans found in Virginia was a colony in crisis. The English settlers had been struggling for a decade — with starvation, with conflict with Indigenous peoples, with disease. The colonists who bought those first Africans were desperate for labor. The tobacco economy was expanding and it needed hands. The legal framework for permanent, hereditary, race-based slavery did not yet exist in Virginia. It would take several more decades to construct.
There is a temptation to see 1619 as a singular rupture — the moment a wrong was committed. But the wrong was constructed incrementally, across decades, through a series of legal, economic, and social decisions made by specific people in specific institutions. Virginia passed laws in the 1640s establishing lifetime servitude. In 1662, Virginia law declared that the status of a child followed the status of the mother — which meant that children born of enslaved women were enslaved regardless of their father. In 1705, the Virginia Slave Codes consolidated these and other laws into a comprehensive legal architecture of racial slavery. The wrong was not a moment. It was a project.
The first Africans found a land still being decided. They arrived before the deciding was done. Some of them, in the earliest decades, acquired land, served out indentures, and lived in legal conditions not entirely different from white indentured servants. Anthony Johnson, one of the earliest African arrivals, became a landowner and himself held an enslaved person. The window was narrow and it closed quickly. By 1705 it was shut.
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