Page 97 - American Stories, A History of the United States

Roots of slavery
3.1 Much is known about the transfer of African peoples across the Atlantic. During the

entire history of this human commerce, between the sixteenth and nineteenth centu-
ries, slave traders carried almost 11 million blacks to the Americas. Most of these men
3.2 and women were sold in Brazil or the Caribbean. A relatively small number of Africans
reached British North America, and of this group, most arrived after 1700. Because
slaves performed hard physical labor, planters preferred purchasing young males. In
3.3 many early slave communities, men outnumbered women by a ratio of two to one.
English colonists did not hesitate to enslave black people or, for that matter, Native
Americans. While the institution of slavery had long died out in England itself, New
3.4 World settlers quickly discovered how well slave labor operated in the Spanish and
Portuguese colonies. The decision to bring African slaves to the colonies, therefore,
was primarily economic.
3.5 English masters, however, seldom justified the practice purely in terms of planter
profits. Indeed, they adopted a different pattern of rhetoric. English writers associated
blacks in Africa with heathen religion, barbarous behavior, sexual promiscuity—with
evil itself. From such a racist perspective, the enslavement of Africans seemed unob-
jectionable. The planters argued that the Bible condoned slavery and maintained that
if black slaves converted to Christianity, shedding their supposedly savage ways, they
would actually benefit from their loss of freedom.
Africans first landed in Virginia in 1619 as a cargo of slaves a Dutch trader stole
from a Spanish ship in the Caribbean. For the next 50 years, the status of the colony’s
black people remained unclear. English settlers classified some black laborers as slaves
for life, as chattel to be bought and sold at the master’s will. But other Africans became
servants, presumably for stated periods of time, and a few blacks even purchased their
freedom. Several seventeenth-century Africans became successful Virginia planters.
One reason Virginia lawmakers tolerated such confusion was that the black popu-
lation remained small. By 1660, fewer than 1500 people of African origin lived in the
entire colony (compared to 26,000 whites), and it hardly seemed necessary for the
legislature to draw up an elaborate slave code to control so few men and women. If the
planters could have obtained more black laborers, they certainly would have. There
is no evidence that the great planters preferred white indentured servants to black

virginian luxuries undated, unsigned, and hidden on the back of another painting, the two-part painting
Virginian Luxuries depicts a white man kissing a black woman and whipping a black man.
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