Gov. Ralph Northam, D-Va., was corrected by CBS anchor Gayle King over the status of the first Africans to arrive in Virginia in 1619. Unfortunately, it’s King who needs to be corrected: Slavery was indeed vile and existed pretty early on in Virginia’s development, but not in 1619. Northam was actually correct to describe those very first arrivals, even if they were forced to leave their homeland, as indentured labor.
This isn’t how we tend to think about it these days, but it is actually true. Chattel slavery wasn’t part of the cultural toolkit that the English (British, if you prefer) settlers brought with them, whereas indentured labor was commonplace. The shift from indentured servants to slaves was something that happened domestically in the colonies. Yes, obviously, the shift was fed by merchants delivering slaves from Africa, but the concept wasn’t an English importation. Things that we might consider to be slavery, like villeinage, died out at the end of the Middle Ages in England, except for a very few local forms: Scottish coal miners were very hard done by at times.
It’s also true that chattel slavery of Africans was never a large-scale fact in England, whatever the size of the trade partaken in. One reason being that that’s just not how the trade routes worked: The sailing routes of the day didn’t take cargoes of slaves up to Europe, but rather across the Atlantic.
Indentured labor, though, was entirely common in England, usually in the form of a contract to work for one year at a time at a certain price or wage. In the case of apprentices, the contracts perhaps lasted for some number of years as a trade was learned as the employer could regain the costs of the earlier years through the output of the latter years.
In the colonies, this translated into a certain number of years’ work in return for the sponsor covering the cost of passage in the first place. There were times when fully 50 percent of the population of Virginia were so constrained. The important and relevant part concerning us today is that, at first, little difference was made in the terms of the contract dependent upon the color of one’s skin, race, nor even origin. As historian Edmund Morgan has written, “For much of the seventeenth century, those servants were white English men and women — with a smattering of Africans, Indians, and Irish — under indenture with the promise of freedom.” Granted, he also wrote, “Servitude in Virginia’s tobacco fields approached closer to slavery than anything known at the time in England,” yet there was still a distinction between slavery and indentured servitude.
We, today, would not want to work under the terms of an indenture, that’s for certain. But for many Europeans of the time, it was a good deal. It was harsh but better than the alternatives after the Thirty Years’ War ruined the European economy. There were a number of variations in the indenture contracts over the years, but they all are to be distinguished from slavery. They’re employment contracts, not ownership of the body for life, and beyond, in the case of offspring.
Importantly, little distinction was made over race, Anthony Johnson being an instructive example. In African terms, he was a slave, captured in Angola and sold to slave traders against his will. But in Virginia, he was indentured, and after his time of contract was finished, he was freed and became a substantial property owner himself.
The very concept of lifelong slavery, or that proper chattel kind, didn’t exist in Virginia until 1654 with the case of John Casor. Awkwardly, it was Johnson, an African himself, who owned Casor’s indenture, that contract converted into actual ownership of the person. Yes, sadly so, our first known and recorded case of legal chattel slavery in what became the U.S. was ownership of a black man by a black man.
This is more than mere pedantry. The original conversation between Northam and King was this:
King: Also known as slavery.
Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam: "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—"@GayleKing: "Also known as slavery" pic.twitter.com/AiX96MU1rJ
— CBS Mornings (@CBSMornings) February 10, 2019
No, indentured servitude was not slavery: Even if people were taken from Africa against their will, they generally earned freedom at the end of their contract as long as they lived that long, and except for the case of poor John Cosar. It was the contract for labor services which was owned, not the person. Much more importantly, when we consider it from our current perspective, little difference in contract existed on the basis of race or origin.
Northam was correct here. Those landings in 1619 were of indentured servants, not slaves. The concept of chattel slavery, known in Europe but more likely to be about religion than race as with the Moors, Barbary pirates, and so on, and its application only to blacks, was something that Virginia itself developed later on.
The importance of this is that the past is complex, and we’ll only understand it if we take the time to understand those details. Chattel slavery is indeed vile, we should not suffer its existence and, far too late, we didn’t and did something about it. But how it came about is important too. Northam was right here, not King.
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at The Continental Telegraph.
