While it’s never fun to look at the unfortunate truths of a nation’s past, unfortunate events are often important ones. The first slaves in Virginia are a great example of this. When they arrived at Point Comfort, Virginia, in 1619, life in colonial Virginia changed. Some of the changes took time, as we’ll see, but Virginia was not the same afterward.

The changes initiated by the first slaves in Virginia were changes for the worst. Slavery was accepted and common when the first slaves in Virginia arrived in 1619, certainly. But accepted and common don’t wipe away the horror and blighted lives that slavery produced.

Today, I’d like to look at various aspects and consequences of the first slaves in Virginia and their arrival in 1619. In some ways, the importance of this event is exactly what one would think. But in others, the consequences are much more complex.

Where Did the First Slaves in Virginia Come From?

This question highlights how complex this event actually was. The twenty-odd people (the account of John Rolfe says 20 and odd) sold in Virginia in 1619 arrived on an English privateer. But that’s not how they started their forced journey to colonial Virginia.

That journey started in the interior of Africa. There, Portugal was at war with the Kongo and Ndongo kingdoms. Portuguese slave raiders captured the unfortunate people and brought them to the port of Luanda (today in Angola). No one recorded how many people perished along the way.

We do know that about 350 boarded a Portuguese ship headed for the Caribbean, the Sáo Joáo Bautista. The captain intended to sell these people to Spanish colonists at Veracruz. But two English ships, sailing from the Netherlands, attacked the Sáo Joáo Bautista and stole 50 to 60 of the slaves on board. (About 150 had already died crossing the Atlantic, so 25-30% of those still alive.) The ships then sailed to Virginia.

So, then, that means we have six nations involved in this event. It shows how international Atlantic slavery was at the time.

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The First Slaves in Virginia – Not the First Slaves in the Americas

You might remember that slavery was already established in Spain’s American colonies (the Sáo Joáo Bautista was headed for Veracruz, recall) and in the Caribbean. The people sold in Virginia in 1619 weren’t even the first slaves in North America’s history. When Ponce de León reached Florida in 1513, he had at least one slave with him. Another Spanish expedition headed for modern South Carolina in 1526 failed when the slaves on the expedition rebelled. When the Spanish settled St. Augustine, Florida, slaves were a part of that settlement.

This is why, partly, some historians have a problem with focusing on the year 1619. That seems to privilege the history of England’s colonies above those of Spain, for instance, even though Florida is just as much an American state as Virginia.

It also ignores that English colonists enslaved Native American people. Furthermore, it seems to put the English colonists in Virginia in a position of superiority, since they bought the slaves. But that would have been news to the people of the Powhatan Confederacy living in the Chesapeake region in 1619. The English colony of Jamestown is famous (infamous?) for the rate at which its inhabitants died in its early years. (Disease and unhealthy living conditions killed people left and right, rather than warfare. The reason the living conditions were unhealthy is that the Powhatan already lived in the better spots.)

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The Servant Question

A few people argue that the people purchased in 1619 were indentured servants. The accounts don’t call them slaves. But this seems a matter of semantics. Indentured servitude was rather horrible in many cases, but the servants had to agree to their indenture.

Remember how the first slaves in Virginia got there. Raiders captured them in Africa, marched them to the coast in chains, and put them on a slave ship for New Spain. Even after the English captured them from the Portuguese slavers, they sold the Africans to the Virginians for food. It’s hard to find any willingness in all of that.

The First Slave Laws in Virginia

In time, the laws in Virginia erased any doubts on the matter. By the 1630s, wills and such indicate that holding people for life was already in place. By 1662, status as a slave was inherited through the mother. (Meaning, of course, that children fathered by Europeans or Africans with slave women became slaves.) In 1680, laws prohibited gatherings of Africans, and they had to get permission to leave their plantation. Finally, in 1691, slaves could not be freed unless the manumitter transported them outside of Virginia Colony.

Why Do We Focus on 1619, Then?

Besides that remembering one year is easier to do, people tend to like firsts. It gives them a point of reference. One could also make the point that after 1619, the number of enslaved people arriving in North America picked up substantially. That would make 1619 a key year, even if not the first year. That’s why I chose to call 1619 tragic rather than a first or the beginning of an era or some similar phraseology.

For me, I’d put myself with the historians who would like to focus less on years and numbers, and more on the impact on people that slavery had. We know the numbers are gruesome—probably over 12 million people taken from Africa. The U.S. had just under 4 million slaves when the Civil War began in 1861.

But that doesn’t tell us as much about how slavery mauled the lives of the people who lived it. Knowing, for instance, that half of the slave children born in the West Indies died in infancy gives us a better feel for the vast tragedy of slavery. So does knowing that one-third of slaves in the West Indies died within three years of their arrival.

That’s part of the reason that I required my students to read The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass during my teaching career. Douglass writes at length about the psychology of slavery, the way it destroyed friendships and families, and how it could turn otherwise normal White people into callous brutes.

I feel like we need both of these to understand the great blight on America that slavery turned out to be. Combining the numbers with the personal stories of enslaved people gives both quantity and nuance to our understanding. So does, I hope, the discussion of the first slaves in Virginia I’ve offered here. It’s an event that offers much more than first meets the eye.

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