Beyond 1619: The Atlantic Origins of American Slavery

By Jesse Cromwell

Beyond 1619 brings an Atlantic and hemispheric perspective to the year 1619 as a marker of American slavery’s origins and the beginnings of the Black experience in what would become the United States by situating the roots of racial slavery in a broader, comparative context.

In recent years, an extensive public dialogue regarding the long shadow of racism in the United States has pushed Americans to confront the insidious history of race-based slavery and its aftermath, with 1619—the year that the first recorded enslaved persons of African descent arrived in British North America—taking center stage as its starting point. Yet this dialogue has inadvertently narrowed our understanding of slavery, race, and their repercussions to the U.S. context. Beyond 1619 showcases the fruitful results when scholars examine and put into conversation multiple empires, regions, peoples, and cultures to get a more complete view of the rise of racial slavery in the Americas.

Painting racial slavery’s emergence on a hemispheric canvas, and in one compact volume, provides historical context beyond the 1619 moment for discussions of slavery, racism, antiracism, freedom, and lasting inequalities. In the process, this volume shines new light on these critical topics andillustrates the centrality of racial slavery, and contests over its rise, in nearly every corner of the early modern Atlantic World.

Contributors: John N. Blanton, Jesse Cromwell, Erika Denise Edwards, Rebecca Anne Goetz, Rana Hogarth, Chloe L. Ireton, Marc H. Lerner, Paul J. Polgar, Brett Rushforth, Casey Schmitt, Jenny Shaw, James Sidbury.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Oct 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9781512825022

Book preview

Beyond 1619

THE EARLY MODERN AMERICAS

Peter C. Mancall, Series Editor

Volumes in the series explore neglected aspects of early modern history in the western hemisphere. Interdisciplinary in character, and with a special emphasis on the Atlantic World from 1450 to 1850, the series is published in partnership with the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute.

A list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Beyond 1619

The Atlantic Origins of American Slavery

Edited by Paul J. Polgar, Marc H. Lerner,

and Jesse Cromwell

PENN

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia

Copyright © 2023 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-5128-2501-5

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5128-2502-2

A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

CONTENTS

Introduction. Repositioning Racial Slavery’s Rise: An Atlantic World Story

PAUL J. POLGAR, MARC H. LERNER, AND JESSE CROMWELL

Part I. Origins

Chapter 1. African Slavers to American Settlers: The Making of African Americans One Hundred Years Before 1619

ERIKA DENISE EDWARDS

Chapter 2. The Unbridled Greed of the Conquistadors: The Real Provisión of 1530 and the Legality of Native Enslavement in the Southern Caribbean

REBECCA ANNE GOETZ

Chapter 3. Monopolizing Violence: African Slave Trading Companies and the Suppression of Native Slavery in the Americas

BRETT RUSHFORTH

Chapter 4. First Enslavements and First Emancipations: Slavery and Capitalism in Early Colonial Virginia, 1547–1660

JOHN N. BLANTON

Part II. Mobility

Chapter 5. The Life and Legacy of Francisco Carreño: Practicing and Protecting Freedom Between the Canary Islands and New Spain in the Late Sixteenth Century

CHLOE L. IRETON

Chapter 6. Warfare, Imperial Competition, and Serial Displacement in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean

CASEY SCHMITT

Part III. Construction

Chapter 7. The Wife, the Whore, and the Wench: Colonial Women and the Development of Racial Hierarchy in Seventeenth-Century Barbados

JENNY SHAW

Chapter 8. Of Differences and Diagnoses: Racializing Health and Framing Suffering in the American Atlantic

RANA HOGARTH

Chapter 9. Black Loyalists in Sierra Leone and Black Royalism in the Revolutionary Atlantic

JAMES SIDBURY

Notes

Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

Repositioning Racial Slavery’s Rise

An Atlantic World Story

PAUL J. POLGAR, MARC H. LERNER, AND JESSE CROMWELL

Writing from England’s fledgling and fragile colony of Virginia during the winter of 1619–1620, the planter John Rolfe noted in passing something that would come to occupy a preeminent position in American history. In a letter to a Virginia Company official, Rolfe remarked that at some point in the latter end of August 1619, 20. and odd Negroes had disembarked at Point Comfort, located at the southern edge of the peninsula where the James River meets the Chesapeake Bay. These captive Africans, almost certainly enslaved, became the first recorded persons of African descent to appear in British North America. Their arrival has served as the starting point in the history of slavery, race, and their legacies in what would become the United States. Yet Rolfe’s letter signifies neither the origin story of American slavery nor a uniquely British colonial North American tale. The moment Rolfe described, cataclysmic for the twenty some individuals who stepped foot in Virginia on that late August day, is a historically important one. But it is also a less singular event when placed on the far greater scale that is the Atlantic World.¹

By 1619, an Atlantic slave trade that transported many thousands of African peoples into bondage in the Americas was already well established. Led by the Portuguese and adopted by the Spanish, this oceanic trade in an enslaved workforce fed the labor-hungry colonies in what is now South America and the Caribbean, where the exploitation of African bondspersons had begun in the early sixteenth century. Indeed, the boat that carried the African captives who eventually ended up in Virginia had left Angola—the region of Africa which then served as one of the main sources of enslaved Africans in the Americas—destined for Vera Cruz, Mexico. While Spain and Portugal then partook in a robust Atlantic slave trade, the English involvement at that time was limited to pirate raids that occasionally netted these privateers’ booty in the form of enslaved Africans. This was exactly what happened to the Angolans whose fate veered when the English privateering ships the White Lion and the Treasurer overtook the slaving vessel the Sáo Joáo Bautista in the Bay of Campeche and each gained possession of around twenty-to-thirty African bondspersons. The privateers then sailed to the colonial backwater of the Americas known as Virginia where, arriving first, the White Lion’s captain traded the Angolan captives he had commandeered for provisions. Whereas this transaction in human beings would come to take on epic meaning in the United States, at the time it unfolded, in a location far from the center stage of racial bondage’s development, it represented a minor occurrence that barely registered in the capacious, burgeoning system of Atlantic slavery.²

This more complete and nuanced rendering of that infamous summer day in 1619 colonial Virginia is only possible because of a wave of scholarship that has revolutionized our conception of early American slavery. Over the past two-to-three decades, historians have moved far beyond the confines of racial slavery’s emergence in a handful of British North American colonies.³ We have learned much more about the many influences on the British system of race-based enslavement, stemming not only from Portuguese and Spanish justifications, but also from medieval Muslim conceptions of Black differences, Judeo-Christian religious worldviews, and even ancient precedents for racial ideologies.⁴ We continue to learn about the many people of African descent who were forcibly brought across the Atlantic Ocean in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and gain valuable perspective on their experiences throughout New World slave societies.⁵ We have benefitted from a richer Atlantic lens that includes several competing imperial powers—the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, English, and French—their complex interactions with Africa, and the dizzying collection of sites in the Americas in which slavery played a crucial part, along with the deep cast of characters that fill out the now expansive portrait of slavery in the whole of the early modern Americas.⁶ We know now that an exclusive focus on the enslavement of those of African descent overlooks the importance of Native slavery. The enslavement of Native peoples was far more widespread, and far more consequential for the history of slavery in the Americas, than previously believed.⁷

Moreover, the emphasis on 1619 has obscured as much as it has revealed about the long history of race and slavery in the Americas. As the historian Michael Guasco has argued, an excessive focus on 1619 can be more insidious than instructive—in its implicit marginalization of the hundreds of thousands of Africans and people of African descent who were already present in the Americas; in its unabashedly narrow nationalist framework; in its parochial stress on an Anglophone, North American viewpoint; and in the way it underwrites the vantage point of Europeans and steals agency from those who were enslaved, making the latter objects rather than subjects in this history.⁸

Yet, if making 1619 the center of gravity in accounting for racial slavery’s origins has been abandoned in historical scholarship, the 1619 date itself has, paradoxically, only gained greater prominence in recent years. The 2019 launching of the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project triggered a hotly contested and highly public exchange over the United States’ problematic relationship to slavery and race. The 1619 Project focused attention on American racial slavery and its enduing effects. By catapulting these issues into the public sphere, the 1619 Project has pressed Americans to confront the insidious history of race-based slavery and its aftermath. In this it has served an invaluable educational function. But the project’s centering of the 1619 date, and the resulting debate that derived from this centering, has also acted to reinforce a parochial and proto-nationalist framework that belies the rich body of hemispheric scholarship described above. As beneficial as the 1619 Project’s contributions have been in foregrounding the long shadow of American slavery and racism in the United States, the project has inadvertently narrowed our understanding of slavery, race, and their repercussions for a wider Atlantic World and, in the process, ironically reinforced an exceptionalist conception of American history.

Indeed, absent from the knotty discourse the 1619 Project ignited has been any sustained examination of how a comparative analysis of racial slavery’s ascendance in the Western world furthers the public discussion. While persistent racism in twenty-first-century American society and politics promises to keep the issues tackled by the 1619 Project undeniably germane, this same emphasis on the 1619 date and its national connotations continues to limit our understanding of the larger history of which the 1619 moment is only one component. In fact, throughout the century before 1619, enslaved Africans served as auxiliary colonists, laborers, overseers, artisans, miners, and even conquistadors (among other roles) in locations far more consequential to European geopolitics than the early seventeenth-century Chesapeake. Their work across the Americas continued long after Virginians struggled to understand how the chance arrival of the White Lion had altered their world. Furthermore, many if not most of the enslaved laborers who toiled in North America after the 1619 disembarkation had been transshipped from other locales in the broader Americas. Appraising 1619 as just one link in a much larger chain of human racial classification, trafficking, and bondage not only places North American slavery in its proper scale hemispherically. It also opens new comparative and connective directions to understand 1619 vis-à-vis older and larger slaveries.⁹

It was with this goal of branching out from the historical confines of an Anglo, North American–centric perspective, while looking beyond 1619 itself, that the Porter Fortune Symposium at the University of Mississippi convened. This volume showcases the scholarly fruits of the dialogue that followed. It recasts the origins, construction, and significance of racial slavery in exciting ways by demonstrating the intellectual payoff that comes when we shift our gaze from a national to an Atlantic framework.

In seeking to more informatively anchor the growing enmeshment of racial slavery in depictions of our past and present, Beyond 1619: The Atlantic Origins of American Slavery makes three overarching contributions to the historical literature. First, it showcases the rich results possible when scholars examine and put into conversation multiple empires, regions, peoples, and cultures in order to get a more textured and holistic view of the rise of racial slavery in the Atlantic World. Here, the goal is not to put forth a singular narrative to take the place of 1619 but rather precisely the opposite—to disrupt and dislodge the more unitary, chronologically and geographically confined approach and, in turn, to further encourage research that applies the themes of origins and construction to a far broader historical plane.

Second, this volume shows people of African descent as active agents in constructing and negotiating the contours of race, bondage, and freedom in the Atlantic World. The arrival in 1619 of Africans in Virginia, the essays reveal, is more than a flawed starting point for historical portrayals of racial slavery’s fashioning. This collection demonstrates how people of African descent were not the passive recipients of an evolving slave status. In fact, they actively utilized legal maneuvers to secure and maintain their own freedom and that of their kin, chose itinerancy meant to find safer and more advantageous living situations, and forged networks that provided mutual aid and vital information for the enslaved. In these ways, Africans fought against the pernicious racialization of their personhood.

Third, in the most elemental sense, this book further solidifies the centrality of racial slavery, and contests over its rise, in nearly every nook and cranny of the early modern Atlantic World. Taken together, the chapters that follow illustrate how racial slavery was imbricated in settler colonialism, capitalism, and empire-making; existed front and center in the colonizing activities of the English, French, Dutch, Spanish, and other empires; was essential to the experiences of Indigenous, African and African-descended, and European peoples; was fundamental in the making of gender and racial ideologies; and spanned a multitudinous array of locales—from the Indies, to North, Central, and South America, even to Africa. There was no concerted pattern to this racialization. Ambiguities in borrowed, overlapping, and often contradictory legal terminology and vague social perceptions and pathologies of Blackness meant that defining who should be enslaved based on their innate qualities was a moving target.

Asserting the centrality of racial slavery in such diffuse and all-encompassing terms is hardly novel. But painting racial slavery’s emergence on such a broad, hemispheric canvass, and in one compact volume, transcends narrow discourses of the 1619 moment that are structured in proto-nationalist United States’ terms and casts aside an American exceptionalist framework for histories of slavery, racism, antiracism, freedom, and lasting inequalities.

Part I of this volume begins a reevaluation of the place of 1619 in our understanding of the origins of race-based plantation slavery in the Western Hemisphere. Situating the origins of racial slavery in the wider Atlantic World, this section has contributions from scholars of the French, Spanish, and British Atlantic, and highlights the geographical and chronological benefits of moving beyond 1619. The chapters reach back to the sixteenth-century Spanish Atlantic, and illuminate the wider notions of the meaning of race, slavery, and emancipation that were circulating at the time, with ramifications for understanding the Atlantic World as a whole. Part I thus begins an important discussion about the origins of racial slavery in the Atlantic plantation system by pivoting away from a more narrow, British North American perspective.

Erika Denise Edwards’s essay begins the volume by surveying the historiographical implications of enslaved Africans in Spanish America, whose arrival predated those disembarking in British North America by more than a century. Their lives as surrogate settlers, who also maintained itinerant diasporic connections, force us to rethink Blackness and African Americanism in a broader Americas framework prior to 1619. Edwards encourages scholars of Atlantic Africa, the slave trade, and slavery throughout the Americas to embrace the arrival of Africans to the Americas as an inclusive process that elicits a shared African diasporic experience. She calls for a reexamination of the term African American, proposing a shift from an exclusive meaning that references slave descendants in the United States, to one with a more expansive understanding of Africans who became Americans throughout the Americas. This historiographical essay reinforces how many of the processes of forced migration, racial classification, and acculturation associated with later eras began much earlier, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

In Chapter 2, Rebecca Goetz reexamines the Real Provisión of 1530 in the Spanish Empire, which theoretically banned slavery, but did not stop the enslavement of Native peoples in practice. Goetz argues that the mere existence of this Provisión demonstrates more early abolitionist sentiment than is widely accepted. Goetz contextualizes the Provisión and explains its failure as largely due to the highly coordinated lobbying effort that slavers mounted in the Spanish Court to ensure that the ban was never enforced. Goetz concludes that examining the context in which the Provisión was written, as well as the resistance to it, exposes the darkest aspects of Spanish colonialism. Even though the Provisión theoretically outlawed the slaving of Native peoples, it did not attempt to abolish the institution of slavery itself, even before the law was rescinded entirely in 1534. Although Goetz recovers the outlines of a short-term humanitarian argument against slaving in Spanish America, she demonstrates that the Provisión’s failure shaped imperial Spanish support for the continued process of enslaving human beings. The real battle, for Goetz, is whether the crown or the slavers would profit most from Spain’s conquests.

In Chapter 3, Brett Rushforth points to the 1680s as an inflection point in the shift from Native slavery to a slave trade based on the enslavement of Africans. Rushforth asks the question, which to a large extent has been ignored, of why investors, slave traders, and officials redistributed their resources toward the expansion of the enslavement of African peoples in the late seventeenth century. Rushforth demonstrates that Native enslavement had been growing and was poised to expand further when the decision to invest in the transatlantic slave trade shifted the nature of New World slavery. He argues that financial incentives structured by the state caused African slave-trading companies to act in particular ways which prioritized the transatlantic slave trade over the previously dominant enslavement of Native peoples.

In the final chapter of Part I, we return to colonial Virginia in order to reconsider the classic historiographical interpretations. John Blanton argues that the development of slavery in early colonial Virginia was shaped by a conflict over capitalist household organization. He places the 1619 arrival of the first enslaved Africans into the context of Governor George Yeardley’s emancipation of the colony’s indentured servants earlier that year. Blanton demonstrates that this decision cemented the capitalist household as the basic unit of social and economic organization in the colony and set the stage for the development of chattel slavery. However, he also shows that this development was not the same throughout the Virginia colony and that the development of racial chattel slavery in Virginia was not inevitable.

Part II of this volume explores the role of mobility in the formation of racial slavery. When applied to the study of slavery, mobility has mostly conjured up the transatlantic slave trade and the horrors of the Middle Passage. Yet new research on the development of racial difference in the Americas has stressed geographic fluidity and occupational permeability.¹⁰ The essays in Part II enrich this scholarly approach. In contrast to more siloed national histories of slavery—like those that emphasize 1619—the chapters in Part II investigate how mobility created wide-ranging and transimperial connections that strengthened, but also ameliorated, racial slavery. They feature historical actors whose very presence in conflict zones, multi-point migration networks, and legal suits eschews the one-way-voyage narrative. Free and enslaved Africans were part of immigrant stories of kinship and separation that Atlantic historiography has all too frequently centered around Europeans. Itinerancy could be the product of choice, but it also came from displacement, kidnapping, and warfare. Racially perceived traits often superseded the legal status of mobile people of color in white-supremacist slave societies, contributing to vulnerability in their daily existences. The geographic reach of Africans within the Atlantic World also created rich streams of local knowledge, geopolitical news, and rumors. As these essays remind us, Africans, and the racial classification systems developing around them, were essential for intra- and intercolonial connections binding together the Americas.

In Chapter 5, Chloe Ireton follows the hundreds of free Black men and women who embarked from Castile to New Spain and settled in various regions between the port town of Veracruz and the city of México in the late sixteenth century. The history of free Blacks who circulated between different sites in New Spain, Ireton argues, casts light on how vast social webs operated among Black populations across the early Hispanic Atlantic. These webs are important for understanding how Black populations in New Spain and elsewhere fostered a rich intellectual exchange of information and knowledge. The connections Ireton identifies also encourage historians to trace the varied and sometimes contradictory views and experiences of Blackness in this period. In contrast to the powerlessness of those later trafficked in the transatlantic slave trade, Ireton reminds us of the intentionality with which many sixteenth-century Africans arranged their legal affairs and far-reaching imperial networks.

In Chapter 6, Casey Schmitt investigates how the marauding violence of interimperial warfare swept up Africans into new labor regimes and racial paradigms. Throughout the seventeenth-century Caribbean, imperial competitors engaged in slave-raiding as a means to hobble one another’s plantation economies. Schmitt argues that the martial chaos and shifting borders of this aqueous world opened up pathways to freedom for captives. Enslaved Africans, who predated those arriving to British North America, served as surrogate settlers while maintaining itinerant diasporic connections. In tracing the vulnerability of enslaved people to captivity and dislocation, even after their sale to Caribbean planters, Schmitt recasts the experiences of the captive Angolans in 1619 as part of a much longer trajectory of violence, piracy, and slavery in the Atlantic World. Slavery here factored into not just the chattel economies of the plantation world, but also into geopolitical rivalries.

For generations, historians argued over the emergence of race as a definitive marker of institutional slavery in what became the United States, designating race-making as a unidirectional undertaking in which people of African descent were defined apart from and acted upon by European colonizers. More recently, scholars have emphasized a broader geographical scope and longue durée approach, tracing how pivotal ideological elements of racial slavery in the Americas originated from a number of intellectual and cultural sources. Additionally, rather than characterizing racialization as something that happened to African descended people in the Atlantic World, historians have shown that people of color were not inert victims but rather critical participants in what should now be understood as a dynamic and fluid process that consistently remained unfinished. The essays in Part III of this volume represent and further reinforce this historiographical move beyond the constraints of the origins debate over the rise of race and slavery in British North America alone. These chapters demonstrate that the construction of race in Atlantic slave societies was unique, ongoing, and shaped by many actors in early modern transatlantic locales. One cannot look at any single place or time period for the birth of racial slavery because the die was never cast. Rather, the construction of racial slavery was, the authors of Part III show us, always contingent, continually contested, and repeatedly made, unmade, and remade by countless people in the Atlantic littoral.

Jenny Shaw’s essay, which opens Part III, provides a case in point for the rewards reaped when applying a multifocal view to race construction and its intersection with Atlantic slavery. Shaw surveys the experiences of three unnamed women—a merchant’s wife, an Irish servant, and an enslaved African—whose lives and labors entwined in a Bridgetown, Barbados household in the 1670s. The women emerge as mere traces in the written archive, the anonymous subjects of a handful of letters between a group of elite Irish brothers from Galway, some of whom had ventured into England’s Caribbean empire. Nonetheless, Shaw reconstructs the women’s experiences and the ways that the brothers deployed the women’s status in the service of bolstering their own rank and reputations. In doing so, Shaw shines new light on an old debate over the timing of the transition to racial slavery in the English Atlantic. Her chapter repositions the spotlight onto the intimate spaces within colonial households, where race construction materialized, thereby uncovering the role women played in the building of hierarchies of race and labor in the English colonial world.

While Shaw underscores that ideas of race and power were entangled with categories of gender in the early colonial Caribbean, in Chapter 8, Rana Hogarth captures how perceptions of health and the supposed natures of African and European peoples led to hypotheses about human differences that emerged as justifications as to whom should be enslaved. Hogarth redirects our exploration of race construction in Atlantic World slavery away from proslavery theorists in the US South and toward the role of physicians in the Caribbean, whose observations on alleged differences in sickness and health between white and Black people helped make racial differences real. According to Hogarth, these physicians were instrumental agents in creating the idea that racial differences did exist and were readily discernible when considered in relation to health. Rather than the simple result of proslavery propaganda, this attention to racial difference via sickness and health, Hogarth concludes, emerged as a by-product of Eurocentric logic and out of an impulse to make sense of the morbidity and mortality in the new disease environments of the Americas. In this way, race-making was far more than skin deep, as medical practitioners tied race and health to claims about fundamental differences between the bodily constitutions of Black and white people.

Like Hogarth and Shaw, James Sidbury challenges orthodox interpretations of race construction in Atlantic World slavery. By taking readers to the late eighteenth century, Sidbury reveals the experiences of an overlooked set of actors whose perspectives do not fit the dominant depiction of race, slavery, and abolition in the Age of Revolution. In this volume’s final chapter, Sidbury pushes back against the presentation of American Revolutionary ideology as sparking a progressive struggle to overcome racial exclusions and thus make good on the promises of republican doctrines that were at their core egalitarian. Instead, pointing out that African and African descended people living through the Age of Revolution frequently sided with monarchies rather than republics, Sidbury profiles Black British Loyalists from Nova Scotia who immigrated to Sierra Leone after the American Revolution and who sought corporate self-determination within British legal regimes. Their loyalism and emigration stories reveal more pessimistic visions of the early American republic’s potential to foster liberty than normally acknowledged. Their experiences also unsettle deep-seated historiographical tendencies to privilege republicanism as the ideological prism through which to view struggles for Black rights in the greater Atlantic. As a group, the chapters in Part III unlock fresh, panoramic vistas on the processes of race construction and their multilayered relationships to slavery and its fallout in the Atlantic World.

Considered as a whole, the essays in this book take a transimperial and transnational approach to the origins and construction of racial slavery in ways that open new avenues of analysis to a broad group of historians. Scholars of the United States will appreciate a set of essays that goes beyond the boundaries of the thirteen colonies and offers comparative and overlapping contexts to the traditional 1619 narrative. For historians of the Atlantic World, the volume provides coverage of the British, Spanish, and French Atlantic constructions of racial difference through an integrative methodology. Historians of slavery, the slave trade, and the African diaspora will find new thematic and theoretical approaches to these topics through the volume’s diverse subject matter and geographical focus. The chapters that follow do not center on 1619, but their wide-ranging regional and chronological focus enriches the vitally relevant discussion that has grown out of an emphasis on that date and its consequences for the course of American history.

Ultimately, this volume’s essays, in their geographical, chronological, and thematic breadth, reorient 1619 as an event of historical significance and national origin. This reorienting is driven by a fundamental paradox. On the one hand, 1619 is only a tiny, and often historiographically disconnected, piece of the hemispheric origin story of racial slavery. The White Lion’s arrival in Virginia was but one drop in a vast ocean of human bondage. Other racial slaveries came before it in locales too numerous to mention. By comparison to immense centers of slavery like Brazil and the Caribbean, or even more modest territories where bondage proliferated, like Mexico and Peru, demographic and territorial expansion of the institution in the Chesapeake and British North America was paltry for decades after 1619. Clearly then, there exists a potential for parochialism in privileging 1619 in the origins of American slavery. On the other hand, this volume maintains that spotlighting 1619 is valuable for how it signals that the colonies that would become the United States, like most other spaces in the Americas, were built in large part upon inconsistent classification systems that consigned certain populations to kidnapping, forced labor, torture, rape, and murder with impunity. Similar to other locations of enslavement, the thirteen colonies, and later the United States, concocted their own unique parameters of what slavery meant and why one would be enslaved. Indeed, it would have been truly exceptional for the United States not to have been built upon this foundation. The essays in this book, therefore, portray a complex process of racializing slavery that was hemispheric in scope and generative to the subjugation and resistance embodied in the 1619 moment. Only when placed within the kaleidoscopic purview of the Atlantic World can we fully comprehend and appreciate the meaning and legacy of the year 1619.

PART I

Origins

CHAPTER 1

African Slaves to American Settlers

The Making of African Americans

One Hundred Years Before 1619

ERIKA DENISE EDWARDS

In 1619 20. and odd Negroes disembarked in Virginia, marking the arrival of Africans to (what would become) the United States. Their descendants and other Black immigrants who came to the United States would later be labeled African American, an exclusive label that has perpetuated an exceptional history in comparison to the rest of the Americas. It is time to make this identity more inclusive of the larger Black American experience. This chapter seeks to complicate African American history by exploring the period of arrival of Africans and their descendants