Winthrop D. Jordan
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- July 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780807834022
- eISBN:
- 9781469600765
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/9780807838686_jordan.8
- Subject:
- History, American History: early to 18th Century
This chapter illustrates how no one had in mind to establish the institution of Negro slavery at the start of English settlement in America. Yet in less than a century the foundations of a peculiar ...
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This chapter illustrates how no one had in mind to establish the institution of Negro slavery at the start of English settlement in America. Yet in less than a century the foundations of a peculiar institution had been laid. The first Negroes landed in Virginia in 1619, though very, very little is known about their precise status during the next twenty years. Between 1640 and 1660 there is evidence of enslavement, and after 1660 slavery crystallized on the statute books of Maryland, Virginia, and other colonies. By 1700 when African Negroes began flooding into English America they were treated as somehow deserving a life and status radically different from English and other European settlers. The Negro had been debased to a condition of chattel slavery; at some point, Englishmen in America had created a legal status which ran counter to English law.Less
This chapter illustrates how no one had in mind to establish the institution of Negro slavery at the start of English settlement in America. Yet in less than a century the foundations of a peculiar institution had been laid. The first Negroes landed in Virginia in 1619, though very, very little is known about their precise status during the next twenty years. Between 1640 and 1660 there is evidence of enslavement, and after 1660 slavery crystallized on the statute books of Maryland, Virginia, and other colonies. By 1700 when African Negroes began flooding into English America they were treated as somehow deserving a life and status radically different from English and other European settlers. The Negro had been debased to a condition of chattel slavery; at some point, Englishmen in America had created a legal status which ran counter to English law.
