This is so well known, what did in fact happen, that even Wikipedia has it unencumbered by wokeness.
Auction at Richmond. (1834)
“Five hundred thousand strokes for freedom; a series of anti-slavery tracts, of which half a million are now first issued by the friends of the Negro.” by Armistead, Wilson, 1819?-1868 and “Picture of slavery in the United States of America” by Bourne, George, 1780-1845
New York Public Library via Wikimedia Commons.
The first 19 or so Africans to reach the English colonies arrived in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619, brought by English privateers who had seized them from a captured Portuguese slave ship. Slaves were usually baptized in Africa before embarking. As English custom then considered baptized Christians exempt from slavery, colonists treated these Africans as indentured servants, and they joined about 1,000 English indentured servants already in the colony. The Africans were freed after a prescribed period and given the use of land and supplies by their former masters. The historian Ira Berlin noted that what he called the “charter generation” in the colonies was sometimes made up of mixed-race men (Atlantic Creoles) who were indentured servants, and whose ancestry was African and Iberian. They were descendants of African women and Portuguese or Spanish men who worked in African ports as traders or facilitators in the slave trade. For example, Anthony Johnson arrived in Virginia in 1621 from Angola as an indentured servant; he became free and a property owner, eventually buying and owning slaves himself. The transformation of the social status of Africans, from indentured servitude to slaves in a racial caste which they could not leave or escape, happened gradually.
There were no laws regarding slavery early in Virginia’s history. But, in 1640, a Virginia court sentenced John Punch, an African, to slavery after he attempted to flee his service. The two whites with whom he fled were sentenced only to an additional year of their indenture, and three years’ service to the colony. This marked the first legal sanctioning of slavery in the English colonies and was one of the first legal distinctions made between Europeans and Africans.
That’s the 1640 start, if you prefer that. When the distinction was made between black and white runaways from that indenture.
Worth noting that there was nothing unusual about indenture. Very similar indeed to the idea and practice of apprenticeship at the time. In effect, a time limited ownership of the labor – not the person – in return for certain benefits such as transport, sustenance, training and so on. This was actually the manner in which anyone at all entered the skilled working class. Sure, it all sounds a bit feudal but then that’s because it was rather the overhang of that feudal system. And it really did apply to people irrespective of skin colour or racial – even national – background.
England hadn’t had chattel slavery since the Anglo Saxons – Scotland and certain miners being evidence that all of Britain wasn’t so lucky – and it was rather more the Moors, Ottomans, Arabs, various places below the Olive Line, who still had full on slavery.
This then full changed in the colonies. And Anthony Johnson, that arrival from Angola in 1621, who makes the history here:
When Anthony Johnson was released from servitude, he was legally recognized as a “free Negro.” He became a successful farmer. In 1651 he owned 250 acres (100 ha), and the services of five indentured servants (four white and one black). In 1653, John Casor, a black indentured servant whose contract Johnson appeared to have bought in the early 1640s, approached Captain Goldsmith, claiming his indenture had expired seven years earlier and that he was being held illegally by Johnson. A neighbor, Robert Parker, intervened and persuaded Johnson to free Casor.
Parker offered Casor work, and he signed a term of indenture to the planter. Johnson sued Parker in the Northampton Court in 1654 for the return of Casor. The court initially found in favor of Parker, but Johnson appealed. In 1655, the court reversed its ruling. Finding that Anthony Johnson still “owned” John Casor, the court ordered that he be returned with the court dues paid by Robert Parker.
This was the first instance of a judicial determination in the Thirteen Colonies holding that a person who had committed no crime could be held in servitude for life. Though Casor was the first person declared a slave in a civil case, there were both black and white indentured servants sentenced to lifetime servitude before him.
That first instance of that full on chattel slavery in the colonies that became the US was firstly in 1655 – we even know the date, March 8 – and it was of a black owning a black. Oh, and free blacks owning slaves themselves was something that never did entirely disappear from American life, not until slavery itself did in the 1860s.
This all is more than mere pendantry too. Because slavery was not simply the invention of white Europeans to oppress black Africans. A few places in NW Europe – see England above – didn’t have slavery for several hundred years before the Atlantic trade. The rest of the world carried on, quite gaily, having it. To the point that the very word “Slav” is cognate with slave. The Mamluks who ruled Egypt were a caste of mercenaries composed of slaves. The Ottoman Sultan took as his tribute from the Balkans and elsewhere male children who were then sent to Egypt to enlist. Their own children could not join that ruling caste and army. It was a non-hereditary ruling army of slaves, weird as it may seem. Africa itself was awash with slavery and the Arab slave trade up into North Africa and the Mediterranean was a trade in something already happening.
