Slavery in Virginia dates from 1619, soon after the founding of Virginia as a British colony by the London Virginia Company. The company established a good system to encourage colonies to transport mandatory slaves to the colony for labor; they received some land for the people whose share they paid to Virginia.
Africans first appeared in Virginia in 1619, brought by the Englishmen from a Spanish slave ship they were tapping into. Some laws on slavery of Africans were passed in the seventeenth century and codified into the first slave code of Virginia in 1705. Among the legislation affecting slaves was one of 1662, who said that children born in the colony would take the social status of their mother, regardless of who their father is. This was in contrast to the English common law at the time, and resulted in many generations of enslaved mixed race boys and adults, some of whom were mostly white. Among the most famous are Sally Hemings and his siblings, the father of John Wayles planter, and his four surviving children by Thomas Jefferson.
Video History of slavery in Virginia
Servers bound
In 1650, there were about 300 Africans living in Virginia, about 1% of the approximately 30,000 British and European population. They are not slaves but work as contract laborers, as do about 4,000 white contract workers working to loan money to Virginia. Many Africans have gained their freedom, and they are each given 50 acres (200,000 m 2 ) of soil when freed from their indentures, so they can increase their own tobacco or other crops. Although harmed because they had to pay to get their newly surveyed lands to patent it, the white servants found themselves in the same difficulty. Some black contract employees patented and bought the land after obtaining freedom.
Anthony Johnson was an African who settled on land on the East Coast after the expiration of the agreement, then bought African slaves as laborers. George Dillard, a white aide who settled in New Kent County after his slavery ended, held at least 79 acres (320,000 m 2 ) from his own land and married, although there were few women in the colony at the time.
Nicholas Ferrar wrote the contemporary text of Sir Thomas Smith's Misgovernment of the Virginia Company (first published by Roxburghe Club in 1990). Here he alleges that Smith and his son-in-law, Robert Johnson, run a company inside a company to take advantage of shareholders. He also alleged that Dr. John Woodall had bought some Polish settlers as slaves, selling them to Lord de La Warr. He claims that Smith attempted to reduce other occupiers to slavery by extending their indenture period indefinitely beyond the seventh year.
Maps History of slavery in Virginia
Servant identified to be slave
Although the history of blacks in Virginia began in 1619, the transition of the status of slaves who were required to be lifelong slaves was a gradual process. Some historians believe that some of the first blacks to arrive in Virginia had become slaves, while others said they were taken to the colony as a compulsory servant. Historians generally believe slavery did not begin as an institution until the 1660s.
Initial cases show differences in treatment between Negro and European contract employees. In 1640, the Virginia General Court ruled the Emmanuel case. Emmanuel was a nigger servant who participated in the escape plan with six white servants. Together, they stole corn, powder, and shotgun, but were arrested before escaping. The members of each group were punished; they are punished with various punishments. Christopher Miller, the group's leader, was sentenced to a one-year fetish. White maid John Williams was sentenced to serve the colony for an additional seven years. Peter Willcocke was branded, whipped, and asked to serve the colony for an additional seven years. Richard Cookson was asked to serve for two additional years. Emmanuel, a Negro, was flogged and branded with "R" on his cheek. All white servants have their slavery requirements increased to some extent, but the court does not extend Emmanuel's ministry time. Many historians speculate that Emmanuel has been a lifetime servant. While Emmanuel's status is not defined in the records, his brand shows a difference in how white servants and black servants are treated. Although this case shows that slavery exists, the differences of lifetime slavery or slavery linked to Africans or people of African descent are not widespread until later.
In the same year, 1640, "the first definite indication of slavery came into being in Virginia." John Punch, the obligatory Negro servant, fled from his master, Hugh Gwyn, along with two white servants. Hugh Gwyn petitioned the court, and the three maids were arrested, sentenced, and sentenced. The white servants had their contracts extended by four years, but the court gave John Punch a much tougher sentence. The court ruled that "the third is a negro named John Punch will serve his master or his assignment for a natural life time here or where." This is regarded as the earliest documentary of slavery in Virginia. This marked a racial distinction in the treatment of black servants and their white counterparts, but also the beginning of the Virginian courts that reduced Negros from conditions of indentured slavery to slavery. Leon Higginbotham believes that this case is proof that the colony developed a policy of forcing Negro workers to serve the terms of the life of slavery.
In other cases, you refuse to acknowledge the termination of the contract contract with blacks, who are mostly illiterate in English. Anthony Johnson is said to have detained his maid, John Casor, through his tenure. Johnson was one of the first 20 blacks brought to Jamestown in 1619 as a contract employee. In 1623, Angola had gained his freedom. In 1651 he was prosperous enough to import his five "servants" of his own, where he was given 250 acres (1.0Ã, km 2 ) as "headrights". One of his servants was John Casor. Casor then claims to a neighbor farmer, Robert Parker, that he has completed his term. Parker persuaded Johnson to release Casor, who later worked for Parker. The breeder signed it to a new term from the indenture. Johnson challenged Parker in court, saying he had taken workers. In the lawsuit of Johnson v. Parker, the court in Northampton County ruled that "seriously considering and weighing its premises with maturity, doe fynde that Mr. Robert Parker's most unfair man is to guard the Negroes from his master Anthony Johnson.... Because it is Court and ordered that John Casor Negro soon return to the services of Mr. Anthony Johnson, and Mr. Robert Parker paid all fees in the lawsuit. "Casor returned to Johnson and served him for the rest of his life.
There is evidence in the 1650s that some Virginia Negro people serve a lifetime. In 1660 the Assembly declared that "if any English servant would flee at the company with a Negro man who was unable to make satisfaction with the addition of time... [he] would serve for the time of the Negro's absence." This law shows quite clearly that Negroes serve life and therefore can not make "satisfaction" by serving longer after they are recaptured. This phrase gives legal status to the practice of slavery of the Negroes who already exist. The statute was soon passed to define slavery with more conditions than lifelong slavery.
In 1660 Elizabeth Key won the first freedom lawsuit in Virginia. He was challenged to be classified as a slave in a complicated case relating to a long indenture and estate. The mixed race woman, the daughter of an African woman and an English planter, argues that she is free because her white English father who has recognized her as her daughter has baptized her as a Christian, and tries to protect her by forming a guardian and indentureship for her as a girl when she is dying. Following this case, the colonial legislature adopted the principle of the Partiter Voyage of Vulrem, saying that all children born in the colony would take their mother's status, regardless of father. So children born from enslaved mothers will be enslaved, regardless of their ethnicity or father. This is contrary to English common law for children of parents who are the subject of English, in which the child takes the status of the father. But the law also means that mixed-race children born of white women are born free, and many independent African-American families come from the union between white women and African ethnic men during the colonial era.
Slavery becomes an institution
As it approached the late 17th century, large numbers of African slaves were taken by Dutch and British slaves to the Virginia Colonies, as well as to Maryland and other southern colonies. In large tobacco plantations, planters use them as goods (property) to replace contract workers (who are obligated to work only for a certain period of time) as field workers, as well as to serve as domestic workers and skilled workers. As slaves, Africans do not work with mutual agreement, or for a limited period of time. Labor-intensive tobacco and cotton plantations in the South depend on slavery for profit.
Partus sequitur ventrem
Prior to the adoption of the doctrine of the partiter sequitur ventrem ( partus ) in the British colony in 1662, beginning in Virginia, English common law has stated that among English subjects, inherited status children from his father. People can ask fathers to recognize illegitimate children and support them. Officials do not know how to treat children in colonies born to parents who are not English subjects. In 1658, Elizabeth Key was the first woman of African descent to bring freedom of clothes in the Virginia colony. He seeks recognition as a woman of free color, rather than classified as a Negro (African) and slave. His real father was an Englishman (and a member of House of Burgesses). He had admitted it, had baptized him as a Christian in the Church of England, and had arranged for his guardianship under an indenture before his death.
Before his guardian returned to England, he sold Key's contract to another man, who held Key out of his tenure. When he died, the secret treasures classified the Key and his son (also a natural child of the English subject) as a Negro slave. Key sues his freedom and his son, based on their English ancestors, his Christian status, and indenture records. He won his case.
The number of white contract employees declined in the late seventeenth century, as an improving economy in the UK made workers less willing to dare to colonize. Against this background, in 1662 the Virginia House of Burgesses passed a law including the principle of partus , to prevent slaves with British fathers from claiming freedom. Other colonies quickly adopted the principle. He states that "all the children born in this country should be held bonded or free just according to the condition of the mother..." Because most of the bonded women are Africans and are therefore considered foreigners, their children are also considered foreigners and removed from consideration as an English Subject. Racial differences make it easier to identify them. Slavery became a racial caste associated with African descent irrespective of the ancestors of fathers of children. The principle became incorporated into state law when Virginia achieved independence from Britain. Labor demands led the colonists to import more African slaves in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.
The doctrine partus may be derived from the economic needs of the labor-poor colony. Conditions are difficult, death rates are high, and the government is finding it difficult to attract enough of the required maids. The change also includes the power relations with which white farmers, their sons, supervisors and other white men take sexual advantage from enslaved women. Their unlawful mixed race boys are now "limited" to slave shelters, unless fathers take certain legal actions on their behalf. The new law in 1662, means that white fathers are no longer required to legally recognize, support, or liberate their illegitimate children by female slaves. Men can sell their problems or get them to work.
Growth of commodity crops and slavery
Virginia Planters develop tobacco commodity crops as the main export. It was a labor-intensive plant, and the demand for it in the UK and Europe led to an increase in African slave imports in the colony. By the mid-eighteenth century, there were 145,000 slaves in the Chesapeake Bay region, compared with 50,000 in the Spanish Cuban colonies, where they worked in urban settlements; 60,000 in Barbados UK; and 450,000 in the French plantation colony of Saint-Domingue. In the eighteenth century, settlers moved slowly to the west, when the land became exhausted in Tidewater. The planters took slaves to Piedmont but started to develop mixed farms by the end of the eighteenth century.
Freedom for some slaves
Almost immediately after the practice of slavery was established in Virginia, several individual slaves began to gain their freedom. This is usually done by running away, buying freedoms through wage savings (such as when slaves are employed), or through their master's generosity, as family ties grow between some of them, and some mixed race slaves are brought down directly. from the planters or their sons. Most color-free people choose to live in Virginia, or join neighbors in migration to the western border of the state and gradually to North Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee. They found the border conditions more tolerant than the Tidewater community.
Many slaves escaped free life as part of the Great Dismal Swamp marathon community. Others fled to the border, sometimes forming alliances with the rest of the Native American tribe.
In Free Africa in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland and Virginia (1995-2005), Paul Heinegg traces the heads of households of color-free people (also recorded as mulatto or blacks free in some cases) in the census from 1790 to 1810. He found that 80 percent could be traced to free families of unity between white women (widowed or free) and African (compulsory, free or slave) Africans in colonial Virginia. Because their mixed-race children are born from free moms, they have free status. In the 17th and early 18th centuries, the working class of the obligatory slaves and slaves then lived and worked closely. They naturally develop a formal union or marriage, because the line of slave caste does not harden at that point. Despite being born free, such mixed race children are often asked to have a lengthy indenture as a maid to the master's mother, especially if the child is invalid. But these color-free people formed the foundation of most of the free black families in colonial Virginia.
At the time of the American Revolutionary War, what came to be called the "strange institution" of slavery was an unresolved problem among the 13 colonies. The founders of the state established the principle of equality in the new Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, although at that time it was interpreted as valid only for the free. When the constitution is ratified, free blacks can vote in five of the thirteen states, indicating their acceptance as citizens. In some cases, such as in North Carolina, free blacks were then restricted from voting after the famous slave uprising as did Nat Turner.
In the 19th century
In the first two decades after the Revolution, inspired by the Revolution and evangelical preachers, many slave owners in the Chesapeake region freed some or all of their slaves, during their lifetime or by will. From 1,800 people in 1782, the total black population in Virginia increased to 12,766 (4.3 percent of blacks) in 1790, and to 30,570 in 1810. The percentage change came from free blacks' comprising less than one percent of the total black population. in Virginia, to 7.2 percent in 1810, even as the overall population increased. A planter, Robert Carter III freed more than 450 slaves for the rest of his life, more than any other planter. George Washington freed all his slaves at his death.
During the 19th century, there were two major attempts at a slave rebellion in Virginia: Gabriel's Revolt in 1800 and the rebellion of Nat Turner's slave in 1831. Consequently, the Virginia legislative council ended the ability of slave owners to free their slaves independently and oblige everyone to be slaves. approved by legislative action. Additionally, the law also validates laws that restrict the rights of colored people, prohibiting them from carrying weapons and reducing collections in groups.
Slaves from Virginia escape through water and land channels to the free countries of the North, with some assisted by people along the Underground, run by white and black people. In 1849, Brown's Henry "Box" slave escaped from slavery in Virginia when he arranged to be sent by express mail in a crate to Philadelphia, arriving in less than 24 hours.
By 1860 Virginia had a black population of about 550,000; only 58,042 or 11% are people of color free. In contrast to Cuba, there are 213,167 free-colored people, or 39% of the black population of 550,000. Cuba has not developed a plantation system in its early years, and the economy supports the Spanish kingdom from urban settlements. With the shortage of white labor, blacks have become heavily involved in urban commerce and business. In this setting, slaves can buy a way out of slavery.
Emancipation
The southern states have economies dependent on slavery, but sentiment for removal grows in the North. Slavery is a growing source of conflict between states as the United States grows. The slave community wants to expand it to the west. The mass emancipation of all remaining slaves occurred during the years of the American Civil War (1861-1865) and shortly thereafter.
See also
- List of plantations in Virginia
- Virginia in the American Civil War
- Trafficking in Virginia
- Indentured servitude in Virginia
- Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: Virginia Colonial Trial. New York: Norton, 1975.
Footnote
Further reading
- Alan Taylor, Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2013.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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