APUSH
Roots of America pt 1: Slavery
Assignments
How did the presence of slavery impact the social, cultural, and political development of the
colonies? How was the “Color Line” drawn? Closely examine the following sources relating to
17th century Virginia, keeping this prompt in mind.
Slavery in North America - Sources
Source 1: Timeline 1492 -1730s
1492 - Columbus lands in Bahamas
1502 - Spanish transport African slaves to Hispaniola.
1526 - Early Spanish attempt at settlement in North America (at San Miguel de Gualdape, South
Carolina) brought first African slaves to what would become the United States.
- First recorded slave rebellion in North America: African slaves brought to San Miguel
de Gualdape flee and joined local Indian tribes.
Mid-1500’s - Spanish & Portuguese start shipping slaves to Brazil & Caribbean (esp. Cuba,
Hispaniola) to work in sugarcane fields
1560’s - England & Netherlands start to join the Atlantic slave trade
1607 - Virginia colony founded (Jamestown)
1613 - First record of African (indentured servant) in Dutch colony of New Amsterdam
1619 - First African slaves in Jamestown
House of Burgesses established (Virginia)
1620 - Mayflower lands at Plymouth
1624 - Dutch found New Netherland
1630 - Puritans found Massachusetts Bay colony
Great Migration of English settlers begins
1630’s - English start importing slaves to their Caribbean islands
1644 - Second Anglo-Powhatan War (Virginia)
1649 - Maryland Act of Toleration
1660 - First series of slave laws (Virginia/Maryland)
Charles II restored as English monarch
Royal African Company chartered in London to trade along West African coast.
1663 - English King Charles II charters South Carolina – settlers start importing slaves from
Caribbean to work on plantations
1664 - England seizes New Netherlands  New York
1675-6 - Bacon’s Rebellion (Virginia)
1681 - William Penn founds Pennsylvania colony
1688 - Glorious Revolution in England
1690’s - Chesapeake planters make transition from indentured labor to African slave labor
1698 - Royal African Company loses its monopoly on the slave trade
1702 - New York passes a slave code
1712 - New York slave revolts spark brutal punishments and executions
1718 – French build New Orleans using African slaves for labor
1724 – Louisiana Territory passes Code Noir regulating slavery in the French-controlled
Mississippi River valley.
1725-6 – Pennsylvania passes act “for the better regulation of Negroes”
1739 - South Carolina slave revolt (Stono Rebellion)
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APUSH
Roots of America pt 1: Slavery
Assignments
Source 2 - Anthony Johnson – “Antonio a Slave: A Story of Diminishing Progress from Father to
Son” is a biographical essay taken from HSI – Historical Scene Investigator, a social science
website created in partnership with The College of William,& Mary, Library of Congress, and the
University of Kentucky.
Anthony Johnson, an African, arrived in Virginia in 1621 with only the name Antonio.
Caught as a young man in the Portuguese slave-trading net of the Bautista piracy, he had
passed from one trader to another in England until he reached Virginia. In 1621 Antonio was
placed with John Pedro, Maria, and other survivors of the San Antonio wreck, on board the ship
James, bound for England. Antonio and Maria were taken to the Earl of Warwick’s great manor
at Leighs Priory in Felsted, Essex as stolen contraband. It was at Leighs Priory that Antonio
converted from Catholicism to become a Protestant and eventually adopted the English spelling
of his name Anthony, just as his future wife Maria, became Mary. They did not abandon their
Angolan identity. In America, Anthony and Mary Johnson’s grandson would name their
plantation Angola in memory of their homeland. Lord Rich who participated in the piracy of the
Treasurer on the Bautista, did not want Antonio and Mary to remain in England, put them on
the ship James a second time and bound them to Bennett’s Welcome. Bennett’s Welcome was
a Virginia plantation owned by Edward Bennett, a wealthy Puritan and Lord Rich’s friend who
accepted the Christianized African slaves. Once in Jamestown colony he was purchased by
Richard Bennett and sent to work at Warrasquoke, Bennett’s tobacco plantation on the James
River. Antonio was already trained in skills of care of livestock and tobacco and wheat growth.
In the next year, Antonio was brought face to face with the world of tri-racial contact and
conflict that would shape the remainder of his life. On Good Friday-March 22, 1622 the
Powhatan tribes of tidewater Virginia fell on the white colonists in a determined attempt to
drive them from the land. Of the 57 people living on the Bennett plantation, only Antonio and
four other men survived the massacre.
Antonio, anglicized to Anthony, labored on the Bennett plantation for some 20 years,
slave in fact if not by law, for legally defined bondage was still in another formative stage.
During this time, he married the slave Mary, another African trapped in the labyrinth of
servitude, and fathered four children. Some Jamestown slaveholders in the early years allowed
Africans to raise cattle and crops of their own to purchase their freedom. This practice was akin
to an ancient Roman custom that permitted slaves to accumulate property to eventually
acquire their liberty. The Siete Partidas laws, later adopted by Spain and Portugal, were an
ancient acknowledgement that slavery was not a natural condition for mankind. In the 1640’s,
Anthony and Mary Johnson gained their freedom after half a life-time of servitude. Probably at
this point they chose a surname, Johnson, to signify their new status. Already past middle age,
the Johnsons began carving out a niche for themselves on Virginia’s eastern shore. By 1650,
they owned 250 acres due to the headright system, a small herd of cattle, and two black
servants. In a world in which racial boundaries were not yet firmly marked, the Johnson’s had
entered the scramble of small planters for economic security. Antony’s servant was taken from
him by a white planter and he won his case in court having the servant eventually returned to
him. Ships trading for tobacco at Jamestown also docked at the Johnson wharf on the Eastern
Shore, to purchase more tobacco before returning to England. Anthony seemed to have carved
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APUSH
Roots of America pt 1: Slavery
Assignments
out a successful life for himself and his family. He is described in the court records as hard
working and of service to the community.
By schooling themselves in the workings of the English legal process, carefully cultivating
white patronage, and working industriously on the land, the Johnson’s gained their freedom,
acquired property, established a family, warded off contentious neighbors, and hammered out
a decent existence. Their house was destroyed by fire in 1652, and Anthony and Maria were
excused from paying tithables by the courts. By the 1650’s, as the lines of racial slavery
tightened, the Johnson’s felt the customs of the country begin to close in on Virginia Free
Blacks. Africans and their descendants were beginning to be seen as bound for life.
In 1644, convinced that ill winds were blowing away the chances for their children and
grandchildren in Virginia, the Johnson’s began selling their land to white neighbors. The
following spring, most of the clan moved north to Maryland, where they rented land and again
took up farming and cattle raising on Tonies Vineyard. In 1667 years later, Anthony died leaving
four children and his wife. The growing racial prejudice of Virginia followed Anthony beyond the
grave. A jury of white men in Virginia declared that because Anthony Johnson “was a Negroe
and by consequence an alien,” the 50 acres he had deeded to his son Richard in Virginia before
moving to Maryland should be awarded to a local white planter.
Johnson’s children and grandchildren, born in America, could not duplicate the modest
success of the African-born patriarch. By the late seventeenth century, people of color faced
much greater difficulties in extricating themselves from slavery. When they did, they found
themselves forced to the margins of society. Anthony’s sons never rose higher than tenant
farmer or small freeholder. John Johnson, the eldest son, moved farther north into Delaware in
the 1680’s, following a period of great conflict with Native Americans in the Chesapeake region.
Members of his family married local Indians and became part of a tri-racial community that has
survived to the present day. Richard Johnson stayed behind in Virginia. When he died in 1689,
just after a series of colonial insurrections connected the overthrow of James II in England, he
had little to leave his own four sons. They became tenant farmers and hired servants, laboring
on plantations owned by whites. By now, in the early eighteenth century, slave ships were
pouring Africans into Virginia and Maryland to replace white indentured servants, the backbone
of the labor force for four generations. To be black had first been a handicap of the Johnson’s.
Now it became a fatal disability, an indelible mark of degradation and bondage.
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What changes in colonial society and culture caused the changes to Anthony
Johnson’s family fortunes?
Re-read the first three columns of Howard Zinn’s “Drawing the Color Line”. How
does the story of Anthony Johnson fit in with Zinn’s account of how slavery and
racism started in Virginia?
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APUSH
Roots of America pt 1: Slavery
Assignments
Source 3 - How did Virginians of different races begin to interact or deal with one another? Is
there any sense of a commonality that crosses over differences of race or ethnicity? Timothy
Breen is a senior professor of American History at Northwestern University. As part of the PBS
“Africans in America” documentary (WGBH, Boston, 1998) he gave the following response to
these questions.
“There are many ways that human beings divide themselves up. Class is one, [and] gender,
race, ethnicity. There's a number of ways that people divide themselves up. And in early
Virginia, race was a category that people recognized. Black people recognized difference, and
sometimes, I would even argue, celebrated difference. But in this highly competitive,
depressingly abusive world, poorer whites and poorer blacks -- people who were marginalized
in this system of dependent labor -- oftentimes reached out to each other in ways that suggest
that, at least in the first 50 or 60 years of Virginia, [1667-1677] ...people of African background
and English background were able to work together in ways that, again, in later period of
American history, were impossible.” http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1i3025.html
Source 4 - "Declaration of Nathaniel Bacon in the Name of the People of Virginia”, July 30,
1676
This declaration was presented to the Virginia government by Nathaniel Bacon’s rebel force of
about 1,000 poor frontier farmers and farmworkers. It is a list of accusations against the
Governor, William Berkeley. There were even some slaves among his rebels. The landless men
had their rights to vote taken away by the House of Burgesses a few years prior to this rebellion.
1. For raising great and unjust taxes for fake public projects that were actually only meant to
advance his favorites. And during this time no project to improve fortifications [defenses],
towns, or trade. …
4. For having protected, favored, and emboldened the Indians against us, his Majesty's loyal
subjects, and never requiring any due punishment for their many invasions, robberies, and
murders committed upon us. …
7. For having done all this, with only the help of some few favorites, and without acquainting the
people…
Of this and the aforesaid articles we accuse Sir William Berkeley as guilty of each and every one
of the same,. . . .
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What inferences can we draw from Bacon’s declaration about the social
relationship between poor white farmers and African slaves in 17th century
Virginia?
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APUSH
Roots of America pt 1: Slavery
Assignments
Source 5 – Atlantic Slave Trade
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APUSH
Roots of America pt 1: Slavery
Assignments
Source 6 - Slave Population & Tobacco Production
Tobacco Production in Virginia
Year
Tobacco Exports (lbs)
1616
1,250
1634
500,000
1669
15,000,000
1700
28,000,000
Year
1630
1640
1650
1660
1670
1680
Estimated Population of Colonial Virginia
Total
Slave
% of
Year
Total
Slave
Pop.
Pop.
Pop.
Pop.
Pop.
Slaves
2,500
10,442
18,731
27,020
35,309
43,596
50
150
405
950
2,000
3,000
2.0%
1.4%
2.2%
3.5%
5.7%
6.9%
1690
1700
1710
1720
1730
1740
53,046
58,560
78,281
57,757
114,000
180,440
9,345
19,390
23,118
26,559
30,000
60,000
% of
Pop.
Slaves
17.6%
33.1%
29.5%
46.0%
33.3%
42.9%
Source: Calculated from Data from the Bureau of the Census, U.S. Department of Commerce
<http://web.viu.ca/davies/H320/population.colonies.htm>
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What patterns can you detect in this data? What do these patterns suggest
regarding the way slavery developed along with the fortunes of Virginia?
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APUSH
Roots of America pt 1: Slavery
Assignments
Source 7 - Virginia Slave Laws. All of the following are excerpts from laws passed by the
Virginia House of Burgesses during the 17th century.
Virginia Slavery Act X - 1639
“ALL persons except negroes to be provided with arms and ammunition or be fined at
pleasure of the Governor and Council.”
Virginia Slavery Act - 1662
“Whereas some doubts have arisen whether children got by any Englishman upon a Negro
woman should be slave or free, be it therefore enacted and declared by this present Grand
Assembly, that all children born in this country shall be held bond or free only according to
the condition of the mother; and that if any Christian shall commit fornication with a Negro
man or woman, he or she so offending shall pay double the fines imposed by the former.”
Virginia Slavery Act - 1669
“Whereas the only law in force [allowing the extension of servants’ terms of service] for the
punishment of disobedient servants resisting their master, mistress, or overseer cannot be
inflicted upon Negroes, nor the stubbornness of many of them be suppressed by other than
violent means, be it enacted and declared by this Grand Assembly if any slave resists his
master and by the extremity of the correction [punishment] should chance to die, that his
death shall not be accounted a felony, but the master (or that other person appointed by
the master to punish him) be acquitted from legal suit, since it cannot be presumed that
any man would plan to destroy his own estate [property].”
Act Concerning Indians - 1661
“And be it further enacted that any Englishman, trader, or other who brings in any Indians
as servants shall not sell them for slaves nor for any longer time than English of similar
ages should serve by act of assembly. (Act “Concerning Indians” 1661)”
Slavery Act IV -1670
“WHEREAS it has been questioned whether Indians or Negroes freed by their masters, or
otherwise free, could be capable of purchasing Christian [white] servants, It is enacted that
no negro or Indian, though baptised and enjoying their own freedom shall be capable of
any such purchase of Christians; but they may buy any servants of their own nation.”
http://www.virtualjamestown.org/slavelink.html
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Which social groups do these laws focus on?
How are the protections and punishments mentioned in these laws unequal?
Why do you think these laws made such distinctions?
What kind of legal status is given to slaves? What about to native Americans?
Children? Women? English settlers? Etc.
Source 8 - English advertisement for Virginia tobacco, c1750
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APUSH
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Roots of America pt 1: Slavery
Assignments
What inferences could you draw from this image about the culture of
colonial Virginia? How did the English regard life in their Chesapeake
colony?
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