ANTHONY JOHNSON AND THE QUESTION OF SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN RACE
AND FREEDOM.
1. Arrived in Virginia in 1621, appeared on a list of inhabitants as a “servant” – “Antonio, a Negro.”
Probably a slave because a surname not listed. Terms slave and servant were used loosely in
the 17th century Chesapeake.
2. He worked on a large plantation with over 60 persons owned or employed by the Bennetts. By
a stroke of luck he survived the Indian attack that left 52 people on the Bennett plantation dead.
3. While historians do not know how he became Johnson, they hypothesize that he took the name
of the man who helped him gain freedom.
4. As a free black, he moved to Northampton, Co. Virginia and married “Mary, a Negro Woman.”
They had four children. In 1664, this county had a population of about 62 blacks, 29 percent of
which gained freedom, a high percentage compared to later periods.
WHAT DO THE FOLLOWING FACTS SUGGEST ABOUT THE NATURE OF THE CULTURE OF THE CHESAPEAKE
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN RACE AND FREEDOM?
1. Local justices observed that the Johnsons “have lived inhabitants in Virginia,” (about 30 years)
and were known for their “hard labor and known service.”
2. The Johnson’s acquired a modest estate where they raised livestock.
3. After a fire destroyed part of their plantation, the court “in sympathy” excused Mary and the
two daughters from tax payments. Taxes were assessed on people. The law allowed exceptions
for women who did not “worke in the grounde.”
4. The Johnsons owned a black slave named Carson. A white visitor to the plantation helped the
slave contest his standing. The slave protested that he had been wrongly sold as a slave instead
of a servant. While Johnson initially gave him up as a slave, he later appealed to the county
court to punish the man who interfered with his labor. The court honored his appeal. The man
who meddled had to pay a fine and Carson was re-enslaved.
5. Historians document that in the Seventeenth-century Atlantic trade world, the numbers of
Europeans living in their “empires of outposts,” (with the Spanish land empire an exception).
These communities were rather small and very informal and very dependent on multicultural or
“brokers.” These brokers tended to be African, Euro-African, or Euro-Indian. As Thomas
Bender has documented, “while there were a hundred or so Portuguese merchants in the
capital of Kongo in 1550, perhaps 10,000 Africans were in Lisbon, mostly slave, but perhaps a
thousand of them free, all doing a variety of jobs in government offices, hospitals, noble
households, farms, and craft shops. (Bender 47)” You will often hear the term African Creole to
describe these cultural brokers who illuminate the variety the experience of people from African
descent. Such variety had been a hallmark of slavery in Mediterranean societies where male
and female slaves “had places in a complex society.” Plantation colonies in North American
(think Caribbean sugar islands) sought primarily males and dramatically narrowed the
experience of slavery since these plantation owners did not need the cultural skills of the
Creoles. But in the 17th Century, the Chesapeake had yet to become a widely established
plantation economy and there is evidence that African Creoles (cheaper slaves since their skills
were less prized in this new plantation economy) were there with the type of expectations from
all that they may or may not remain as slaves (Bender, 52).
Source: Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia..
New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1975 and Thomas Bender’s A Nation Among Nations:
America’s Place in World History. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006.