Chapter One
Launchings
The idea that the “antislavery”
Mayflower can be pitted against the 1619 Jamestown “slave ship” has a large germ of truth. But like most things, it’s complicated.
Many of the
Mayflower’s passengers, coming from a background of persecution and tyranny, established a society in which basic human rights were affirmed. Religion as practiced in Plymouth had a democratic tendency because it put all people on the same level under God and allowed church members to choose their own magistrates and clergy. When fully acted on by Roger Williams, the exile from the Massachusetts Bay Colony who fled to Plymouth before establishing Rhode Island to the south, this outlook yielded the separation of church and state, respect for Indigenous people, and antislavery legislation.
As for the
White Lion, which brought the “twenty and odd negroes” to Jamestown in August 1619, while it did not introduce slavery to the Americas-enslaved Africans had been carried to Spanish and Portuguese colonies for more than a century, and Indigenous peoples had long held captives of war in bondage-it was the vessel that first brought Africans to an English colony destined to become part of the United States.
The Background of 1619
In notes for a speech in 1855, Abraham Lincoln mentioned the Jamestown ship after discussing the earlier enslavement of Africans, which traces back to Spain and Portugal. The international slave trade began in earnest in the 1500s, when Spain and Portugal transported well over one hundred thousand Africans to the Americas to work on plantations or in mines. Spanish expeditions, which carried enslaved Black people with them, attempted short-lived settlements on the South Carolina-Georgia coast in 1526 and at Pensacola, Florida, from 1559 to 1561. St. Augustine, Florida-America’s oldest continually inhabited European-founded city-was established in 1565 by Spanish colonists who owned enslaved Africans, many of whom later gained freedom through self-purchase or manumission.
As Lincoln noted, the English were transporting enslaved Africans to the Americas by 1562, when the sailor John Hawkins sold about three hundred captives in the West Indies. In 1586, Sir Francis Drake, having stolen slaves from a Spanish town in South America, arrived at the English settlement on Roanoke Island, off the coast of current-day North Carolina, with “Indians from Cartagena, . . . 200 negroews, Turks and Moors, who do menial service,” in the words of a witness.
Spain’s aggressive colonization of the West triggered the events that led to Jamestown. The English nobleman Sir Robert Rich, the Second Earl of Warwick-known in his time as “the head of the Puritans”-was committed to defeating the international forces of “popery,” especially Catholic Spain. The owner of England’s largest private fleet, Rich plotted to use his ships to interrupt Spain’s thriving commerce in the Caribbean.
Slavery was probably not at the top of Sir Robert’s mind when he embarked on his pirate mission from Jamestown. He had been scheming to make an attack on Spanish trade with Virginia’s deputy governor, Samuel Argall, with whom he co-owned a ship, the
Treasurer. Their plan carried high risks. King James I had signed a peace treaty with Spain in 1604 and had proclaimed that “all Piracies and Depredations upon the Sea . . . of his Majesties Friends and Allies” were crimes punishable by death. The king was furious when the celebrated adventurer Sir Walter Raleigh attacked a Spanish colony on the coast of South America; Raleigh was subsequently beheaded for plotting treason against the king.
Small wonder that Robert Rich took extreme caution in his scheme. He secured for the
Treasurer letters of marque (license to capture enemy ships) from Savoy, Italy, a state often in conflict with Spain. In Jamestown, Samuel Argall pretended to direct the Treasurer north to Cape Cod on a trading voyage. Secretly, he sent the Treasurer south to the West Indies in search of Spanish plunder.
In the Caribbean, the
Treasurer had a chance meeting with another British ship, the White Lion, a privateer that was sailing under Dutch letters of marque. In late July 1619, the ships captured a Portuguese vessel, the São João Batista, in the Bay of Campeche off Yucatán. The Batista turned out to be a slave ship that had departed Angola two months earlier, headed for Veracruz, Mexico. The Batista had left Africa with 350 Black people in its hold, about 40 percent of whom died during the voyage.
This extraordinary death rate suggests how horrific the journey had been. The
Batista was overloaded; it had been licensed to carry only about hundred captives. On a lower deck of the ship, the Africans were shackled close together, lying with one’s head to another’s feet. In the tropical heat, temperatures soared above one hundred degrees. Air circulation in the pitch-dark hold was minimal, as was sanitation. The stench of excrement, vomit, and perspiration was overwhelming. Once a day, the enslaved were fed cassava gruel or corn and beans along with salted sardines. Periodically, the captives were brought to the main deck for exercise. The bodies of the dead-two or three a day, on average-were heaved overboard. An untold number of the enslaved jumped into the ocean, preferring death to the unrelenting misery.
The captains of the
White Lion and the Treasurer selected some sixty Black people, divided them up, and headed to Virginia. The White Lion got there first, arriving at Point Comfort on August 20. In the words of the Virginia official John Rolfe, the ship “brought not any thing but 20 and odd Negroes, which the Governor and Cape Marchant bought for victualls.” The Treasurer came a few days later with an additional thirty or so Africans. Discovering that the mission’s ringleader, Samuel Argall, had been taken to England on suspicion of illicit activities, the Treasurer’s captain, Daniel Elfrid, sold a few of the Africans in Virginia and then voyaged to Bermuda, where he sold the remaining people.
What Happened in Jamestown?
Slavery was formally legalized by Virginia’s General Assembly through a sequence of statutes, beginning with the 1662 law enforcing
partus sequitur ventrem (the child inherits the status of the enslaved mother). This was followed by restrictions on manumission in 1691 and by the harsh codes of 1705, which defined enslaved people as property on the same level as domestic animals or inanimate things. The presence of a small but meaningful population of free Black people earlier in Virginia reflects the ad hoc decisions made about Black workers before the 1662 law.
Settled in 1607, Virginia struggled through a decade of food shortages, epidemics, and economic problems before it began to find its stride with the cultivation of tobacco, soon to become the colony’s staple product. Spearheading Virginia’s growth was the English politician Sir Edwin Sandys, the head of the Virginia Company, the body of English investors that King James I had chartered to develop the colony of Virginia. Determined to make Virginia a commercial competitor to Spain, whose Caribbean colonies thrived on tobacco and sugar, Sandys vigorously promoted the export trade. In 1618, the company adopted the headright system: Virginia planters who transported laborers from overseas received fifty acres for each person brought over. The newcomers typically served four to seven years as indentured servants before receiving their freedom and a modest allotment of supplies to begin life on their own.
Some of the Africans who arrived in Virginia between 1619 and 1662 became indentured servants, though most Black workers were immediately enslaved. Among the few Blacks in early Virginia-about two dozen in 1623, three hundred in 1648, and two thousand by 1670-the percentage of free Black people was comparatively high on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. During the 1660s, the percentage of Blacks in Northampton County who were listed as free ranged between 20 and 30 percent. Looking at the numbers, George M. Fredrickson remarks that free Blacks in the area comprised “a larger portion of the total Black population than they would in any subsequent time during the slave era.”
In seventeenth-century Virginia, there were two main paths to freedom for the enslaved: manumission and self-purchase. Some enslavers voluntarily emancipated their bondspeople, usually in their wills. In most cases, manumission reflected the fact that a high percentage of the early generations of Virginia Blacks were Christians, having been baptized by Jesuit missionaries who were part of the Spanish and Portuguese colonization of Africa. The principle that Christians must not be permanently enslaved had some acceptance in Virginia until 1667, when the General Assembly passed a law saying that “the conferring of baptisme doth not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or ffreedome.”
More common than manumission was the practice of allowing enslaved people to purchase their freedom. Many landowners in early Virginia adopted a form of slavery, harking back to ancient Rome and practiced in some of Spain’s American colonies, that permitted the enslaved to hold property and earn income that could be applied to buying emancipation.
Slaves who were offered a chance for self-purchase had to work hard for their freedom. An enslaved worker produced, on average, around 1,500 pounds of tobacco per year working for an owner from sunup to sundown, six days a week, with Sundays and brief holidays off. To buy freedom, a slave typically had to pay at least that yearly amount-usually much more-in tobacco or other goods. Even if one spent all available off-hours farming or raising livestock, it took many years to accumulate enough to attain freedom. The situation of the people of African origin who were brought to Virginia in the seventeenth century against their will was only less oppressive relative to the harsher racial system that later emerged.
Besides meager opportunities for economic advancement, Black people in early Virginia were granted certain legal rights. Blacks and whites in Virginia received similar legal sentences, even in cases of violence and illicit sex. Working-class Black people mingled freely with working-class whites. Ira Berlin notes that in seventeenth-century Virginia, “Black and white servants ran away together, slept together, and upon occasion, stood shoulder to shoulder against . . . established authority.” Studies have indicated that as many as a third of children born out of wedlock in Northampton County in the mid-1660s resulted from sex between a Black man and a white woman, who was usually an indentured servant. There were instances of interracial marriage, such as the ex-slave Francis Payne, who married a white woman, Amy; in his will, he left “to my lovinge wife . . . my whole Estate [movables and] unmovables, making her my . . . executrix.”
However, by the century’s end, such possibilities would all but disappear. The overwhelming majority of Virginia’s Black population was enslaved, as the colony’s slave codes stiffened and the hierarchical Cavalier mentality took over among Southern whites, as we will see.
Behind the Mayflower and Plymouth
The
Mayflower Pilgrims believed that they were freedom seekers, escaping centuries of bondage. William Bradford, a Mayflower passenger who served as Plymouth’s longtime governor, began his History of Plymouth Plantation by describing the oppression that religious intolerance had caused over the centuries. The “Heathen Emperours” of ancient Rome, Bradford wrote, initiated the kind of “bloody & barbarous persecutions” that were later inflicted on alleged heretics during the Inquisition and under English monarchs. King Henry VIII’s persecution of Catholics had been followed by the ruthless anti-Protestant campaign of his Catholic daughter, Mary I. Under Mary’s rule, around 280 Protestants were executed-most of them by being burned at the stake. Mary’s crusade against Protestants was vividly captured in John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, an influential work among the Pilgrims. Bradford wrote of “Mr. Foxe [who] recordeth . . . those worthy martires & confessors which were burned in queene Marys days & otherwise tormented.”
It was the practices of Mary’s Anglican successors Elizabeth and James I that most directly affected Bradford and his fellow Puritans. Elizabeth and James imposed strict Anglican conformity, penalizing Catholics as traitors and Puritan Separatists as religious dissenters. Elizabeth oversaw the execution of nearly two hundred Catholics, including her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, whose beheading was gruesomely botched when the errant executioner sliced parts of her neck twice with his axe before finishing her off with the third blow. Elizabeth was also harsh on Puritans (Protestants devoted to “purifying” the English church of all remnants of Catholicism, such as vestments, rituals, and church hierarchy). Prominent dissenters-Elias Thacker, Henry Barrowe, John Penry, John Copping, and others-were hanged for speaking or writing against the Anglican Church. Many others were imprisoned.
James I continued the crackdown on religious nonconformists. For James, the king not only controlled the church but also had a direct link to God. James verbalized the doctrine of the divine right of kings that would inspire later Stuart monarchs. James declared, “Kings are not only God’s lieutenants upon earth, and sit upon God’s throne, but even by God himself they are called gods.” As for the Puritans, he vowed, “I will make them conform themselves or I will harry them out of this land or worse.”
He put his threat into action. Bradford wrote that the Puritans became “slaves” of the monarchy; they “were hunted & persecuted on every side. . . . Some were taken & clapt up in prison, others had their houses besett & watcht night and day, & hardly escaped their hands; and the most were faine to flie & leave their howses & habitations, and the mean of their livelihood.”
In the face of the ongoing monarchical onslaughts, some gave up the idea of purifying the church and decided to separate themselves from it. Separatism had arisen as early as the 1570s under the radical Robert Browne, whose followers were popularly known as Brownists. Separatist groups sprouted in London as well as Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire in northeastern England.
The group that would become the Pilgrims emerged in the rural Nottinghamshire hamlet of Scrooby, about 150 miles north of London. The Separatist William Brewster, a government official, served as postmaster in the region. He lived in a large manor leased by Samuel Sandys, whose brother Edwin Sandys would prove to be important both for the Pilgrims and for the settlers of Virginia. The Scrooby manor became the clandestine site of religious services held by the Cambridge-educated clergyman John Robinson, who had broken with the Anglican Church. Attendees at the Scrooby services included, besides Brewster, many local supporters, including the young William Bradford, who lived in nearby Austerfield.
By the fall of 1607, the Nottinghamshire Separatists had grown so restive under James that they decided to leave England. The Dutch Republic was an attractive destination. An alliance of seven provinces, led by Holland, whose long war with Spain (1568-1648) was at a temporary standstill, the Dutch Republic offered religious tolerance. Robinson’s group made two attempts to go there secretly by ship. The first one, in 1607, failed, resulting in the temporary imprisonment of some of the Separatists. The second, the following year, was successful. Robinson described the group’s escape as a “flight in persecution,” comparable to the exodus of Moses.
