The First Africans in Virginia

By 1619, the Portuguese had been capturing and enslaving people in west central Africa, including from the kingdom of Ndongo, whose people raised crops and animals and mostly followed local religions. Virginia’s tobacco economy, launched in 1612, created a hunger for labor that English indentured servants only partly filled.

In 1619 a Portuguese slave ship sailed from west central Africa for New Spain (Mexico) carrying captives from Ndongo. Two English privateers, the White Lion and the Treasurer, attacked it and took some of the captives. Many had probably had contact with Catholic missionaries, since Portuguese law required enslaved Africans to be baptized before reaching America.

The White Lion reached Point Comfort in late August 1619, and about twenty Africans were sold in exchange for food. A few days later the Treasurer arrived and sold two or three more. Most were distributed to the households of colonial leaders. Census records from the 1620s and 1630s list Africans living at Jamestown and on plantations such as Flowerdew Hundred, many identified only by first names, among them a woman named Angelo purchased by William Peirce.

The legal status of these first Africans is debated. Virginia had not yet written laws defining slavery, and some Africans, such as Anthony and Mary Johnson, gained their freedom and bought land. But the National Park Service notes that the evidence suggests they were often treated in a manner closely resembling enslavement. More captives followed: in 1628 a shipload of about 100 Angolans was sold in Virginia.

Over the following decades, Virginia’s laws hardened lifelong, inherited slavery based on race, and enslaved Africans replaced indentured servants as the colony’s main labor force. The year 1619 has become a symbol of slavery’s deep roots in English America — a system that ended only with the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865.