Slaves vs. Indentured Servants

Did Africans brought to Virginia in 1619 have the same status as “slaves” from Ireland? “Yes!” cry the white supremacists. “No!” retort the anti-racists. While reputable historians differ, today’s furor is more about politics than evidence.

Legal documents of the 1620s and 1630s call the Africans “servants.” Blacks in bondage toiled alongside indentured whites, intermarried with them, escaped with them, rebelled with them. Wealthy white landholders preserved their power through steps to divide and conquer.

• 1640: First recorded distinction by race. After the recapture of three escaped servants, the two white men were condemned to four more years of bondage; the African, to indenture for life.
• 1661: First Virginia law to use term slave. It allowed any free person to own slaves.
• 1662: Slavery made hereditary. In a departure from English common law, Virginia assigned children the legal status of their mother.
• 1691: Interracial marriage prohibited. Earlier laws restricted marriage by condition of servitude; now marriage between free blacks and whites was forbidden too.
• 1705: Virginia Slave Act. Among other provisions, this converted black indentured servants to lifelong slaves and allowed masters to torture or kill them.

To say race-based chattel slavery came into being gradually doesn’t diminish 400 years of suffering or the differences between black and white bondage for most of that time. Read Clyde W. Ford about why it matters.