The Birth of Slavery in America - 1619

This article provides a brief overview of the arrival of the first enslaved people in America at Jamestown in 1619.

An Overseer Doing His Duty (1798), Benjamin Henry Latrobe

Slavery in Colonial Virginia and Jamestown

The establishment of Jamestown in 1607 began permanent English settlement in Virginia. Twelve years later, in 1619, a group of captive Africans arrived at Point Comfort in Virginia. Their arrival became an important early event in the development of a system of racial slavery that would profoundly shape Virginia, the English colonies, and eventually the United States.

The Arrival of Africans in Virginia

In late August 1619, the privateer White Lion arrived at Point Comfort, near present-day Hampton, Virginia, carrying what an English colonist described as "20 and odd" Africans. The captives had originally been taken from a Portuguese slave ship carrying Africans across the Atlantic. Some were exchanged in Virginia for food and supplies. A second ship, the Treasurer, arrived shortly afterward with additional African captives. These arrivals became among the earliest documented examples of Africans being brought into the English colony of Virginia.

What Was Their Legal Status?

The precise legal status of Virginia's earliest African arrivals remains complicated. Virginia did not yet have the detailed slave laws that would later define enslaved Africans and their descendants as property for life. Some early Africans may have occupied legal positions resembling indentured servants, and a small number later obtained freedom and property. At the same time, the Africans brought to Virginia had been forcibly captured and transported through the Atlantic slave trade. Over the following decades, Virginia increasingly created laws that permanently separated Africans and their descendants from European servants and established a system of hereditary racial slavery.

Why Did Slavery Expand in Virginia?

Demand for Labor: Tobacco transformed Virginia's economy during the seventeenth century. Growing and processing tobacco required enormous amounts of labor, and plantation owners continually sought workers to clear land, plant crops, harvest tobacco, and prepare it for export.

Economic Growth: Tobacco became Virginia's most important cash crop and generated great wealth for successful planters. At first, much of the colony's labor was performed by indentured servants from Europe. As Virginia's plantation economy expanded, however, wealthy landowners increasingly turned toward enslaved African labor.

The Atlantic Slave Trade: European powers had already created extensive systems for trafficking enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. Portugal and Spain had transported large numbers of enslaved Africans to colonies in the Americas before the English established Jamestown. As England became more deeply involved in Atlantic commerce, English merchants and colonists increasingly participated in this slave-trading system.

Slavery Becomes Established in Virginia

During the seventeenth century, Virginia passed a series of laws that gradually transformed slavery into a permanent and hereditary institution based heavily on race. Enslaved Africans and African Americans could be forced to labor for life, denied basic legal rights, separated from family members, bought and sold, and subjected to violence and punishment. A 1662 Virginia law established that a child's legal status followed that of the mother, helping make slavery hereditary from one generation to the next.

Life in Bondage

Life for enslaved Africans and African Americans in colonial Virginia was shaped by forced labor, restrictions on freedom, and the constant possibility of family separation. Many worked on tobacco plantations, while others labored as craftspeople, domestic workers, dockworkers, or skilled tradespeople. Despite the tremendous restrictions imposed upon them, enslaved people maintained families and communities, preserved elements of African cultures, created new African American traditions, and resisted slavery in many different ways.

The Legacy of Slavery

The growth of slavery in Virginia had enormous consequences. Enslaved labor helped generate wealth for plantation owners and supported the expansion of tobacco agriculture, while laws increasingly tied slavery to African ancestry. The system that developed during the colonial period expanded throughout much of British North America and endured in the United States for generations.

Why it mattered: The arrival of captive Africans in Virginia in 1619 was part of a larger Atlantic system of forced labor and human trafficking. Over time, Virginia transformed that system into hereditary racial slavery, an institution that profoundly affected American economics, politics, society, and culture.

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