American Slavery, American State: Rethinking Slavery and the Creation of British North America

The 400^th anniversary of the year 1619 in the Virginia colony has given the public and professional historians an opportunity to reflect on the importance of that year: the development of the Virginia House of Burgesses, the first elected legislative body in the British American colonies; and the arrival of 20 Angolans for sale, stolen for slavery by the Portuguese on their slave ship San Juan Bautista before English privateers stole them in an attack in the Gulf of Mexico and brought them to Point Comfort, Virginia on the White Lion. Another privateer ship arrived a few days later, the Treasurer, which likely sold an additional 7–9 Angolans to English settlers. By March 1620, Virginia records indicate at least 32 Africans lived in the colony.

It is this latter event that has become a point of serious inquiry and debate for historians of the American South and the Atlantic World. In August 2019, The New York Times magazine published the 1619 Project, a series of essays exploring the legacy of slavery accompanied by a special section in the Sunday edition of the paper along with an essay in the Sports section and plans for a 1619 Project Curriculum for classroom use. Public and scholarly response to this project is ongoing but many historians of Early America counter that we must not obfuscate the years of settlement and slavery that preceded the Jamestown endeavor. In a February 2019 public interview, Virginia governor Ralph Northam parroted an older historical viewpoint, that the Angolans who arrived in 1619 were indentured servants and not slaves. Historians, most notably Rebecca Goetz of NYU, responded immediately on social media to challenge his claims with a series of posts on the long history of the study of slavery and how Northam's position represents an antiquated viewpoint that is not only wrong but represents an attempt to maintain Virginian innocence while ignoring the facts of slavery.¹ The lack of laws regarding slavery present in 1619 has posed an issue for scholars of the British Atlantic, however in recent decades many have rightfully turned to the greater Atlantic world to consider the influence of the Spanish and French colonies on British aspirations and to chip away at Anglocentric notions that the Virginia colony was the first time Africans were present in an English colony, or that the English settlers were not already inheritors of the Atlantic slave trade via the four slave-trading expeditions of John Hawkins in the 1560s. Interested scholars should consult Michael Guasco's Slaves and Englishmen (2014) and a 2017 article written for the Smithsonian Magazine. Goetz has rightfully pointed out that the Africans-as-servants narrative is "no longer tenable" once serious inquiries into the greater Atlantic world are considered. Scholars such as Guasco have proven that the specter and presence of African slavery were already present in the English Atlantic by the time that English colonists arrived in the South at Roanoke. Thus, English colonists likely brought beliefs about Africans' place as slaves and as inferior to Europeans with them as they settled Jamestown.

Another point to consider about 1619 is that the English settlement and occupation of Tsenacommacah was by no means certain. Framing the events of democracy in 1619 as a step in the inevitable has been argued against by Guasco: "When we make the mistake of fixing this place in time as inherently or inevitably English, we prepare the ground for the assumption that the United States already existed in embryonic fashion." By not challenging that idea, Guasco argues that it is an insidious logic, that "reinforces the illusion of white permanence necessitates that blacks can only be, ipso facto, abnormal, impermanent, and only tolerable to the degree that they adapt themselves to someone else's fictional universe."²

James Horn's...