Were the “20. and Odd Negroes” Slaves or Indentured Servants?

In an interview with Gayle King of CBS News, Virginia Governor Ralph Northam referred to the first enslaved Africans to Virginia in 1619 as “indentured servants.”

Blogger Kevin Levin has a short post on Northam’s comment here.  A taste:

At the outset of the interview the governor references the 400th anniversary of the first enslaved Africans to Virginia’s shores in 1619, only he chose to refer to these slaves as indentured servants. King quickly responded by correcting the governor that he meant to say slavery. My social media streams quickly lit up with reactions to the oversight.

They included some people who suggested that the governor was correct in referring to the first Africans as indentured servants. They noted that a system of African slavery took time to evolve as the primary form of labor in colonial Virginia. This is true. Historians such as Ira Berlin have shown that for much of the seventeenth century African slaves worked side by side Native Americans and even white indentured servants. It was even possible for a small number of Africans to gain their freedom.

The larger question, however, of how Virginia went from – in the words of historian Edmund Morgan, ‘a society with slaves’ to a ‘slave society’ – is separate from the status of the Africans who arrived in 1619. Earlier today historian Rebecca Ann Goetz clarified this question with a twitter thread clarifying that these Africans were indeed slaves.

Read the entire post here.

Rebecca Goetz‘s tweet thread is worth reading.  She is a history professor at New York University and the author of The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race.  Here it is:

Every time I think I’m done with Virginia history, I get dragged back in. But here’s why Northam referring to the “20. and Odd Negroes” of 1619 is so problematic: An historiographical thread. 1/

— Doctor Historianess (@historianess) February 10, 2019

The idea that the first Africans in Virginia might have been indentured servants goes back a long ways. Oscar and Mary Handlin wrote an article about this in 1950. 2/

— Doctor Historianess (@historianess) February 10, 2019

Part of what the Handlins were wrestling with was the early absence of laws about slavery and what constituted slave status. This is a problem for historians of Virginia and of the early English Caribbean as well. 3/

— Doctor Historianess (@historianess) February 10, 2019

It’s a chicken and egg problem: do laws enshrine practices that are already custom, or are laws aspirational, attempting to create the slaveholding world that wealthy Virginians wanted? 4/

— Doctor Historianess (@historianess) February 10, 2019

So you can see why some historians took both the absence of positive law regarding enslaved people and the fact that a few Africans did become free and set up their own households and made arguments about fluidity of status in the very early part of the 1600s. 5/

— Doctor Historianess (@historianess) February 10, 2019

Edmund Morgan did this to an extent too in his 1975 American Slavery, American Freedom. Drake, Raleigh, and others saw enslaved people in SPanish territories and maroons as potential allies. 6/

— Doctor Historianess (@historianess) February 10, 2019

Then in the 1970s and 1980s there was a big (and justified) push to see agency for enslaved people. In VA this took the form of a lot of curiosity about those early free blacks. So Breen and Innes’s book Myne Owne Ground, about the JOhnson, Driggus, Payne, & other families… 7/

— Doctor Historianess (@historianess) February 10, 2019

It’s fascinating, the small cadre of interrelated free black families on the eastern shore. The problem is historians started to make these families typical. They weren’t. They were Exceptional. 8/

— Doctor Historianess (@historianess) February 10, 2019

There’s a reason they settled on the eastern shore, well away from most of the great tobacco grandees around Jamestown. They were looking to get away. And, ultimately, their efforts were unsuccessful. 9/

— Doctor Historianess (@historianess) February 10, 2019

The Johnsons eventually had to flee to Maryland. Emanuel Driggus might even have been reenslaved by the end of his life (mid-1670s) though the evidence is ambiguous. 10/

— Doctor Historianess (@historianess) February 10, 2019

The narrative of early fluidity and of the free blacks of the eastern shore has combined into a popular narrative of English/white innocence abt slavery. The English didn’t really know what they were doing. That slavery in this period was easily escapeable & not a big deal. 11/

— Doctor Historianess (@historianess) February 10, 2019

Of course there are plenty of historians (and plenty of historical evidence) countering that kind of position. Winthrop Jordan and his unthinking decision (1968). Mike Guasco’s Slaves and Englishmen (2014) really destroys that mythology. 12/

— Doctor Historianess (@historianess) February 10, 2019

Guasco showed that the English knew A LOT about slavery when they ventured into the Atlantic. They wanted enslaved people in Virginia, the Caribbean, and elsewhere. There was no assumption of indentured servitude for Africans in 1619 in VA. 13/

— Doctor Historianess (@historianess) February 10, 2019

Though some Africans were able to come to private arrangements with slaveholders early on, those arrangements became less and less possible QUITE QUICKLY. 14/

— Doctor Historianess (@historianess) February 10, 2019

John Coombs has done quite a bit of work on this, hopefully his book will be out soon. Another book on this Ibram Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning. 15/

— Doctor Historianess (@historianess) February 10, 2019

While mid-twentieth-century historians were wrestling in good faith with the question of legal status of early Africans in the English Atlantic, there has been so much work done since then. The Africans-as-servants narrative is no longer tenable. 16/

— Doctor Historianess (@historianess) February 10, 2019

The “20. and Odd Negroes” of 1619 were not intended to be servants. (See both Sluiter and Thornton on this in the WMQ.) 17/

— Doctor Historianess (@historianess) February 10, 2019

When Northam said this morning that those people were servants, he was not engaging an earlier historiography. He was engaging a narrative of white innocence, of Virginian innocence, a narrative that slavery wasn’t that bad. 18/

— Doctor Historianess (@historianess) February 10, 2019

When Northam said this morning that those people were servants, he was not engaging an earlier historiography. He was engaging a narrative of white innocence, of Virginian innocence, a narrative that slavery wasn’t that bad. 18/

— Doctor Historianess (@historianess) February 10, 2019

Northam joins a long line of people who want to maintain white innocence about race and slavery by equating slavery and indentured servitude. That’s a bad idea, esp since this year white Virginians has an opportunity to honestly confront a pretty horrifying past. 19/

— Doctor Historianess (@historianess) February 10, 2019

TL;DR: the Africans who arrived in Virginia in 1619 were not indentured servants. Saying they were deliberately effaces the long and violent history of slavery in Virginia and elsewhere. fin/

— Doctor Historianess (@historianess) February 10, 2019

Addendum from reader Matt Gottlieb:

While I appreciate the post, the Virginia Department of Historic Resources retired this sign and put in a replacement in 2015. The updated marker includes newer research that emerged since the original’s 1992 installation. An image of it may be seen here: https://www.latimes.com/dp-pictures-african-landing-day-commemorated-on-fort-monroe-20150820-photogallery.html

Please contact me if you have any questions. Physical markers, to borrow the cliche on political polling, are snapshots in time.