First Enslaved Africans Arrive in Virginia, Beginning Atlantic Slave Trade in British North America

The English privateer ship White Lion arrives at Point Comfort in Hampton, Virginia in late August carrying “twenty and odd” captive Africans originally from modern-day Angola. According to a letter by colony secretary John Rolfe, Governor Sir George Yeardley and head merchant Abraham Peirsey purchase the Africans “for victualles…at the best and easyest rate they could.” These individuals had been captured in Portuguese wars against the Kongo and Ndongo kingdoms, placed on the slave ship San Juan Bautista bound for Vera Cruz with 350 captives, then seized by English privateers White Lion and Treasurer in the Gulf of Mexico. A few days later the Treasurer arrives and sells an additional 7-9 Africans including a woman named Angela who is purchased by Captain William Pierce, making her the earliest historically documented enslaved African in the colony.

The arrival marks the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade in British North America and initiates a gradual transformation in labor systems that will evolve into chattel slavery over subsequent decades. Unlike the hereditary racial slavery that will develop by the late 1600s, these first Africans are initially treated more like indentured servants, with several gaining freedom after approximately seven years of labor. By March 1620, 32 Africans are recorded in Virginia, though only 23 remain documented by 1625. The system at this stage remains fluid: some of these early Africans eventually gain freedom, acquire land, and even own indentured servants themselves. However, this initial ambiguity regarding legal status will be systematically eliminated through subsequent legislation that transforms African servitude from a potentially temporary condition into permanent, inheritable bondage based on race.

The 1619 landing establishes the foundation for institutional corruption on a massive scale: an economic system dependent on forced labor that will corrupt democratic governance, legal frameworks, and constitutional development for over two centuries. As the slave population grows from virtually nothing in 1619 to over four million by 1860, the institution infiltrates every aspect of American political economy. Slaveholding interests will capture federal institutions through mechanisms like the Three-Fifths Compromise, the Fugitive Slave Clause, and systematic overrepresentation in Congress and the Electoral College. The labor of enslaved people generates enormous wealth concentrated in planter elites while distorting free labor markets, suppressing wages for poor whites, and preventing broad-based economic development. The corruption is foundational: slavery does not simply coexist with American democracy but actively shapes and deforms its institutions from the beginning, creating power structures designed to protect human bondage regardless of moral considerations or majority opposition.