Chapter FIVE: The Coming of the Negro

A new element came early into the life of Virginia, with permanent and continuous hurt to the welfare of the colony and later to the Commonwealth; an element to which the colony was compelled to adapt itself because it did not have the power to eradicate it after men perceived its danger. It was the element of human slavery.

The first Negro captives were brought into the port of Jamestown in the year 1619. They were brought by a foreign ship then described as a "Dutch" ship, but presumably a Portuguese slaver seeking the enlargement of his market. The Portuguese had developed a market for Negro slaves in the Spanish colonies in the Caribbean where the enslaved Indians proved unable to perform the hard work demanded of them. Unhappily the slavers succeeded in widening their market to include Virginia and the other English colonies of the American continent and in the West Indies.

The first Negroes were brought to Jamestown in 1619 and sold to English masters as indentured servants. As such they were required to serve for a definite number of years and after that they would become freemen entitled to all the benefit of Virginia law. The goal set before them, as before immigrants from France and the Netherlands, was eventual freedom and naturalization as full citizens.

The tragedy of the Negro was that he had been procured by the Portuguese as a captive taken in war between the native Negro tribes, and he came into the life of Virginia utterly ignorant of every British ideal of human freedom and government under constitutional law. He knew nothing of the English language. The indentured Englishman or Scotsman who was sold into service came with inherited knowledge of Anglo-Saxon ideals of civil government and Christian faith; and the one great goal set before him was that he could become a legal citizen of Virginia after he completed his years of servitude. The Negro knew nothing of all this.

There would have been little difficulty if the few Negroes in the first ship had been all who came. The government could have provided for their care and for their instruction in English ideals and the Christian faith. But they were not all who came. The first indentured Negroes proved useful as hewers of wood and drawers of water, and they were capable of far more work in the fields than many of the Englishmen: and so the agrarian needs of the community where all men were farmers made the governmental authorities willing to admit more Negroes.

The authorities must have realized at once that if Negroes were brought into the colony in great number they could not be permitted to become freemen after any period of indenture. That would have brought into the life of Virginia a steadily growing population of men and women who knew nothing of English institutions, or of the English language, or of the Christian religion. The welfare of the colony required that if they were to be admitted at all, they could be admitted only as servants under a permanent status of servitude. So slavery was introduced into the British empire; and in America the enslavement of the Negro was permitted in New England as well as in Virginia, the Carolinas and in Georgia.

That was the first act in the great tragedy of Negro slavery in America. The second was that the enslavement and sale of Negroes proved so profitable that the people of England entered into it by chartering the Royal African Company, with authority to purchase captive Negroes throughout a large portion of Africa which was assigned to the Company for that purpose. At one time at least the King of England owned stock in the Company; and he gave his instruction to the royal Governors of American colonies that they should not permit the passage through a colonial legislature of any act which would interfere with the right to import Negroes and sell them into slavery within the colony.

The third act in the tragedy was that after Virginia and perhaps other colonies had made many unavailing efforts to check or forbid by legislation the bringing of more Negroes from Africa, the War of American Independence was fought and won. In the Constitutional Convention of the new sovereign states called to create a Federal Union of them all, the representatives of Virginia and other states fought bitterly for an immediate prohibition against further importation of Negro slaves, only to be defeated by the cotton-growing interests of some states and the shipping interests of others who demanded that the trade be continued for a period of years. And so the Constitution of the United States when first put into effect in the Federal Union permitted for twenty years the importation of captive Negroes from Africa and their sale into slavery.

The increase in the number of Negro slaves in those states where their labor proved profitable brought with it the constant fear of a Negro insurrection; a fear that continued until the ending of slavery in this country. The presence of the Negroes and of English convicts sold into servitude made it impossible upon any large plantation for the women and children of the master's household ever to be left without the protection of a slave-master who had the power of gun and lash to protect them from harm.

The preaching of the Christian faith to the heathen Indians, which was so strongly present in the purposes of the London Company at the first settlement of Virginia, must have been considered when the custom of admitting Negro slaves began but there is no recorded evidence bearing upon that subject. If there had been a bishop in the colony he could have made the conversion of the Negro to Christianity an important part of a diocesan program; but without a bishop nothing could be done in an organized way. The matter was perforce left to the consciences of the incumbent ministers of the several parishes.

It must be remembered that every first generation of the slaves had come to America as captives taken in war of one tribe against another. Their languages and dialects included perhaps every language in central and southern Africa; and their unfamiliar languages made it almost impossible for the average citizen or his parson to do much in the way of preaching the Christian faith; except perhaps in the observance of the universal law of kindness.

The birth of slave children, however, removed the barrier of language, for the children were taught English as their native tongue. The children therefore could be taught. All teaching of children, whether children of the master and mistress or those born as their slaves, was considered the duty of the whole family. And the teaching of the catechism and the duties of a Christian life to the slave children was as important a part of the family responsibility in a Christian home as the teaching of the children of the family itself. No clergyman of the Church would be willing to baptize a slave child unless there were responsible sponsors present who would assume the obligation to give steady Christian teaching. So it became a rule of the clergy, or most of them, that the master and mistress in the case of each such baptism must assume the obligation to give the child Christian training. The baptized children could then in early youth be permitted to attend the instruction classes which were held by the incumbent minister for them. The slave child and the master's child would share the privilege of admission to the Sacrament of the Holy Communion when each one had shown sufficient knowledge and understanding of right and wrong, and had been sufficiently instructed in "the things which a Christian should know and believe." No one knows how many or what percentage of slave children in Virginia or elsewhere were baptized, or how many became communicants because no record was kept. But there were enough baptisms to create a new problem.

There was no Negro slavery in England, and it was generally understood that when a Negro slave set foot upon the soil of England he became a free man. Somehow that concept of freedom became linked in common thinking with the concept of baptism into the Christian faith; and there arose in practically every slave-holding section of the English colonies a question whether the very act of baptizing a slave child did not set him free from slavery. Because of that question many slave-owners declined to permit the baptism of their slaves until the question was settled, and consequently in every slave-owning colony it became necessary to secure a legislative enactment establishing the legal status of a baptized slave. The question arose in Virginia, and in 1667 the following act was adopted by the General Assembly:

Whereas some doubts have risen whether children that are
slaves by birth, and by the charity and piety of their owners
made partakers of the blessed sacrament of baptisme, should
by virtue of their baptisme be made free; _It is enacted and
declared by this Grand Assembly and the authority thereof_,
that the conferring of baptisme doth not alter the condition
of the person as to his bondage or freedom; that diverse
masters, freed from this doubt, may more carefully endeavour
the propagation of Christianity by permitting children,
though slaves, or those of greater growth if capable to be
admitted to that sacrament.

The question was settled likewise throughout all the slave-holding colonies of England, and human slavery was written into the laws of the various colonies of the British empire, there to remain until the ideals of the nineteenth century eliminated it from the constitution and the laws of every English-speaking nation.

The following incidents, although they occurred in the first half of the eighteenth century, outside the period covered by this booklet, are yet of such interest in the continuing story of Negro slavery as to be worth recording here.

In 1724 the Bishop of London, Edmund Gibson, sent a questionary to the incumbent minister of every Anglican parish in the American colonies. Among the questions he asked were two; one inquiring how many "infidels," either Indians or Negroes, there were in each parish; and two, what efforts were being made to convert them to the Christian faith. The answers revealed a serious situation, and the need of more definite and better organized efforts to convert the Negroes.

The first effort made by the Bishop of London was as strong a pastoral letter as he could write upon the need of more earnest effort to bring the Negro slaves into the Christian faith. He also prepared a pamphlet to be used for the instruction of Negroes. His pastoral letter and his pamphlet were sent to every incumbent minister, and copies were given to the heads of families.

Another effort was the organization in England in 1723 by the Rev. Thomas Bray of a company called "Dr. Bray's Associates." Dr. Thomas Bray was the bishop's commissary to the province of Maryland. The purpose of Dr. Bray's Associates was to establish in the colonies schools for the education and Christian instruction of Negro children, and it did a useful work. It did a notable work in the City of New York, and it conducted schools in other places; one of them at Williamsburg, in Virginia.

There was another and most unusual development in Virginia. Under the urge of the Bishop of London's pastoral letter there came a great increase in the number of baptisms of adult Negroes; so sudden an increase as to cause concern to Commissary Blair and to Governor Gooch. In some way a report had spread among the Negroes that ex-Governor Alexander Spotswood, upon his return from a voyage to England, had brought with him an order from the King directing that all baptized Negro slaves be set free. The story, improbable as it was to English ears, was believed implicitly by the Negroes and it brought many of them to their parish clergy seeking for baptism. Time passed and there was no movement to set the baptized Negroes free. They became indignant, for they believed the colonial authorities had ignored the King's order. A plot for a Negro uprising was formed; but the plot was discovered and the ringleaders were punished.

Another incident occurred two years later. A woman slave who had been baptized was convicted of manslaughter in the Gloucester County Court which sentenced her to death. She thereupon plead the benefit of clergy. Her plea brought a new problem to the courts of Virginia for until that time no woman and no slave in the colony had ever been permitted to plead benefit of clergy. The County Court considered the plea and the vote was a tie between granting the plea and enforcement of the sentence. The County Court referred the matter to the General Court of the colony; and there again the vote resulted in a tie. The General Court therefore referred the case to the Attorney General of England. Meanwhile, the General Court ordered that the woman's plea be granted, and, in order not to set a precedent in an unsettled question, directed that she be sold out of the colony. At a subsequent meeting of the General Assembly the matter was settled so far as Virginia was concerned by enactment of a law that all persons convicted of a first offense of felony, whether male or female, bond or free, might plead benefit of clergy.

Slavery existed in the American colonies from Massachusetts and Connecticut to Virginia and the Carolinas at the end of the seventeenth century. It was alien to English ideals of human freedom. Yet out of it all one tremendously important fact has come to pass. The Negro came to America from almost every Negro tribe and dialect in central and southern Africa; he came without any connection except his connection with other slaves when more than one were sold to the same master. He came into a highly developed civilization with great organized power of leadership and government; and through the generations of slavery the Negro in America wrought for himself a national and racial consciousness within the sphere of American life. The American Negro today is the most highly educated and the most advanced Negro in the world. As such he has the opportunity to make his own contribution to the culture and the civilization of the world. This their centuries of slavery and repression have brought them.