Historical marker showing the site where first African slaves landed in America
Near the end of August, 1619, the first African slaves were brought to the English settlement of Jamestown in what would become the state of Virginia. For the next 256 years slavery would be legal in all or parts of the American colonies and later the United States. In 1776, in one of the “founding documents” of America, Thomas Jefferson wrote in part that “all men are created equal”. At that time Jefferson was a slave owner. And in 1788 New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify the new Constitution of the United States, a document which counted Black slaves as worth three-fifths the value of free White people.
It’s certainly no secret that racism is a huge problem in America. In spite of the 13th & 15th Amendments, Civil Rights legislation, Voting Rights legislation and numerous other federal, state and local laws, Black Americans continue to be denied the rights and privileges that White Americans take for granted. In many Liberal and Progressive circles it has become fashionable to blame the problem on the most recent former occupant of the Oval Office and his band of followers. This is as far from the truth as the length of American history makes possible.
Back to Jamestown, 1619. The 20 or so Africans that became the colonies’ first slaves were traded by two English privateer ships in exchange for food and other supplies. Only a few names have survived in history down through the 400 years to the present day. But we know that those men and women weren’t freed by the Jamestown colonists. Those 20 Africans, victims of a Spanish war on the other side of the globe, were the “founders” of that “peculiar institution” that would eventually lead to Civil War, slave freedom, Jim Crow, right down to the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in 2020.
Philadelphia, 1776. Thomas Jefferson, a young and emerging delegate to the 2nd Continental Congress from Virginia, was tasked with drafting a document which would delineate the colonial justification for declaring independence from King George III and Great Britain. In his original draft, Jefferson included a paragraph that condemned slavery. Even though he owned slaves himself, Jefferson was driven by the principles of the Enlightenment and fundamentally opposed slavery. Since Jefferson’s assignment was to lay out a set of grievances against the British monarch, he tied slavery to George III. Jefferson wrote:
“He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.”
During the process of debate and revision, the anti-slavery paragraph was removed. The 13 colonies were already deeply divided on the issue of slavery, both the South and the North had financial stakes in perpetuating it. Southern plantations, a key engine of the colonial economy, needed free labor to produce tobacco, cotton and other cash crops for export back to Europe. Northern shipping merchants, who also played a role in that economy, remained dependent on the triangle trade between Europe, Africa and the Americas that included the traffic in enslaved Africans. Removing Jefferson's condemnation of slavery would prove the most significant deletion from the Declaration of Independence. The founders’ failure to directly address the question of slavery exposed the hollowness of the words “all men created equal.”
Philadelphia, 1787. Eight years of war had gained independence for the new United States of America. Addressing the need to move beyond the loose Confederation of the former colonies, delegates from the 13 states gathered to draft a formal Constitution. At the Constitutional Convention, the founders were in the process of forming a union. Delegates agreed that the representation each state received in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College would be based on population, but the issue of slavery was a sticking point between the South and the North. It benefited Southern states to include enslaved people in their population counts, as that calculation would give them more seats in the House of Representatives and thus more political power. Delegates from Northern states, however, objected on the grounds that enslaved people could not vote, own property, or take advantage of the privileges that White men enjoyed. While some of the delegates were opposed to slavery, none were willing to call for outright abolition. Instead, a compromise was forged whereby slaves would be counted as three-fifths of a person. The following year, the Constitution would be fully ratified and become the law of the land.
Three times, Jamestown 1619, Philadelphia 1776 and again in 1787, America was presented with the direct opportunity to either prevent or abolish slavery. At no point did they take advantage of these opportunities.
It is my firm belief that every issue connected to racism became possible because this country was founded with slavery as an intact institution. From the moral abdication by the men who founded the country, to the violent upheavals in the 19th century that resulted in catastrophic Civil War, to oppressive Jim Crow laws that continued into the second half of the 20th century, right up to the present day, America’s “Original Sin” has been it’s refusal to believe Jefferson’s stirring rhetoric that “all men are created equal” regardless of the color of their skin. 1619, 1776 and 1787 murdered Breonna Taylor and George Floyd every bit as much as the cops who fired the shots or knelt on a neck. We were born a racist country. We have yet to see much change from the condition of our birth.
