On or around August 20th, 1619, four hundred years ago today, the privateer White Lion made landfall at Point Comfort, Virginia. Short on supplies, the privateer’s crew was eager to sell its cargo for food.
The cargo for sale was “20, and odd Negroes” captured from the slave ship, San Juan Bautista. A second privateer, the Treasurer, docked at Port Comfort a few days later and sold another 20 to 30 Africans also captured from the same ship.
Africans had been in the colonies for decades prior, primarily as indentured servants. Nevertheless, the arrival of Africans to be sold as chattel began the inexorable descent towards wholesale slavery. Like a plague arriving from the sea, slavery arrived in America in 1619 and still influences our nation to this day.
Slavery was already here with the Native American tribes.
Native American slavery was not chattel slavery. In most tribes, children were not born as slaves.
More on slave from The New York Times, Aug 19, 2019
With photos.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/19/magazine/history-slavery-smithsonian.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab
In the above article:
Though people of African descent — free and enslaved — were present in North America as early as the 1500s, the sale of the “20 and odd” African people set the course for what would become slavery in the United States.