1619: The Year The Troubles Began

 On August 20 1619 America’s original sin took place. The English privateer White Lion arrived at Point Comfort, Virginia with a cargo of 30 Africans.

These men and women were stolen from a Portuguese ship by the privateers and then when they landed in Virginia the Africans were traded primarily for goods. They went into immediate indentured servitude.

A few days later the White Lion’s companion ship the Treasurer did the same. The first Africans were sold for food as Virginia Governor George Yeardly and his head of trade Abraham Piersey made the deal. 

This initial group of Africans were part of a group of 50,000 war prisoners from the Kingdom of Portuguese’s war with the African Kingdom of Ndongo in what is modern Angola. The Portuguese had already begun using these captured Africans as slaves in their territories in the Americas

These Africans were not the first in what would become the US but they were the first to be used by the English and northern European settlers that would form the majority of Americans. There were Spanish slaves in Florida. 

From this point forward things began to snowball and by 1661 Virginia set the standard for African chattel slavery. In 1661 the laws stated a free white man can own Negro slaves and that a child born to a woman is also a slave.