When were the first slaves taken from africa

Over the period of the Atlantic Slave Trade, from approximately 1526 to 1867, some 12.5 million captured men, women, and children were put on ships in Africa, and 10.7 million arrived in the Americas. The Atlantic Slave Trade was likely the most costly in human life of all long-distance global migrations.

The first Africans forced to work in the New World left from Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century, not from Africa. The first voyage carrying enslaved people direct from Africa to the Americas probably sailed in 1526.

The number of people carried off from Africa reached 30,000 per year in the 1690s and 85,000 per year a century later. More than eight out of ten Africans forced into the slave trade crossed the Atlantic between 1700 and 1850. The decade 1821 to 1830 saw more than 80,000 people a year leaving Africa in slave ships. Well over a million more—one-tenth of those carried off in the slave trade era—followed within the next twenty years.

By 1820, nearly four Africans for every one European had crossed the Atlantic; about four out of every five women who crossed the Atlantic were from Africa.

The majority of enslaved Africans brought to British North America arrived between 1720 and 1780.

Africans carried to Brazil came overwhelmingly from Angola. Africans carried to North America, including the Caribbean, left mainly from West Africa.

Well over 90 percent of enslaved Africans were sent to the Caribbean and South America. Only about 6 percent of African captives were sent directly to British North America. Yet by 1825, the US population included about one-quarter of the people of African descent in the Western Hemisphere.

The Middle Passage was dangerous and horrific. The sexes were separated; men, women, and children were kept naked, packed close together; and the men were chained for long periods. About 12 percent of those who embarked did not survive the voyage.

US SLAVERY COMPARED TO SLAVERY IN THE AMERICAS

Plantations in the United States were dwarfed by those in the West Indies. In the Caribbean, many plantations held 150 enslaved persons or more. In the American South, only one slaveholder held as many as a thousand enslaved persons, and just 125 had over 250 enslaved persons.

In the Caribbean, Dutch Guiana, and Brazil, the enslaved death rate was so high and the birth rate so low that they could not sustain their population without importations from Africa. Rates of natural decrease ran as high as 5 percent a year. While the death rate of the US enslaved population was about the same as that of Jamaican enslaved persons, the birth rate was more than 80 percent higher in the United States.

In the United States enslaved persons were more generations removed from Africa than those in the Caribbean. In the nineteenth century, the majority of enslaved in the British Caribbean and Brazil were born in Africa. In contrast, by 1850, most US enslaved persons were third-, fourth-, or fifth-generation Americans.

Slavery in the US was distinctive in the near balance of the sexes and the ability of the enslaved population to increase its numbers by natural reproduction. Unlike any other enslaved society, the US had a high and sustained natural increase in the enslaved population for a more than a century and a half.

CHILDREN

There were few instances in which enslaved women were released from field work for extended periods during slavery. Even during the last week before childbirth, pregnant women on average picked three-quarters or more of the amount normal for women.

Infant and child mortality rates were twice as high among enslaved children as among southern White children. Half of all enslaved infants died in their first year of life. A major contributor to the high infant and child death rate was chronic undernourishment.

The average birth weight of enslaved infants was less than 5.5 pounds, considered severely underweight by today’s standards.

Most infants of enslaved mothers were weaned within three or four months. Even in the eighteenth century, the earliest weaning age advised by doctors was eight months.

After weaning, enslaved infants were fed a starch-based diet, consisting of foods such as gruel, which lacked sufficient nutrients for health and growth.

HEALTH AND MORTALITY

Enslaved persons suffered a variety of miserable and often fatal maladies due to the Atlantic Slave Trade, and to inhumane living and working conditions.

Common symptoms among enslaved populations included blindness, abdominal swelling, bowed legs, skin lesions, and convulsions. Common conditions among enslaved populations included beriberi (caused by a deficiency of thiamine), pellagra (caused by a niacin deficiency), tetany (caused by deficiencies of calcium, magnesium, and Vitamin D), rickets (also caused by a deficiency of Vitamin D), and kwashiorkor (caused by severe protein deficiency).

Diarrhea, dysentery, whooping cough, and respiratory diseases as well as worms pushed the infant and early childhood death rate of enslaved children to twice that experienced by White infants and children.

DOMESTIC SLAVE TRADE

The domestic slave trade in the US distributed the African American population throughout the South in a migration that greatly surpassed the Atlantic Slave Trade to North America.

Though Congress outlawed the African slave trade in 1808, domestic slave trade flourished, and the enslaved population in the US nearly tripled over the next fifty years.

The domestic trade continued into the 1860s and displaced approximately 1.2 million men, women, and children, the vast majority of whom were born in America.

To be “sold down the river” was one of the most dreaded prospects of the enslaved population. Some destinations, particularly the Louisiana sugar plantations, had especially grim reputations. But it was the destruction of family that made the domestic slave trade so terrifying.

PROFITABILITY

Prices of enslaved persons varied widely over time, due to factors including supply and changes in prices of commodities such as cotton. Even considering the relative expense of owning and keeping an enslaved person, slavery was profitable.

In order to ensure the profitability of enslavement and to produce maximum “return on investment,” slaveholders generally supplied only the minimum food and shelter needed for survival, and forced their enslaved persons to work from sunrise to sunset.

Although young adult men had the highest expected levels of output, young adult women had value over and above their ability to work in the fields; they were able to have children who by law were also enslaved by the owner of the mother. Therefore, the average price of enslaved females was higher than their male counterparts up to puberty age. Men around the age of 25 were the most “valuable.”

Slaveholding became more concentrated over time, particularly as slavery was abolished in the northern states. The fraction of households owning enslaved persons fell from 36 percent in 1830 to 25 percent in 1860.

During the Civil War, roughly 180,000 Black men served in the Union Army, and another 29,000 served in the Navy. Three-fifths of all Black troops were formerly enslaved.

WORKS CITED AND RESOURCES

University of Virginia, American Slave Narratives

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, Emory University

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African (1789)

Special thanks to Steven Mintz, University of Texas at Austin

In late August 1619, “20 and odd” captive Africans first touched the soil at Point Comfort (now Fort Monroe National Monument), part of England’s new colony in Virginia. These men and women had been stolen from their homes in Africa, forced to board a ship, and sailed for months into the unknown. The first Africans in an English colony, their arrival is considered by many historians to be the beginning of a 400-year story filled with tragedy, endurance, survival, and a legacy of resilience, inequality, and oppression.

These first Africans in Virginia were not the first Africans in North America, but they were a significant part of the ever changing Atlantic world during the colonial era. Their travels and experiences represent those of more than 12.5 million other captives, who were taken from Africa to be sold in the Americas during the five centuries of the transatlantic slave trade. Their story marks an important historical transition, as the North American colonies began to turn away from indentured servitude and instead rely on chattel slavery. (See also: It was America's first colony. Then it was gone.)

Slavery in Africa

On the west coast of central Africa in the 1600s, the Portuguese were in the midst of a war with Ndongo, a powerful west African kingdom located between the Lukala and Kwanza rivers, in present-day Angola. The people of Ndongo lived in developed cities and towns surrounding their capital city, Kabasa. The capital was where royalty lived, along with approximately 50,000 citizens. In 1618, Portuguese forces aligned with Ndongo’s adversaries, neighboring Imbangala mercenaries, to invade the kingdom. They captured thousands of prisoners to sell into slavery.

These political relationships were spawned 135 years earlier. In 1483, the Portuguese first forged a relationship with the Kingdom of Kongo. Portuguese explorers aimed to spread Catholicism in Africa, colonize both people and land, and grow rich. Upon developing a trade deal with the Portuguese, the Kongo King Nkuwu converted to Catholicism. After his death, his son and heir, King Nzinga Mbemba, took the name King Afonso I and declared the kingdom a Catholic state, firmly bonding the two nations.

Queen Nzinga, armed with a bow and arrow, leads a military band in this illustration created by Italian missionaries in the mid-1600s.

Queen Ana Nzinga was born in 1583, and in 1624, at the age of 42, she became the Queen of Ndongo, just five years after the Angolans arrived in Virginia. Her reign came amidst the ongoing war between the Portuguese, and her people of Ndongo. She attempted to shift the political partnership between the states, offering herself as a convert to Catholicism in return for the termination of slave raids that were devastating her people. Portugal’s colonial Governor agreed, and acted as her godfather for the conversion. Queen Nzinga maintained a strong political relationship with the Portuguese for two years, but in 1626 they betrayed her and began taking Ndongo captives again. As a result, she established a nearby state, Matamba, which acted as a refuge for victims of the trade, meanwhile ordering her militia to attack the Portuguese who had taken over her former state of Ndongo. Queen Nzinga ruled until her death at the age of 81.

In 1512, Afonso I negotiated an agreement with the Portuguese giving them rights to land and direct access to Kongo’s prisoners of war, who would be sold into the transatlantic slave trade. This arrangement provided a model that other European nations and western and central African kingdoms would follow for centuries afterward. (See also: Tracing slaves to their African homelands.)

The first people sold were mostly prisoners of war. African kingdoms were often in conflict, at times absorbing smaller nations or kinship groups into themselves. The vast ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity in these kingdoms allowed for easily identifiable differences among groups, making it easier for kingdoms to sell their enemies in exchange for weapons and goods to expand and protect their territories. Grand empires, such as the Kongo, Dahomey, Yoruba, Benin, and Asante, were vying for wealth and power in their regions, and Europeans were in need of laborers to build their colonies. It was the ideal circumstance to bring about the largest forced migration in human history.

Painted in 1599, Don Francisco de Arobe (center) was a political leader of a robust enclave of former slaves and allied indigenous people in Ecuador’s coastal Esmeraldas region. Richly attired, both his and his sons' apparel blend Spanish and South American styles.

By 1619, the transatlantic slave trade had been in existance for more than 100 years. As early as 1501, both Portugal and Spain began building up their young colonies in Brazil and Uruguay through slave labor. Other European colonizers soon followed; Great Britain in the 1550s, France in the 1570s, the Netherlands in the 1590s, and Denmark in the 1640s. In the 1500s, the Spanish were the first to bring enslaved Africans to North America as part of their colonization efforts in Florida and the Carolinas. By 1620, close to 520,000 captured and enslaved African men, women, and children had already been sold into chattel slavery by several European nations. The Spanish and Portuguese colonies alone accounted for approximately 475,000 enslaved people.

In just two years, 1618 and 1619, the Portuguese-Imbangala alliance resulted in the capture and enslavement of thousands of Ndongo people, filling at least 36 ships with human cargo. These captives would be sent to the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in Central and South America to work as laborers. It was through this arrangement that slavery would spread to British North America in 1619, when chaos intervened and the destiny of those “20 and odd” Africans was redirected to a place called the Colony of Virginia on the Atlantic coast.

They entered the Middle Passage, a phrase used to describe both the trip itself and the shipping of people from the coasts of Africa to the European colonies in the Americas. Conditions aboard the ships were dreadful; a lack of food and water, physical abuse, and severe overcrowding led to the death of approximately 30 percent of the captives on any given ship. To survive the Middle Passage was a feat in itself: Hundreds of ships sank, small-and large-scale revolts broke out, and disease and starvation were widespread. The San Juan Bautista was no exception, as sickness took hold aboard the vessel. Of the 350 captured and enslaved African men, women, and children, roughly 150 died on the journey west.

In addition to the trauma of widespread death on the San Juan Bautista, the crew was also concerned about English privateers, who were assigned to take any goods aboard Spanish and Portuguese ships. By this period, both Spain and Portugal had colonized much of the Americas, and the British were in fierce competition for both land and power in the so-called New World. In previous decades, Englishmen such as Sirs Humphrey Gilbert, Richard Grenville, John Hawkins, Walter Raleigh, and Francis Drake were sent by Queen Elizabeth I to the Atlantic and Caribbean, where they attacked and seized goods from Spanish ships and colonies.

It was because of this complex political climate that the Africans aboard the San Juan Bautista found themselves in an unexpected turn of events. In late July or early August 1619, just weeks before the Ndongo captives would have been sold through the port of Veracruz, the ship was attacked by pirates searching for Spanish gold.

Rosemary P. Wardley, NG Staff; Scott Elder. Art: Dave Stevenson

The White Lion, commanded by Cornish man John Jope, and the Treasurer, owned by Sir Robert Rich, the Earl of Warwick, and led by Captain Daniel Elfrith, were assigned the duty of intercepting and seizing Spanish goods in the Atlantic. The English wanted these privateers to slow down Spanish settlement and empowered them to attack Spanish ships. This particular encounter, in the bay of Campeche, left all three ships damaged, and the English pirates stole approximately 50 Africans as part of their overall booty.

After the battle, the San Juan Bautista continued to Veracruz, where 147 surviving enslaved Africans would be sold. The Treasurer and White Lion left the battle and sailed toward the eastern Caribbean. The 50 Angolans on board the two ships had lived through the Middle Passage from Luanda to the Gulf of Mexico. They had witnessed death and endured despair and violence, and had survived it all—including an attack by pirates.

Arrival in Virginia

The English pirates split the captive Africans into two groups between their ships. Both vessels sailed toward the British Colony of Virginia, which was established in 1607. The White Lion arrived first, landing at Point Comfort, in present-day Hampton, Virginia. English colonist John Rolfe recorded the event:

...a Dutchman of Warr of the burden of a 160 tunnes arrived at Point Comfort, the Commandors name Capt. Jope. He brought not any thing but 20. And odd Negroes, w[hich] the Governo[r] and Cape Merchant bought for victuals.

His clinical summation is the only documentation of the event and falls short of capturing any details of that day in late August 1619 as “20 and odd” Africans placed their feet on the soil of new continent. As they stood together as the first Africans in British North America, no one recorded their reactions or opinions about leaving their homes in Angola. Their perspective was lost in time.

The second ship, the Treasurer, arrived a few days later for a quick trade at nearby Kicotan (now Hampton), Virginia, but quickly departed for Bermuda. They traded their remaining goods and sold the rest of the Africans upon their arrival. The English colonies were expanding and the captives supplied them with an instant and distinguishable work force. The Spanish and Portuguese capture and enslavement of Africans as laborers in the Atlantic world was common practice by the time Jamestown was established, and the British followed suit. By the end of the 17th century, the colonies’ reliance on indentured servants had shifted toward that of enslaved African people. (See also: Jamestown colonists resorted to cannibalism.)

England had made several unsuccessful attempts to start a colony in North America before founding Jamestown in 1607 along the banks of the river they named after King James I.

By 1619 the English were having realizing success in North America. Thirteen years earlier, the London-based Virginia Company had sent three ships, captained by Christopher Newport, to colonize the eastern coast of North America. On May 14, 1607, he and his all-male passengers landed near the James River, in an area ruled by the Powhatan. More settlers, including women, followed, and Jamestown became the first successful English settlement in the Americas. In July 1619, Virginia held the first gathering of the General Assembly, marking the formality of law in the young colony.

By March 1620, 32 Africans were documented living in Virginia; 15 men and 17 women. The first American-born African likely was either at Flowerdew Hundred Plantation or at Kicotan, both nearby settlements on the James River. In 1624, this small African population had shrunk to only 21, most likely from death due to illness, the 1622 Powhatan uprising, or because some were sold back into the Atlantic trade.

There is no record stating the official legal status of these first Africans in Virginia. There was already an established racial caste in the Portuguese and Spanish colonies, and it is fair to presume the English followed this custom. They most likely saw these Africans as something other than indentured servants, a status common for their poor white counterparts.

Early Virginia census records show that many Africans were never listed by name, just their “race,” and cited their appearance as starkly different from that of the colonists. This distinction marks the beginnings of a racial caste, formalized into Virginia law by the early 1650s, the enslaved status of African women was written into Virginia law as their children automatically inherited their status and were enslaved at birth, regardless of the father’s identity. This set up slavery as a permanent, hereditary condition. A series of laws, called slave codes, followed, each one cementing racism firmly in the DNA of the United States.

Culture clues

Historians know few details about the first “20 and odd” Africans in Virginia. It is assumed that they spoke forms of the Bantu language, either Kikongo, from the Kongo Kingdom, or Kimbundu, from the Ngongo empire. Their documented names are of Spanish origin and most likely were assigned to them during their time on the San Juan Bautista. A few of them, and some of those who followed shortly after in the early 1620s, left clues to their lives in Virginia’s courts and records. In 1624, court records show the testimony of “John Phillips” and the census lists “Anthony” and “Isabella” as living in Elizabeth City, and “Angelo (Angela)” at Jamestown. It is this brevity that keeps the details of their lives absent from most written records and hinders current understanding of their experiences.

Cowrie shells were valuable in many West African cultures and used as currency. When found at archaeological sites in the “New World,” they indicate an African presence.

A woman named Angela was one of the captured Angolans who arrived in Virginia on the Treasurer in 1619. She was listed as “Angelo” in the 1624 census, living in Lieutenant William Pierce’s home in Jamestown, along with three white indentured servants. Although her name sounds masculine, she is listed as a woman and referred to as both Angelo and Angela. She was born in Angola around 1600, and her name was likely changed by her enslavers. In 2017, archaeologists at Jamestown found at her site a cowrie shell, which likely held special signigicance to her. In West and central Africa, cowrie shells were used as currency, adornment, and in religious practices.

Some of the English colonists might have failed to see the ethnic and religious diversity among their captives. But many slavers sought out particular ethnic groups for their skills. In addition to farming, these kingdoms were known for their iron work, masonry, glassmaking, weaving, and mining—all skills needed in the development of the colonies. The Kongo were well-known metal workers and brought with them unmatched skill sets.

Angola was home to the Kongo Kingdom, which converted to Catholicism in the 15th century, but inhabitants still retained many of their own religious practices. Traditional rituals and beliefs, such as ancestor worship, were intermixed with Catholic rites. Archaeologists working at colonial sites have found traces of it in the material culture; the Kongo cosmogram, a cross-like mark, often with a circle encompassing it, can be found carved into objects such as pipes and bowls and into walls and metal throughout the African diaspora. This symbol, often mistaken for a cross, had a double meaning; it could pass as Christian while also performing essential ritual purposes. This symbol was used to pray to and conjure the African ancestors for protection.

These clay pipe fragments found in Virginia date to the 17th century and bear designs that reflect the influence of West African culture. Stratford Plantation, Virginia.

Handmade pipes, like the ones excavated at the Cliffs Plantation at Stratford Hall (above), date to the 1650s and were handmade by the enslaved Africans who lived there. The designs etched in the clay are specific to their ancestral cultures. Similar designs are found carved into objects throughout the African diaspora, which can yield clues about the dispersions of African populations in the early colonies. These pipes may also hold the DNA of the people who used them. In 2019, scholars were able to collect DNA from a 19th-century clay pipe found in Maryland and trace it back to modern-day Sierra Leone, most likely to the Mende people in West Africa.

It is through the markings carved into pipes and other material objects, mostly found through archaeological investigations, that historians are given a glimpse into the Africans’ personal lives. Their religion, ethnicity, and culture survived the Middle Passage and took hold in the colonies. The first Africans in Virginia were followed by more than 400,000 people captured and brought directly from West and central African to the North American slave ports, from New England to New Orleans. Written records are mostly limited to names, sex, and monetary value, and occasionally occupation; more detailed descriptions typically are found only in advertisements about runaway slaves. This leaves historians with a limited amount of information, and as such, a heavy reliance on archaeological data and oral tradition. (See also: Last American slave ship is discovered in Alabama.)

While slavery existed for millennia in other cultures around the world before 1619, it transformed significantly in the Americas. Traditional African slavery was vastly different from what developed in the colonies. In African kingdoms, slavery was not permanent nor was it inherited. Children of slaves were not automatically enslaved, and they could be socially and politically mobile. (See also: Nat Turner, an American rebel's complicated legacy.)

In the “New World,” slavery transformed. It was permanent and hereditary. The enslaved had few or no civil rights. They could be bought and sold at their owners’ discretion. The social construct of race became tightly tethered to legal status, causing problems that ripple down to the present day.

As the 400th anniversary of the 1619 arrival approached, more people actively tried to trace their roots back to their African ancestors’ arrival in the colonies. Some are fortunate, like members of the William Tucker 1624 Society. Many members can trace their lineage back to William Tucker, believed to be the first African American child born in Virginia. Their surname was recorded centuries ago, and they have remained connected to this distinct family line.

Unfortunately, the Tuckers are the exception, as most African Americans can only trace their ancestors back to the late 19th century, following emancipation, when African Americans were free to record their own full legal names. Scientific advances in genetics have also given people new tools to find their ancestors via DNA, but creating a full family tree remains unlikely. Few family histories will ever be complete, yet another legacy of the inhumane treatment of enslaved Africans and their descendants. (See also: Their ancestors survived slavery. Can their descendants save the town they built?)

Looking back to 1619, one realizes it is time to recognize how racist ideology fed the colonization of the Americas and the systematic enslavement and oppression of both Native Americans and captive Africans. Looking forward, one must also see how necessary it is for humanity to try to tell the full story of the millions of Africans who were stolen away.

Dr. Kelley Fanto Deetz is a historian of the African diaspora and director of programming, education, and visitor engagement at Stratford Hall in Stratford, Virginia.