The enslavement and racialization of Africans
Between 1660 and 1690, leaders of the Virginia colony began to pass laws and establish practices that provided or sanctioned differential treatment for freed servants whose origins were in Europe. They conscripted poor whites, with whom they had never had interests in common, into the category of free men and made land, tools, animals, and other resources available to them. African Americans and Africans, mulattoes, and American Indians, regardless of their cultural similarities or differences, were forced into categories separate from whites. Historical records show that the Virginia Assembly went to great extremes not only to purposely separate Europeans from Indians and Africans but to promote contempt on the part of whites against blacks. Recognizing the vulnerability of African labour, colonial leaders passed laws that increasingly bound Africans and their children permanently as servants and, eventually, as slaves. White servants had the protection of English laws, and their mistreatment was criticized abroad. Africans, however, had no such recourse. By 1723 even free African Americans, descendants of several generations then of free people, were prohibited from voting and exercising their civil rights. Colonial leaders thus began using the physical differences among the population to structure an inegalitarian society. In the island colonies of Barbados and Jamaica, the numbers of Irish and Indian slaves had also declined, and planters turned increasingly to Africans. Southern planters, who were in regular communication with these island communities, brought in large numbers of Africans during the 18th century and systematically developed their slave practices and laws. Christianity provided an early rationalization for permanent enslavement: Africans were heathens and slaves in their own lands; under English slavery, their souls would be saved.
The underlying reality was that their labour was needed to produce wealth for the colonies and for England’s upper classes. During the early decades of the 17th century, many Englishmen considered the Africans to be civilized. Unlike the Indians, whom they called “savages” and who were largely nomadic hunter-gatherers, the English knew the Africans in the colonies as sophisticated cultivators who understood how to grow foods and other crops in tropical soils. In this they surpassed the Irish who had been enslaved on plantations in the Caribbean; with no tradition of agriculture in tropical habitats, the Irish failed as producers of necessary goods. Some Africans were skilled metalworkers, knowledgeable about smelting, blacksmithing, and toolmaking. Many others were skilled in woodworking, weaving, pottery production, rope making, leatherwork, brick making, thatching, and other crafts.
Two additional factors made Africans more desirable as slaves: Africans were immune to Old World diseases, which caused Indians to sicken and die, and, most important, Africans had nowhere to run, unlike the Indians, who could escape from slavery into their own familiar territory. The Irish, who were also in an alien land, were perceived as unruly and violent. When they escaped, they often joined their fellow Catholics, the Spanish and the French, in conspiracies against the English.
Thus, Africans became the preferred slaves, not because of their physical differences, although such differences became increasingly important, but because they had the knowledge and skills that made it possible to put them to work immediately to develop the colonies. They were not Christian, they were vulnerable, with no legal or moral opposition to their enslavement, and, once transported to the New World, they had few options. Moreover, the supply of Africans increased as the costs of transporting them fell, and English merchants became directly involved in the slave trade.