The March 1655 court case of Johnson v. Parker in Northampton County, Virginia, exemplifies the insidious transformations in forced labor practices in the early American colonies. Anthony Johnson, the plaintiff in the case, was an African man who likely arrived in Virginia sometime around 1621 as a captive from Angola, transported across the Atlantic in the slave trade. In the course of thirty years, however, Johnson enjoyed a remarkable fate different from that of millions of African captives. Against insurmountable odds, Johnson survived the harrowing trek to the Americas known as the Middle Passage and eventually married, had children, secured his freedom, and acquired more than two hundred acres of land, livestock, and even indentured servants.
John Casor, another African man, was one of these servants. At the time of the lawsuit, he was working for Johnson under a contract. Unlike Johnson, Casor claimed he’d first come to Virginia not in captivity but as an indentured servant, and he therefore demanded his freedom after he believed he had fulfilled his indenture contract with Johnson. According to Casor, “Johnson had kept him his servant seaven yeares longer than hee ought [sic].” Casor likely knew that as an African man, he would face challenges in winning his freedom. In fact, fifteen years before Casor brought his case, in 1640, a Black indentured servant named John Punch ran away from his Virginia owners along with two white servants. After they were recaptured, the court sentenced the two white servants to thirty lashes and one extra year of servitude. Punch’s punishment, however, was to “serve his said master or his assigns for the time of his natural Life here or elsewhere,” thereby becoming the first person of African descent considered a “slave for life.” Although the institution of chattel slavery had not yet been completely codified into law and racist ideologies connecting Blackness with enslavement were not yet fully formed, it was nonetheless clear at this time that servants of African descent were viewed as different from their white counterparts, subject to being held in servitude for an undefined period of time, unlike white servants, who had clear terms of indenture and were never considered slaves for life.
With the precedent that only people of African descent were held as slaves for life set before Casor, and with his claims of freedom apparently unheeded by Johnson, Casor eventually appealed to one of Johnson’s white neighbors, Robert Parker, for help in his quest for freedom. Parker took Casor’s side and, over Johnson’s objections, took Casor out of Johnson’s possession and to his own farm, “under pretense that the said Negro [Casor] is a free man.” Johnson, after consulting with his wife, two sons, and son-in-law, reluctantly acceded to Casor’s demands, even providing him “corne and leather,” as “freedom dues.” A few months later, however, Johnson reconsidered his choice and sued Parker in court for stealing Casor. Johnson asserted that Casor never had an indenture; on the contrary, “hee had him [Casor] for his life.” The court ruled in Johnson’s favor and ordered Casor to “returne unto the service of his said master Anthony Johnson,” decreeing that Robert Parker cover the costs of the court case.
With the decision of the Northampton County Court, Casor became the first person of African descent in a civil case to be deemed a “slave for life.” Although Johnson initially agreed to free Casor from his contract, the loss of his labor apparently proved too much to accept. Perhaps thinking about ensuring his financial standing and the future of his family, Johnson decided that he needed to possess as much property, both human and inanimate, as possible. And though the court sided with him in this instance, Anthony Johnson and his family faced increasing harassment and threats to his property from his white neighbors. Around 1665, Johnson and his extended family moved to Maryland. Other people of African descent who were able to gain their freedom also bought land in the surrounding area and formed a tight-knit community that provided much-needed support in the face of rising discrimination and mistreatment of Black people. Two years later, in 1667, Johnson’s son, John, acquired forty-four acres of land in Maryland and named the estate Angola, after the African homeland his father had been torn away from over forty years before.
Like Johnson, other masters of indentured servants in Virginia also made calculated choices about which unfree laborers to manumit or retain. In October 1657, Anne Barnehouse, the sister of Christopher Stafford, a white planter from England, followed the wishes stated in his will to free his servant Mihill Gowen, a man of African descent, and his son William, promising “never to trouble or molest the said Mihill Gowen or his sone William or demand any service of the said Mahill or his said sone William.” Barnehouse, however, did not free her servant Prosta, who was William’s mother and perhaps the partner of Gowen. Evidently, Barnehouse had no qualms about obeying the manumission wishes of her brother but could not part with her own servant, who was likely acutely aware of the differences in status between herself, her son, and the father of her child. Five years before the 1662 Virginia law of partus sequitur ventrem declared that children followed the legal status of the mother, Barnehouse likely realized that the productive and reproductive labor she could extract from Prosta outweighed the morality of allowing her to enjoy freedom with her kin.
The English colonizers in the Chesapeake region were not the only Europeans to depend on Black people for labor. By the mid-seventeenth century, enslaved Africans comprised 20 percent of the population of New Netherland, the original homeland of the Lenape Indians—now occupied by Manhattan—making it the colony with the highest percentage of enslaved people at that time. Enslaved people of African descent performed all kinds of labor in the region for Dutch merchants of the West India Company. They cultivated small farms, built forts and churches, and protected the fledgling Dutch colony against Indian attacks.
Just like John Casor in Virginia, however, enslaved laborers of African descent in New Netherland used the labor they performed and the law as freedom strategies. Since enslaved Africans enjoyed the right to use the Dutch legal system, some individuals who participated on the side of the Dutch in conflicts with Indigenous nations petitioned—and often received—the status known as “half-freedom.” The Dutch understood early on that fostering divisions between African-descended peoples and Native people could serve their interests by forcibly removing Indigenous people from their lands to free it for slave-based cultivation. Half-freedom was an appropriate term: those who had this status could not pass it on to their children, unlike the enslaved people in the English colonies, and had to pay the West India Company an annual tribute in exchange for working for themselves. Despite the limitations of this standing, Africans made the most of their circumstances and never stopped pursuing complete freedom.
Africans in early America lived in a society that blurred the lines between freedom and unfreedom, a world of constrained possibilities, a world that could provide only “half-freedom.” And almost four hundred years later, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless others serve as a stark and painful reminder that for people of African descent, the United States is still a place of “half-freedom.”