many female laborers among them: Martha McCartney, A Study of the Africans and African Americans on Jamestown Island and at Green Springs (Williamsburg, VA: National Parks Service, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 2003), 56.
practiced crop rotation: Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), Kindle loc. 3082–88.
pigs, and other livestock: John Thornton, “Notes and Documents: The African Experience of the ‘20 and Odd Negroes’ Arriving in Virginia in 1619,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 55, no. 3 (1998): 421–34; James Deetz, Flowerdew Hundred: The Archaeology of a Virginia Plantation, 1619–1864 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995), 20–22; T. H. Breen and Stephen Innes, “Myne Owne Ground”: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore (1980; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 71; William Thorndale, “The Virginia Census of 1619,” Magazine of Virginia Genealogy 33 (1995): 155–70; Linda Heywood and John K. Thornton, “In Search of the 1619 African Arrivals: Enslavement and Middle Passage,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 127, no. 3 (2019): 204–5.
sought-after market item: Anne Hilton, The Kingdom of Kongo (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 90–103.
“on the advice of our Negroes”: “Angela, Brought to Virginia 1619,” Jamestown Chronicles, n.d., www.historyisfun.org/sites/jamestown-chronicles/angela_more1.html.
Archaeological records: “The Young Woman from Harleigh Knoll: Unearthing Untold Stories,” National Museum of Natural History, naturalhistory.si.edu/education/teaching-resources/written-bone/forensic-case-files/young-woman-harleigh-knoll; “Young Woman from Harleigh Knoll,” Clippix ETC, etc.usf.edu/clippix/picture/young-woman-from-harleigh-knoll.html.
ten thousand English pounds: Deetz, Flowerdew Hundred, 20, 46.
1649–1654: The Black Family
In 1649 three hundred: Warren M. Billings, ed., The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: A Documentary History of Virginia, 1606–1689 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 148.
New Amsterdam: Leslie Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 15.
Many of them struggled: Regarding the sale of people in New Netherland and Virginia in this period, see Joyce D. Goodfriend, “Black Families in New Netherland,” Selected Renssalaerswijc Seminar Papers, 148, www.newnetherlandinstitute.org/files/3513/5067/3660/6.1.pdf; and J. Douglas Deal, Race and Class in Colonial Virginia: Indians, Englishmen, and Africans on the Eastern Shore During the Seventeenth Century (New York: Garland, 1993), 168–69, 280–81.
Emmanuel Pietersen: “Slavery in New Netherland,” New Netherland Institute, www.newnetherlandinstitute.org/history-and-heritage/digital-exhibitions/slavery-exhibit/family-and-community.
through baptism or marriage: Regarding marriage in the Dutch Reformed Church, see Goodfriend, “Black Families in New Netherland,” 149.
forty-nine children for baptism: Graham Russell Hodges, Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613–1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 16.
By 1656, the Dutch Reformed: Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery, 17; Hodges, Root and Branch, 18–24; Goodfriend, “Black Families in New Netherland,” 151–52.
“The Negroes occasionally”: Hodges, Root and Branch, 21; Rev. Henricus Selyns to the Classis of Amsterdam, June 9, 1664, in John Franklin Jameson, ed., Narratives of Early American History, vol. 8, Narratives of New Netherland (New York: Scribner, 1909), 409.
“children that are slaves”: “An Act Declaring That Baptisme of Slaves Doth Not Exempt Them from Bondage” (September 1667), in William Waller Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature in the Year 1619 (New York, 1823), 2:260.
“out of the Naturall love”: Quoted in T. H. Breen and Stephen Innes, “Myne Owne Ground”: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1640–1676 (1980; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 85.
racing toward full dependence: Deal, Race and Class in Colonial Virginia, 279–87; Breen and Innes, “Myne Owne Ground,” 75–79.
1654–1659: Unfree Labor
“the necessary evil upon which”: Frank E. Lockwood, “Bill by Sen. Tom Cotton Targets Curriculum on Slavery,” Arkansas Democrat Gazette, July 26, 2020, www.arkansasonline.com/news/2020/jul/26/bill-by-cotton-targets-curriculum-on-slavery/.
fulfilled his indenture contract: Indentured servitude, the prevalent labor system in the early days of British colonization, required that a person contract to serve a “master” from five to seven years before they gained freedom and land.
“Johnson had kept him”: “Court Ruling on Anthony Johnson and His Servant (1655),” Encyclopedia Virginia, www.encyclopediavirginia.org/court_ruling_on_anthony_johnson_and_his_servant_1655.
“serve his said master”: “Meeting Minutes July 9, 1640,” Minutes of the Council and General Court of Colonial Virginia (Richmond, VA: Colonial Press, 1924), 466.
“under pretense that the said”: “Court Ruling,” Encyclopedia Virginia.
“corne and leather”: T. H. Breen and Stephen Innes, “Myne Owne Ground”: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1640–1676 (1980; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 14.
“hee had him”: “Court Ruling,” Encyclopedia Virginia.
“returne unto the service”: Ibid.
named the estate Angola: John K. Thornton and Linda M. Heywood, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 283.
“never to trouble or molest”: “York County Deeds, Orders, and Wills, Selected Virginia Records Relating to Slavery,” Virtual Jamestown, www.virtualjamestown.org/practise.html.
all kinds of labor in the region: Thelma Wills Foote, Black and White Manhattan: The History of Racial Formation in Colonial New York City (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 40.