America’s original sin: How and why slavery took hold is a story of accident and coincidence. It didn’t have to happen the way it did.
Seven thousand miles from Jamestown, on a rise overlooking the Atlantic just south of Angola’s capital city, Luanda, sits an old two-story white building. With a cross on its pediment and a sand-colored baptismal bowl inside, it might seem that its function, centuries ago, was sacred.
When the enslaved were marched from their homes, this was one of the slave trading halls where they were held until they could be transported into boats that sailed to the New World.It was part of a fight that the Portuguese king hoped would open a corridor to his colonies in East Africa. To this end, his governor forged an alliance with a group of fearsome nomadic African mercenaries who practiced cannibalism and infanticide.
Those who reached Luanda were branded and jammed into pens until there was room for them on one of 36 slave ships that left in 1619 for the New World, carrying a total of about 15,000 enslaved people. “Never in the history of the Atlantic slave trade would so many Africans from so small an area be taken in so short a time,’’about 350 Angolans were loaded onto the San Juan Bautista
Then it was attacked by two English privateers – pirate ships licensed under a foreign flag of convenience – who were searching for gold and silver. The following year the two appear again in a census, this time along with “William theire Child Baptised’’ – the first identified child born of Africans parents on the mainland of English America.Although the colony had no law permitting or banning slavery, the Africans became slaves in fact, if not law. But slavery was not part of the original plan for the colony.
Left, a historic illustration of the Brookes slave ship, on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. The image shows the human cargo packed in accordance with government regulations outlined in the Regulated Slave Trade Act of 1788. Right, slave shackles from the late 17th century on display at the Hampton History Museum in Hampton, Virginia.Some of the new arrivals were skilled at farming, herding or ironworking.
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