Slaves in the New World
The first Africans to arrive in what would one day be called the United States had quite the adventure getting here. A Portuguese slave ship bound for the Caribbean was intercepted by British pirates who were then robbed by a Dutch warship that then made it's way to the British port at Jamestown. The name of this Dutch ship carrying "20 and odd negroes" sold its cargo and was lost to history.  In the early days, slavery was unknown in Virginia and this "human cargo" was treated no differently from the thousands of other white indentured servants who had been brought from England to work in America. Meaning they were treated like garbage. British society back then took a pretty brutal view of the poor. Indentured servants could be bought and sold, beaten, starved. Most never survived their contract period of seven years but if you did you were promised land and freedom. This was true of whites and blacks and there are records of black servants buying land and becoming plantation owners themselves. But somebody decided that why pay for indentured servants that had to be freed when you could permanently enslave people for life. The only problem was that it was illegal to enslave Englishmen and Christians. That pesky problem was solved with racism and within a few decades Africans were marked by the color of their skin and transformed into lifelong slaves. Pretty soon the whole Christianity thing was dropped and slave owners began justifying their evil institution by saying that Africans were just naturally inferior to whites. The color line had been created in America. 

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By the end of the 17th century, things got even worse for African-Americans. Slave codes varied from colony to colony but generally said much of the same stuff; slaves could not testify in court against a white person, slaves could not be educated, slaves could not leave their plantation without permission, slaves could not own weapons and slaves had to carry passes. But the most damning law of all was that slaves and their children were the legal property of their masters. For the next two hundred year, African-Americans would find themselves trapped in the nightmare of slavery. American society became poisoned as whites used religion and questionable scientific methods to rationalize slavery. It was claimed that Africans were created inferior, less intelligent, and built for back-breaking work. This was simply nature at work. From then on slavery and racism became intertwined in a system that continues to poison American society.  

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Africans had been kidnapped and brought to the Americas for one purpose: to work. Their entire lives were spent as field hands working in the rice, indigo, sugar, and tobacco plantations. They worked as domestics, cooks, drivers, dock workers. Their blackness defined them as subhumans meant to spend a lifetime in poverty and ignorance in order to enrich their masters. Barred from giving testimony in courts, African-Americans had no legal recourse to escape from the worst of the brutality and abuse that they suffered. But the scars from countless whippings, missing limbs, and broken bones told the story that they could not.

 

Life is full of irony and as far as slavery goes two events would come together to create one big super irony. After the American Revolution slavery seemed to be on the decline. Many, including Thomas Jefferson, predicted that soon the entire system would simply fade into irrelevance. Tobacco was harsh on the soil and along the eastern seaboard, many old plantations had become less productive meaning a declining need for slaves. But 1794, Eli Whitney invented a simple machine called a cotton gin that easily extracted the sticky seeds from the cotton plant. Up to this point, the process had to be done by hand making it totally a waste of time to grow the crop. But with this handy little machine cotton production exploded. Cotton plantations sprung up all over the deep South where the hot and humid conditions were ideal for growing the crop. Soon cotton became the number one southern export, literally transforming the southern economy overnight. The irony is that Whitney had thought that like self-serve check out machines at grocery stores it would replace human labor with machines. But he wrong, instead the demand for cotton and slaves boomed.

 

In 1770, there were only 700,000 slaves but by 1860 that number had mushroomed to 4 million. The second great irony is that as president Jefferson was able to ban the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, which again he thought would spell the end for the evil empire. But all it did was increase the price for slaves. The old tobacco kingdoms of Virginia and Maryland began selling their excess slaves to the new cotton kingdom's leading to a new demand for home-grown slave breeding. Up until the Civil War slavery became so profitable that many whites thought it would be impossible to abolish it without a total collapse of the economy.