No one can discuss American history without talking about the prevalence of slavery. When the Europeans attempted to colonize America in its early days, Indians and Africans were enslaved because they were “different from them”. The excerpt below from American Slavery: A Very Short Introduction follows the dark past of colonial America and how slavery proceeded to root itself deeply into history:
America held promises of wealth and freedom for Europeans; in time, slavery became the key to the fulfillment of both. Those who ventured to the lands that became the United States of America arrived determined to extract wealth from the soil, and they soon began to rely on systems of unpaid labor to accomplish these goals. Some also came with dreams of acquiring freedoms denied them in Europe, and paradoxically slavery helped to make those freedoms possible as well. As European immigrants to the colonies initiated a system of slavery, they chose to enslave only those who were different from them—Indians and Africans. A developing racist ideology marked both Indians and Africans as heathens or savages, inferior to white Europeans and therefore suited for enslavement. When continued enslavement of Indians proved difficult or against colonists’ self-interest, Africans and their descendants alone constituted the category of slave, and their ancestry and color came to be virtually synonymous with slave.
Although Europeans primarily enslaved Africans and their descendants, in the early 1600s in both northern and southern colonies, Africans were not locked into the same sort of lifetime slavery that they later occupied. Their status in some of the early colonies was sometimes ambiguous, but by the time of the American Revolution, every English colony in America—from Virginia, where the English began their colonization project, to Massachusetts, where Puritans made claims for religious freedom—had people who were considered lifetime slaves. To understand how the enslavement of Africans came about, it is necessary to know something of the broader context of European settlement in America.
In the winter of 1606, the Virginia Company, owned by a group of merchants and wealthy gentry, sent 144 English men and boys on three ships to the East Coast of the North American continent. English explorers had established the colony of Roanoke in Carolina in 1585, but when a ship arrived to replenish supplies two years later, the colony was nowhere to be found. The would-be colonists had either died or become incorporated into Indian groups. The English failed in their first attempt to establish a permanent colony in North America. Now they were trying again, searching for a place that would sustain and enrich them.
By the time the English ships got to the site of the new colony in April 1607, only 105 men and boys were left. Despite the presence of thousands of Algonquian-speaking Indians in the area, the leader of the English group planted a cross and named the territory on behalf of James, the new king of England. They established the Jamestown Settlement as a profit-making venture of the Virginia Company, but the colony got off to a bad start. The settlers were poorly suited to the rigors of colonization. To add to their troubles, the colony was located in an unhealthy site on the edge of a swamp. The new arrivals were often ill, plagued by typhoid and dysentery from lack of proper hygiene. Human waste spilled into the water supply, the water was too salty for consumption at times, and mosquitoes and bugs were rampant. No one planted foodstuffs. The colonists entered winter unprepared and only gifts of food from the Powhatan Indians saved them.
In the winter of 1609/10, a period that colonist John Smith called the “starving time,” several of the colonists resorted to cannibalism. According to Smith, some of the colonists dug up the body of an Indian man they had killed, boiled him with roots and herbs, and ate him. One man chopped up his wife and ate her. John Smith feared that the colony would disappear much as Roanoke had, so he established a militarized regime, divided the men into work gangs with threats of severe discipline, and told them that they would either work or starve. Smith’s dramatic strategy worked. The original settlers did not all die, and more colonists, including women and children, arrived from England to help build the struggling colony.
The first dozen years of the Jamestown Colony saw hunger, disease, and violent conflicts with the Native People, but it also saw the beginnings of a cash crop that could generate wealth for the investors in the Virginia Company back in England, as well as for planters within the colony. In 1617, the colonist John Rolfe brought a new variety of tobacco from the West Indies to Jamestown. In tobacco the colonists found the saleable commodity for which they had been searching, and they shipped their first cargo to England later that year. The crop, however, made huge demands on the soil. Cultivation required large amounts of land because it quickly drained soil of its nutrients. This meant that colonists kept spreading out generating immense friction with the Powhatan Indians who had long occupied and used the land. Tobacco was also a labor-intensive crop, and clearing land for new fields every few years required a great deal of labor. The colony needed people who would do the work.
Into this unsettled situation came twenty Africans in 1619. According to one census there were already some Africans in the Jamestown colony, but August 1619, when a Dutch warship moored at Point Comfort on the James River, marks the first documented arrival of Africans in the colony. John Rolfe wrote, “About the last of August came in a dutch man of warre that sold us twenty Negars.” According to Rolfe, “the Governor and Cape Marchant bought [them] for victuals at the easiest rates they could.” Colonists who did not have much excess food thought it worthwhile to trade food for laborers.
The Africans occupied a status of “unfreeness”; officials of the colony had purchased them, yet they were not perpetual slaves in the way that Africans would later be in the colony. For the most part, they worked alongside the Europeans who had been brought into the colony as indentured servants, and who were expected to work usually for a period of seven years to pay off the cost of their passage from England, Scotland, Wales, the Netherlands, or elsewhere in Europe. For the first several decades of its existence, European indentured servants constituted the majority of workers in the Jamestown Colony. Living conditions were as harsh for them as it was for the Africans as noted in the desperate pleas of a young English indentured servant who begged his parents to get him back to England.
In March 1623, Richard Frethorne wrote from near Jamestown to his mother and father in England begging them to find a way to get him back to England. He was hungry, feared coming down with scurvy or the bloody flux, and described graphically the poor conditions under which he and others in the colony lived. He was worse off, he said, than the beggars who came to his family’s door in England. Frethorne’s letter is a rare document from either white or black servants in seventeenth-century Virginia, but it certainly reflects the conditions under which most of them lived. The Africans, captured inland, taken to the coast, put on ships, taken to the Caribbean, and captured again by another nation’s ships, were even farther removed from any hope of redemption than Frethorne. Even if they could have written, they would have had no way of sending an appeal for help. As it happens, Frethorne was not successful either. His letter made it to London but remained in the offices of the Virginia Company. His parents probably never heard his appeal.
Featured headline image: Cotton gin harpers. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
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YOU DID IT! THANK YOU! Maggie’s 31-Day Audiobook Crowdfunding Campaign has ended and we’re Over the Moon! You soared over the $3,000 goal and so the story will be narrated and produced by the great Tavia Gilbert. We can’t wait … Continue reading →
Young vaulters are rising to new heights every day at Saddleback Pole Vaulting Club in Mission Viejo, California. They’ll get an added boost with a Mean Green Skypole like Maggie used to vault over the moon! Saddleback Coach Dan Cassidy … Continue reading →
POLE-VAULTERS AND COACHES! GILL ATHLETICS is the Grand Prize Sponsor for the ongoing Maggie Vaults Over the Moon Audiobook Crowdfunding Campaign. The Grand Prize includes a Mean Green Skypole, a 15-foot Skypole Pole Bag, and a roll of the new … Continue reading →
Just as sure as temperatures will skyrocket on the Kansas prairie this summer, vaulters will leap to new heights at Tailwind Pole Vault Club Summer Camps. In fact, tiny Jamestown, Kansas should change its name to PR City, because more … Continue reading →
JAMESTOWN, Kansas – Tailwind Pole Vault Club has pledged a 2-Day Summer Camp, valued at $250, for a vault fan who contributes $225 to Maggie’s Audiobook Campaign! Tailwind Camps (with meals and snacks) will be held on multiple dates from … Continue reading →
JAMESTOWN, Kan. – Storybook pole-vaulter Maggie Steele celebrated her first anniversary in the company of a former world-record holder, Olympians, and Olympic hopefuls at Doctoberfest 2013 on Saturday, Oct. 5th. The eighth annual event at the Tailwind Pole Vault Club … Continue reading →
Young children in the US are often taught that the tradition of Thanksgiving began with a friendly meal between the Pilgrims and Native Americans. In school, they make buckle hats out of construction paper and trace their hands to make turkey drawings, all in anticipation of the great Thursday feast. If asked, I’m sure most Americans wouldn’t actually know the origins of the Thanksgiving tradition as we practice it today. Below is an excerpt from The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink (edited by renowned food historian Andrew F. Smith) which explains just how the modern holiday came to be. Have a happy Thanksgiving everyone! -Lauren Appelwick, Blog Editor
Hale’s Tale
The driving force behind making Thanksgiving a national holiday was Sarah Josepha Hale, who was born in 1788 in Newport, New Hampshire. After her husband’s death, Hale turned to writing to generate money. Her novel Northwood: A Tale of New England (1827) included an entire chapter devoted to a Thanksgiving dinner. Its publication brought Hale fame, and she ended up as editor for Godey’s Lady’s Book, the most influential women’s magazine in the pre-Civil War era. For seventeen years Hale campaigned to proclaim the last Thursday in November Thanksgiving Day. Hale encouraged other magazines to join the quest of making Thanksgiving a national holiday, and many published Thanksgiving-related stories, poems, and illustrations. During the Civil War, Hale redoubled her efforts. A few months after the North’s military victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in the summer of 1863, President Abraham Lincoln declared the last Thursday in November a national day of thanksgiving. Every president since has proclaimed Thanksgiving Day a national holiday.
Hale’s pre-1865 letters and editorial promoting Thanksgiving Day made no mention of the Pilgrims or the first Thanksgiving feast. There were several good reasons for this. Jamestown had been settled before Plymouth, and colonists in Jamestown had observed days fo thanksgiving before Plymouth was settled. Hale made the connection between the Pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving holiday in an 1865 editorial in Godey’s Lady’s Book. This connection was picked up by newspapers and by other magazines. By 1870 school textbooks contained the story of the “first Thanksgiving.”
By the late 1880s the concept of a Pilgrim-centered Thanksgiving had blossomed in popular books. Thanksgiving plays were produced annually, and many schools offered special dinners based on fictional visions of life in Plymouth in 1621. This curriculum spawned a large body of children’s literature focused on the Pilgrims and the “first Thanksgiving.” These myths were enshrined in books, magazines, and artworks during the twentieth century.
The rapid adoption of the Pilgrim Thanksgiving myth had less to do with historical fact and more to do with the hundreds of thousands of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe flooding into the United States. Because the immigrants came from many lands, the American public education system needed to create an easily understood history of America. The Pilgrims were an ideal symbol for America’s beginning, so they became embedded in the nation’s schools, as did the Thanksgiving feast.
You know that one place (or maybe two) you've lived in that, from the moment you got there, just felt like home?
I've lived all over the Midwest, East Coast and Western Europe, and as luck would have it, that place, for me, is Charlottesville, Virginia. Every time I get back, I feel like I'm home. It's funny, too, because I spent the five most difficult years of my life there. Difficult because I was writing a dissertation, and, for me, just about every other challenge I've faced in life has been a thousand time easier than that gut-wrenching, sleep-depriving, paranoia-inducing academic obstacle course. Still, Virginia turned out to be the perfect place to do it.
My husband and I made really great friends there. Friends we still keep in touch with although we've been gone now for (gulp) ten years. And the air has just right smell to it. And the food, just the right taste.
So when I was invited to speak at the Virginia Festival of the book in C-ville this year, I was ecstatic. The kids were ecstatic. It was like a second Christmas in Spring.
Except for the trip out. It was...what is the right adjective here...insane? We missed our connecting flight in O'Hare due to weather (I'm not sure what kind of weather because it was in the 50s and raining, but that's what the airline was claiming was the cause of delays and the reason they didn't have to try very hard to get us out until, say, next Spring). Pandemonium ensued. It was two weekends ago, the first weekend of Spring Break in the Midwest, and everybody was trying to get somewhere. Let's just say that it was a minor miracle we were able to get anywhere near Virginia before I'd aged another year. I think the gods of aviation must have intervened because before my birthday dawned on Sunday, we were at my brother's in Chesapeake.
My kids were then subjected to the usual, learn American history firsthand routine. I took them the Yorktown, Jamestown, and colonial Williamsburg. It rained, but it didn't matter. We were too excited to be back in Virginia. Then it was off to Charlottesville (C-ville to townies and students) for a week of school visits. My kids spent the time with their godparents and old friends, one of whom took them hiking two days in a row.
When I asked my kids if they were having an okay time, what with my being away all day at schools, my ten year old looked at me and said, "Are you kidding? I would have come here without you!"
Needless to say, the week went by way too quickly, and it was suddenly Saturday morning and I was off to the Festival. Red letter day. Got to see old writing friends, talk on a panel with them about setting in kidlit, schmooze, meet lots of authors I'd never met before, and round the evening off with a dinner at a cozy tapas joint in town (where we all learned to never order the tu
I am going to be visiting one of my best girlfriends Patty in Jamestown RI this week. It's been over a year since I've seen her so I am WAY excited. These pictures are from her backyard (totally amazing). I love this place because it's so beautiful, peaceful and it's quality time spent with Patty. She is totally amazing and one of my dearest friends forever.
Here is a picture of Ryan and I about five years ago. Looking at this picture makes me smile because we spent the day catching hermit crabs and walking on the beach together. We were both very pooped out from our day.
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Maybe it was some Maggie magic (delivered by Grant Overstake) or maybe there was something in the air down there in Jamestown Kanas, but otherwise I can’t explain it. However, I can come up with a bunch of reasons why I should NOT have vaulted well at Doctoberfest, such as straining a groin muscle the Sunday before, and tweaking a hamstring during warm-up, only able to run from 10 steps (5 lefts), not having vaulted in over a month…etc., etc. Still it was an awesome weekend with a new post-40 PR (13’1”). Shout-out thanks to the entire crew from Bell Athletics Sam Bell, Kayla Caldwell, Brian Mondschein, Jason Vogt and, of course, Earl Bell). Doc Bro Mark Breault) you have an awesome vault facility ( Tailwind Pole Vault Club/Mark Breault), thanks for hosting. And I couldn’t have done it without my Fuzion coaches Drea Sabbatine and the illustrious Jamie Steffen.
Jim Moeller