The forlorn dirt road leading from the James River to Jamestown hasn’t changed much in the 400 years since an African woman named Angela walked its dusty path to a new life.
She had survived months, possibly years, of chaos and upheaval and was being forced into the unknown. She’d been sold in Ndongo, part of present-day Angola, where she’d been enslaved after wars between African kingdoms and Portuguese invaders. She endured a perilous journey across the Atlantic Ocean before being sold to the English, who themselves were invading Native American lands along the Virginian coast.
However, not much is known about Angela after she arrived in Virginia, beyond the fact that she was among the first group of 20 to 30 documented Africans in English North America. Hundreds of thousands would follow, bringing their identity and knowledge, influencing America’s food, music, art, and culture.
An archaeological dig is currently taking place at Jamestown and it carries Angela’s name; it is a smaller, easier lot to study and the only undeveloped land remaining that can be tied to one of the first named Africans.
This year, Virginia – and the nation – marks that 400th anniversary with curriculum changes for K-12 schools, college lectures, dedicated art and dance performances, and a year-long list of commemorations.
Jamestown Settlement, a living-history museum, is revamping its programming and will unveil new exhibits and in-depth programs this year. The Dance Theatre of Harlem will debut its worldwide tour in Norfolk with a piece choreographed and composed for the anniversary. In August, Fort Monroe will open a visitor and education center to tell the story of how the first Africans landed on its coast, which was then called Old Point Comfort.
“We are the site where the first Africans landed here as property, and we are the site where contrabands arrived and were not returned to their owners as property,” said Glenn Oder, executive director of the Fort Monroe Authority. This is the only place in the country with that story, he said.
“And we have to tell it.”
Colita Fairfax, a Norfolk State University professor, historian, and co-chair of Hampton’s 2019 Commemoration, said that America’s narrative too often pays homage to courageous, entrepreneurial Englishmen.
“These were people who were able to economically advance because of their use of unpaid human labor,” Fairfax said. “I cannot wrap my head around anyone talking the early years of Virginia without discussing the horrors perpetuated among the African peoples, and the Native Americans who were enslaved first … .They were forced to work and give up their land.”
Its unique history means the international spotlight will be on this corner of Virginia, where a small group of Africans disembarked from two ships in present-day Hampton and developed roots along the James.
David Givens, the director of archaeology at Jamestown Rediscovery, is in the middle of coordinating the three-year dig near the end of that dirt road where Angela is known to have worked for a prominent member of the Virginia colony, Capt. William Peirce. Givens said Jamestown is the genesis of so many stories that make up America.
“The entanglement of that legacy got us to where we are today.”
Written records are thin when it comes to documenting the lives of those first Africans brought to the Virginia colony, but we do know they were not the first brought to the Americas. Spanish invaders enslaved Africans and brought them to their settlements along the Florida and East Coast in the 1500s. The Portuguese and Spanish used them as forced labor in sugar and tobacco plantations, as well as the silver and gold mines of the Caribbean and Central and South America since that time.
But 1619 is the foothold in British North America; the beginning of our country, in many ways. Records show other slaves living on other properties, such as four named Africans on Flowerdew in present-day Hopewell. But that land has been developed during the years, unlike Jamestown.
Angela came from the West Central area of Africa where nearly half of America’s African slaves would eventually hail. The transatlantic slave trade, which began with the Portuguese in the 1400s, would eventually bring an estimated 12 million Africans to the New World before being outlawed in America in 1808. It is estimated that 10 to 15 percent of Africans did not survive the infamous Middle Passage voyage on the ships.
The Angolan kingdom was a sophisticated culture headed by a queen in the early 1600s. She was in constant negotiations with Portugal, which had established a colony on the coast of her kingdom. The Portuguese acquired the slaves in various ways; sometimes by hiring African mercenaries who captured them during battle; sometimes by simply buying them from other Africans who were holding prisoners due to war and debt.
Angela was one of these captives, though bondage in Africa was different from the slavery that would come to be in the colonies. Those terms were usually for a limited time, slaves had rights and the status of those slaves was not passed on to their children. Also, it was not race-based, said Beth Austin, registrar at the Hampton History Museum.
A couple of records bear Angela’s name (sometimes spelled as “Angelo”) and it tells us she was likely baptized, said John Thornton, a professor of African American Studies and History at Boston University. Thornton has worked as a consultant with the Jamestown Settlement and several of Virginia’s commemorative events. He has also written several books on Africa and the African diaspora.
Christianity, he said, had been introduced to that area decades before and many Africans were second- or third-generation. Those who weren’t Christians were quickly baptized on the docks by priests before boarding ships.
The Africans were also acquainted with growing tobacco, which was introduced by the Portuguese. The skill would be in demand years to come as tobacco became the leading cash crop in Colonial Virginia.
In the African culture, women were the farmers while men tended the livestock. It might have been a shock to arrive in the colony and see men working in the fields. Angela was among a group of 350 in 1619 who boarded the frigate San Juan Bautista, bound for Veracruz, near Mexico City.
Though the English would not become major players in the slave trade until the middle of the century, English pirates didn’t resist chances to steal human cargo. Christopher Newport, the namesake of the city of Newport News, once hijacked a ship and sold a cargo of 300 Africans in the Caribbean in the 1590s before he helped found Jamestown in 1607.
In 1619, two English ships, the White Lion and Treasurer, attacked and raided the Bautista and took about 60 Africans. The ships cruised to the fort at Old Point Comfort, present-day’s Fort Monroe, in late August 1619.
A letter by John Rolfe, secretary of the Virginia Company of London, noted that the White Lion had “20 and odd Negroes,” who were traded for food and supplies.
This is where the story gets tricky. Were the Africans slaves at this point?
Probably, but not in the way we view slaves today, Thornton said. They were obviously not free. They weren’t indentured servants like many English, French and other
Europeans were when they first came to the colonies. Indentured people signed written or agreed to oral contracts to work for a term in exchange for travel costs and lodging. They also had rights.
The Portuguese introduced the word “Negro” to the English as it described people who were forced laborers, including natives in the Caribbean.
The term “slavery” popped up among the English such as when some Englishmen were “condemned to slavery” for a period as a punishment for a crime, Thornton said. But it was not a lifelong sentence.
With indentured servants, records transferring land often mentioned who was working on the property and how much time was left on those contracts. There is no indication that the first Africans were offered contracts and no reference to time remaining when “Negroes” were listed on the land records.
It was likely up to the people who bought them to decide when and if they would be allowed to live on their own. But “slavery and the lifelong, inheritable servitude that we think of today wasn’t part of the English vocabulary at that time,” Thornton said.
Martha McCartney, an independent researcher in Williamsburg, has written volumes about the first settlers in the new colony, including Africans.
Even though legalized slavery hadn’t formed, she could see racial biases against Africans and Native Americans in the early documents. Servants were often listed in households by their ethnicity, such as Irish, French or Italian. The records often listed Africans only as “Negro.”
“They listed people not by nationality, but listed them if they were ethnically different.”
Census and colony muster rolls taken during the next few years give glimpses of the lives of these Africans, known as the Charter Generation. They worked in the households of wealthy members of the colony up and down the James River.
A 1620 census states 32 Africans were in the colony, 15 males and 17 female, but does not list them by name. A 1624 census lists 21 Africans, 13 by first names only, including Anthony and Isabella who were in the household of Capt. William Tucker in Elizabeth City, present-day Hampton. Historians said the drop in the African population could be due to death or that some were sold to plantations in the Caribbean.
But other Africans were arriving, according to the records. For example, an Anthony Johnson is listed in a 1621 census arriving on a ship called the James. In the 1624 census, Angela is marked down as “Angelo” and is listed as being in the household of George Sands, who was the treasurer of the colony. He lived in Peirce’s house but is listed as the owner because he outranked Peirce, McCartney said.
Governor George Yeardley, who lived within walking distance of Peirce in Jamestown, had two Africans living on that property and six others living in Flowerdew. In a muster roll of 1625, Anthony and Isabella are listed as being with Tucker, but a child, William, is noted. An unnamed child is also listed at Flowerdew that year.
In 1625, Angelo is listed as a servant for Peirce and it also notes she arrived on the Treasurer, the only African tied to the original two ships.
In the dig at Jamestown, researchers have found a few items: Cowrie shells that were used for decoration and currency among Africans. Givens said they are probably not old enough to be tied to Angela but to other Africans. Or were they from the pockets of white colonists? Peirce’s house went back to the colony after his death after 1644 and was carved up; other houses were built on top of its foundation during the years.
“All of this is peeling off the layers,” said Givens, the archaeology director.
Records get even spottier after 1625, but Thornton said it appears several of the first Africans eventually lived on their own. Being Christian probably helped, Thornton said, as the English began to debate whether Christians could enslave other Christians.
Several Africans, including Anthony Johnson of the 1621 census, ended up on the Eastern Shore owning property. A 1668 list for Northampton County showed that 29 percent of the Africans in that county were free, a number that wouldn’t reach that high until after the Civil War and emancipation.
Within two decades of the arrival of the first Africans, race-based slavery was slowly starting to form in Virginia. In a 1640 case, three Virginia servants, two white indentured men and one black, fled their owners but were captured.
The white men were punished by having more time added to their contracts. The black man, John Punch, was ordered to spend the rest of his life in servitude.
As is the story of America, one of Punch’s descendants, a white American woman named Ann Dunham, married an African man in 1961. They had a child, Barack Obama, who would become the first African American president of the United States.
In 2011, then President Obama signed legislation designating Fort Monroe a national monument, a testament to its historical importance. Obama said at the time: “This is going to give an opportunity for people from all across the country to travel to Fort Monroe and trace the history that has been so important to making America what it is.”
