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Virginia 1619: Slavery and Freedom in the Making of English America' H-Slavery Blakley on Musselwhite and Mancall and Horn, 'Virginia 1619: Slavery and Freedom in the Making of English America' Review published on Monday, November 4, 2019 Paul Musselwhite, Peter C. Mancall, James P. P. Horn, eds. Virginia 1619: Slavery and Freedom in the Making of English America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. 336 pp. $25.00 (paper), ISBN 978-1-4696-5179-8. Reviewed by Chris Blakley (UCLA) Published on H-Slavery (November, 2019) Commissioned by Andrew J. Kettler (University of California, Los Angeles) Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=54594 Vibrant discussion has arisen over how to reckon with the 400th anniversary of the arrival of captive Africans to Virginia among journalists, scholars, and public intellectuals. This reckoning is especially apparent within the New York Times 1619 Project. The question of how to place slavery within foundational narratives of American history is an urgent one. Collectively, the essays produced by the 1619 Project range from the origins of slavery in English North America beginning with the first twenty “and odd” captives seized by English privateers aboard theWhite Lion from a Portuguese slaver to the afterlives of slavery in the present evidenced through mass incarceration, health inequality, cultural appropriation, redlining, black impoverishment and white wealth accumulation, educational disparities, and systemic racial injustice within the United States. Politically speaking, reflecting on the anniversary of 1619 also raises the issue of reparations in the United States, and historians and other scholars continue to add to this important conversation. Current reflections on 1619 attest to the central importance of understanding how chattel slavery shaped every facet of American society, law, economy, politics, and culture from the colonial era through the Revolutionary period to the Civil War. Grappling with the legacy of 1619, then, necessarily involves engaging with how the nation’s foundational origins in slavery continue to shape racial inequalities in the present. The essays appearing in Virginia, 1619: Slavery and Freedom in the Making of English America, edited by Paul Musselwhite, Peter Mancall, and James Horn, join this ongoing discussion and provide further historical context for ongoing public discourse over the legacy of 1619 and place slavery in colonial Virginia within an increasingly global narrative. This collection is a timely, fresh, and engaging addition to the wider 1619 anniversary conversation that connects historical scholarship to a much-needed public conversation. Within their introduction, the editors set out their claim that slavery, indigenous dispossession, and gendered hierarchies emerged from an “interweaving of ideology, pragmatic experience, and international rivalries” that made Virginia the “prototype for colonization” in the English Atlantic world (p. 12). Mancall observes in his essay that slavery–either centered around Atlantic Africa or within Native America–was not an anticipated or original objective of imperial-minded Elizabethan colonial projectors like Richard Hakluyt and others writing in the late sixteenth century. Yet, after 1619 the expansion of England’s involvement in the Atlantic slave trade, and the labor and knowledge Citation: H-Net Reviews. Blakley on Musselwhite and Mancall and Horn, 'Virginia 1619: Slavery and Freedom in the Making of English America'. H-Slavery. 11-04-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/11465/reviews/5274827/blakley-musselwhite-and-mancall-and-horn-virginia-1619-slavery-and Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Slavery of Africans in the diaspora, certainly defined the future of the colony. Though the book’s subtitle indicates slavery is of prime import, several chapters in the collection deal more directly with the subject than others. This is not to discount the wealth of interpretation and analysis in these chapters, which are valuable contributions to diverse fields within early American and Atlantic history. Essays by Lauren Working and James Rice approach the social and political relations between the English and indigenous societies, especially the groups that made up Tsenacommacah–including the Powhatans, Chickahominies, Pamunkeys, Patawomecks, and many others. Rice also explores societies the Virginia Company negotiated with beyond the Powhatan confederacy, like the Accomacs based on the lower Eastern Shore. Nicholas Canny’s chapter on Ulster, Ireland, adds to a richer discussion of settler colonies and racial exclusion within England’s burgeoning empire during the early seventeenth century. Contributions from Musselwhite, Alexander Haskell, and Andrew Fitzmaurice provide excellent analyses of the changing contestations surrounding political economy and political philosophy in England and on the ground in Virginia. Finally, Melissa Morris’s essay contrasts the aims of the Virginia Company and its colony with the efforts of the Amazon Company in Guiana between the Orinoco and Amazon Rivers. Morris identifies key similarities between the Amazon and Virginia Companies’ interest in cultivating tobacco, and contrasts how settlers in both colonies negotiated their reliance upon indigenous interpreters, allies, and go-betweens. These chapters are valuable for placing Virginia more fully in an Atlantic world context. However, given this network’s focus on slavery, the remainder of this review will concentrate on the chapters most dedicated to examining slaving, slavery, and the lives of enslaved people who experienced displacement and laid the foundations of the African diaspora in the Americas. The chapters on slavery appear between these other essays and are not cordoned off to a single section of the collection, and it is commendable that the editors integrated the chapters through this organization. Philip Morgan’s essay, “Virginia Slavery in Atlantic Context, 1550 to 1650,” places the well-known twenty captives taken from Luanda who arrived at Point Comfort in August 1619 within a much longer and far-reaching story than is popularly understood. These men and women, including Andolo and Maria, and their children, Doll and Denise, came as part of what scholars term the “Angolan wave” of captives who arrived in the Americas during the early seventeenth century, when nine out of ten enslaved people originated from West Central Africa. Morgan’s narrative of the twenty captives raises several difficult questions related to the legal, cultural, and social foundations of slavery. Through considering the European origins of Atlantic slaving, Morgan asks why Europeans revived slavery, a practice that “largely died out in northwestern Europe” by the early sixteenth century (p. 88). Slavery, he underscores, was associated with a profound “loss of humanity, a descent into bestiality” that English people generally rebuffed (pp. 88-89). The legal and social condition of slavery in the early modern period defined the very idea of the human itself. In 1638, as Morgan notes for example, Samuel Maverick of Massachusetts attempted to order an enslaved person to rape another slave to “breed” more captives for his personal use (p. 94). In his essay, Morgan draws attention to the fact that there were “far more white slaves in the Old World” than enslaved people of African descent in the Americas by the time the twenty captives arrived in Virginia (p. 91). The causal forces that propelled Europeans to turn away from enslaving other Europeans—including Baltic, Mediterranean, Muscovite, and Venetian slaves—and in turn constrain Africans within the legal and social boundaries of chattel slavery are unclear. Yet, racial Citation: H-Net Reviews. Blakley on Musselwhite and Mancall and Horn, 'Virginia 1619: Slavery and Freedom in the Making of English America'. H-Slavery. 11-04-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/11465/reviews/5274827/blakley-musselwhite-and-mancall-and-horn-virginia-1619-slavery-and Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-Slavery slavery involving African captives, and to a lesser extent indigenous Americans in early Virginia, was widespread well before 1619 in Spain’s American colonies. In 1513, Iberian slavers transported African slaves to Puerto Rico. Guy Cameron and Stephen Vermette, among others, have pointed out that captive Africans arrived as part of the San Miguel de Gualdape colony located in present-day South Carolina in 1526.[1] As scholars such as David Wheat have also argued, early Americanists would do well to acknowledge that the “Africanization” of the Americas dates to well before this “red- letter year.”[2] Such a long history of Africanization and African cultural mixing is apparent in the material culture record. Tobacco pipes found on Chesapeake plantations using African aesthetics and Native materials, which existed within wider European commodity networks, are evidence of the fundamental creativity of the descendants of the twenty captives in Virginia. The year 1619, as Morgan concludes, “hardly seems pivotal” from this longer chronological and Atlantic perspective (p. 106). In this sense, Morgan’s essay, and others in this volume, adds to scholarly work by April Lee Hatfield and Audrey Horning that emphasizes Virginia’s position in a broader intercolonial and circum-Atlantic geography.[3] Michael Jarvis’s following essay locates the origins of black Anglo-America on the island
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