First Slaves First Hope

Home , John Casor

African Americans are so sketchy no one knows for certain whether they arrived in the New World First Slaves as slaves or indentured servants. Johnson is one of the few who left a faint trail in the written historical record. Several fragmentary official First Hope documents reveal that he managed, somehow, to gain his freedom, to Was an indentured servant in Jamestown buy hundreds of acres of land and become a prosperous tobacco grow- America's spiritual ancestor of freedom? er and to possess indentured servants of his own. The servants By David Nicholson included a fellow African whom local courts allowed Johnson to keep in The story of Anthony Johnson. from Angola, in southern Africa, lifelong bondage. one of the first Africans who came who were brought to the English That essentially made Johnson a to America, has haunted me for settlement of Jamestown in the slaveholder, a hard reality difficult more than two decades. Johnson was early 1600s. Documentary accounts for me as a black man to accept. among dozens of men and women of the lives of that first generation of Even so, he calls to me across the centuries. Like the ancestor I've discovered who in 1819 scraped together $2,000 to purchase freedom for himself, his wife and two of his children, Johnson was not content to simply endure. As uncomfortable as aspects of his life make me, I claim him as a spiritual ancestor: His story offers proof of America's multiracial beginnings, intriguing evidence of the possibility of freedom for all before colonial lawmakers began to officially sanction chattel slavery in the late 1600s.

Historians know precious little about the first Africans who were brought to Jamestown. One of the few written sources is an account by John Rolfe, the English entrepre- neur who married the Indian prin- cess Pocahontas and who brought to Virginia the strain of milder, sweeter tobacco that would make some colonists rich and eventually give them a reason to want cheap, slave labor. In a letter to the Virginia Company, Rolfe told of "20. and odd" Africans who came to Jamestown in August 1619 aboard a Dutch man-of- war. Rolfe made the vessel's arrival seem almost accidental. Low on sup- A slaver, cutlass near at hand, surveys his cargo in a hand-colored mezzotint from 1798. The plies, it stopped to trade for food. federal government outlawed the importation of slaves to the United States a decade later. George Yeardley, the colonial gover-

6 8 AMERICAN HISTORY JAMES FORTE AT JAMESTOWNE

A map of unknown provenance depicts the fort Jamestown's early settlers built in territory controlled by Powhatan. supreme chief of the Tsenacommacah Indians. the Treasurer, but their partnership was more deliberate and their nor, and Abraham Piersey, the head pean archives reveals that the White arrival in Virginia not as accidental merchant, traded corn for part of Lion, the ship sometimes referred as Rolfe made it seem. His vague- the ship's human cargo, but Rolfe to as "the black Mayflower," was ness about the number—"20. and said nothing in the report about an English privateer, not a Dutch odd"—was probably an attempt to what happened once the Africans man-of-war. Several weeks before avoid entangling the Virginia Com- came ashore. Historians have long arriving 40 miles dovmriver from pany in allegations of piracy. assumed that they were akin to the Jamestown at Port Comfort, the We know far more about the white indentured servants they White Lion and the Treasurer, an- lives of Yeardley, Piersey and James- labored beside in the tobacco fields, other English privateer, had seized town's other land-owning gentry free to earn their freedom after about 60 slaves from a Portuguese than we do about either the whites serving a term of years in exchange slaver bound for Veracruz. The or blacks whose labor made them for the privilege of having been Treasurer landed in Virginia four wealthy. A few of the white inden- brought to the colony. days after the White Lion, and it, tured servants were literate, and But there's trouble with this ver- too, may have left Africans. through their scant writings we hear sion of the Jamestown founding The captain of the White Lion a faint echo of their voices, pleading story. Evidence uncovered in Euro- claimed he'd merely fallen in with to be rescued from their brutal Hves.

ART RESOURCE. NY; OPPOSITE: © THE TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM JUNE 2013 69 But we know almost nothing about Still, a few managed to become the lives of the Africans sent to the free. Some may have been granted Yeardley and Piersey plantations. their freedom by generous or con- Precisely because we know so little, science-stricken owners. Others may they've become a kind of Rorschach have performed some extraordinary test, allowing us to make of them service or grovra too old to be produc- what we will. Nowhere is this more tive laborers. And some, including evident than in the fundamental Anthony Johnson, may have pos- question of whether they were in- sessed dogged strength and vidlled dentured servants or slaves. themselves to freedom. Stanley Ann Dunham holds her son, If the first Africans were inden- Thanks to Portuguese histories Barack Obama, in an early family photo. tured, it means they had a chance to and records, we have a better under- become free. Like their white coun- standing of the lives Johnson and Obama's terparts, they could look forward to other early black pilgrims left be- obtaining land after completing their hind in Angola, enough to know they Slave Roots terms. This interpretation of the may have been better equipped to Slavery did not become the law of Jamestown founding story offers the survive in the New World than the the land in Virginia until 1670, more hope of redemption to a nation that original Jamestown colonists. Some than six decades after Jamestown would later embrace slavery. If, at the may have been soldiers, familiar was founded. But blacks, who were beginning, the Africans had been free, vdth European weapons and tactics officially classified as indentured the terrible history that followed after they'd been defeated in a Por- servants in the intervening years, could be seen as a detour—though tuguese war of conquest. Some may were routinely denied legal protections one fraught with horrors—before have been born Catholic, members available to whites. John Punch, a native America returned to the straight path of an Angolan Christian community of Cameroon held in bondage on a to fulfill its original promise. established five decades before the plantation northeast of Jamestown, founding of Jamestown. Many would was caught trying to escape in 1640 Unfortunately, the sparse records have been farmers who'd used the with two white indentured servants. available suggest that America went hill-and-hoe technique the Indians A court extended the terms of indenture wrong from the beginning. While taught the first colonists. Im- for Punch's white companions by four blacks and whites did live and work portantly for their future in Virginia, years. Punch was sentenced to together early on, the Africans were some may also have known how to permanent servitude, making him the treated like slaves. White inden- grow tobacco. first native African officially enslaved tured servants are almost always Several men named Anthony or for life in colonial America. Punch listed in early Jamestown records by Antonio appear in the early James- fathered children with a white woman, first and last names, and those list- town censuses. One, thought to be probably an indentured servant. ings include ages, dates of arrival Anthony Johnson, was brought to the Over the decades some of their and the names of the various ships colony in 1621 and sent to Warres- descendants married other whites and on which they arrived. This informa- quioake, a plantation owned by Ed- crossed the color line. Genealogical tion establishes the length of their ward Bennett. If this is the man research and DNA analysis recently servitude. Africans, by contrast, are whose story has come down to us, revealed that Punch is likely the usually identified in official docu- then his first piece of good fortune nth-generation great-grandfather ments only as "Negro woman" or was to survive the Indian massacre of President Barack Obama through "Negro man." Few listings for Afri- of 1622; more than 50 on the planta- his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham. cans include ship names and dates of tion did not. His second was the ar- arrival, indicating that their terms of rival that year of Maria, the woman service were not considered finite. who would become his helpmeet.

70 AMERICAN HISTORY Sometime between 1625 and 1650, black rights, until slavery eventually symbolic common ancestor to all Anthony and Mary, as Maria came to became fully codified into law. black Americans. Johnson's success be called, obtained their freedom. Ironically, the system to which in gaining his own freedom was After his death in 1670, she outlived Johnson had given his "hard labor heroic, even if the man himself him by a decade. We know this, but and knowne service" ultimately may not have been a hero. In the we don't know when Antonio became betrayed him. After his death, a end, because we can know so little of Anthony and Maria became Mary, Virginia court refused to allow his him, he belongs to some future gen- just as we don't know when or how land to pass to his sons. Instead, it eration of novelists and epic poets. they may have adopted the surname ruled that the government could He's just too important to be left to Johnson. But we do know the historians. that by the mid-1600s An- AVhen I went recently to thony Johnson had claimed Jamestown as part of my 250 acres of land—50 acres quest to learn more about each for five people he'd Anthony Johnson, I stood brought to the colony. About on the banks of the James the same time, his son John River near a plaque that claimed 450 acres nearby marks the 1607 landing and another son, Richard, place of the 102 men and claimed 100 acres. boys who established the Later, Johnson and his settlement. Closing my eyes, family moved to Virginia's I tried to ignore the thrash- Eastern Shore, where he ing of a ferry and a woman would become involved in a calling her children to come court case that would have up to the nearby museum to far-reaching implications for "look at the skeletons" ex- future generations of black humed by archaeologists as Americans. In 1654 John part of the Jamestown Re- Casor, another black man, discovery Project. claimed Johnson was hold- For one fleeting instant, I ing him unlawfully as a RMASCALL5 could almost glimpse An- slave. Casor was, he said, an thony Johnson in a small indentured servant who had shallop making his way up completed his term. the James. He was clad in a Johnson denied Casor's cast-off shirt and breeches claim but, after a family from some even more unfor- conference, decided not to tunate indentured servant fight it. Casor was freed and who died at sea. Johnson was Slaves pack tobacco for shipping in a 1700 label went to work for the neigh- ragged but unchained. In my advertising "Best Virginia" in a London shop. bors who had helped him mind's eye, I watched him go to court. A few months fill his lungs with fresh air later, though, Johnson had second seize the property because Johnson and stretch to ease muscles cramped thoughts. He went back to court, was "a Negro and by consequence from fetid weeks below decks. He asserting that the neighbors had an alien." The last we know of the looked sternward downriver toward unlawfully taken Casor and were Johnson family is the name his the bay and the distant ocean, the holding him "under pretense that grandson gave to his farm in home he would never see again. And the said [John] Casor is a free man." Maryland. He called it Angola. then he turned, stout-hearted and This time, Johnson succeeded. Casor resolute, to face the future. • was ordered returned to him and the Ralph Ellison, author of the classic neighbors ordered to pay legal costs. novel Invisible Man, once wrote Johnson's suit provided one of the that you can't choose your family, A former writer and editor for the earliest legal precedents in Virginia but you can choose your ancestors. Washington Post, David Nicholson for holding a black person in slavery. He was speaking of Hterary ances- is completing a novel about a Over the next several decades, Vir- tors, but he might well have been museum curator haunted by the ginia would enact laws restricting speaking of Anthony Johnson, a ghost of a freed slave.