1.5 The Origins of Slavery in British North America & Early Resistance (1619–1750)

The Blueprint Theme

"The origins and nature of slavery and resistance to it" is one of the twenty-one named CLEP themes, and it spans the entire exam period. This section covers its origins — the colonial construction of the institution — while the antebellum plantation South is treated later. The examiners' favorite framing here is process: slavery was built by legislation over roughly eighty-five years, not established in a single founding moment.

1619 and the Ambiguous Decades

In late August 1619, an English privateer sold "20. and odd Negroes" at Point Comfort, Virginia. They had been seized from a Portuguese slaver bound for Veracruz. This is the conventional starting date for African presence in English North America — but it is a starting point, not the birth of a finished institution.

For roughly four decades, the legal status of Africans in Virginia was unsettled. Some, such as Anthony Johnson, completed terms of service, acquired land on the Eastern Shore, and themselves held servants. Others were held for life with no statutory basis. What distinguished this early period was not the absence of exploitation but the absence of a legal category that made bondage automatic, permanent, and inherited.

Constructing Slavery in Law

The decisive shift came through colonial statutes, most of them Virginian, that answered the practical questions raised by the growth of a Black population.

Read the sequence as a whole: 1662 made slavery hereditary, 1667 made it un-escapable by conversion, and 1705 made it a comprehensive racial caste system. The 1705 codes also extended small privileges to poor whites, which historians read as an effort to split the interracial laboring class that had frightened planters during Bacon's Rebellion in 1676.

The Volume and Geography of the Trade

Of roughly 12.5 million Africans embarked in the entire transatlantic trade, only about 388,000 were landed directly in mainland British North America — under 4% of the total, with the overwhelming majority going to Brazil and the Caribbean. This is a favorite CLEP contrast: North American slavery was demographically small at the point of import but grew enormously afterward by natural increase, the opposite of the Caribbean pattern where brutal mortality required constant replacement.

Two policy changes drove volume:

1. The Royal African Company received an English monopoly on the African trade in 1672.
2. Parliament opened the trade to independent merchants in 1698, and imports to the mainland surged. Virginia's enslaved population roughly quadrupled in the following generation.

By 1770, about 460,000 enslaved people lived in the mainland colonies — roughly one-fifth of the total population. Distribution was radically uneven:

• South Carolina: an enslaved majority from about 1708; rice and indigo cultivation drew directly on West African rice-growing expertise, and the Barbadian planters who founded the colony imported a fully formed Caribbean slave regime.
• Chesapeake: roughly 40% enslaved by 1770, working tobacco in the gang system under continuous supervision.
• Lower South rice coast: the task system, in which a completed daily assignment freed the remainder of the day, allowed enslaved communities more autonomy and helped preserve African cultural forms — the Gullah/Geechee language and culture of the Sea Islands is the clearest surviving example.
• New England and the middle colonies: slavery was legal everywhere and enslaved people worked as dockhands, artisans, and household servants, but numbers stayed small — roughly 3% of New England's population. Northern merchants, however, were deeply invested in the trade; Rhode Island alone financed a large share of North American slaving voyages.

Resistance: The Continuum

Resistance is best understood as a spectrum, not a set of rare explosions.

Day-to-day resistance was constant and rational: slowing the pace of work, feigning illness, breaking tools, "borrowing" provisions, and quietly preserving naming practices, music, burial rites, and religious belief. This was the safest form and the most common.

Flight was the middle option. Runaways in the Lower South often headed for Spanish Florida, where a 1693 royal edict promised freedom to enslaved fugitives from the English colonies who converted to Catholicism. Free Black settlers built Fort Mose near St. Augustine in 1738 — the first legally sanctioned free Black town in what is now the United States. Maroon communities survived in the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina.

Armed revolt was rarest and most dangerous, and every episode produced a legal crackdown.

• New York Slave Revolt (1712): about two dozen enslaved people set a fire and ambushed responders; roughly twenty were executed, and New York tightened its slave code.
• Stono Rebellion (September 9, 1739): the largest colonial uprising. Roughly sixty enslaved people — many likely Kongolese with military experience and Catholic ties — gathered near the Stono River in South Carolina, seized weapons from a store, and marched toward Spanish Florida under a banner reading "Liberty," killing about twenty whites before the militia crushed them.
• New York Conspiracy Trials (1741): a wave of fires in Manhattan produced a panic-driven prosecution; about thirty Black New Yorkers and four whites were executed on thin evidence.

Consequence: The Negro Act of 1740

Stono's legislative aftermath is the causal chain the exam most often tests. South Carolina's Negro Act of 1740 responded by:

• prohibiting enslaved people from assembling in groups, growing food for sale, earning money, or learning to write;
• requiring passes for travel and authorizing armed patrols;
• restricting private manumission to acts of the colonial legislature;
• imposing a prohibitive duty on new African imports for a period, to reduce the ratio of African-born to creole enslaved people.

The pattern set here recurs for the next century and a quarter: resistance provokes repression, and repression is written into law. You will see the identical mechanism after Gabriel's conspiracy in 1800, Denmark Vesey's in 1822, and Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831.