Slavery in Virginia began with the capture and enslavement of Native Americans during the early days of the English Colony of Virginia and through the late eighteenth century. They primarily worked in tobacco fields. Africans were first brought to colonial Virginia in 1619, when 20 Africans from present-day Angola arrived in Virginia aboard the ship The White Lion.

As the slave trade grew, enslaved people generally were forced to labor at large plantations, where their free labor made plantation owners rich. Colonial Virginia became an amalgamation of Algonquin-speaking Native Americans, English, other Europeans, and West Africans, each bringing their own language, customs, and rituals. By the eighteenth century, plantation owners were the aristocracy of Virginia. There were also a class of white people who oversaw the work of enslaved people, and a poorer class of whites that competed for work with freed blacks.

Tobacco was the key export of the colony in the seventeenth century. Slave breeding and trading gradually became more lucrative than exporting tobacco during the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century. Black human beings were the most lucrative and profitable export from Virginia, and black women were bred to increase the number of enslaved people for the slave trade.

In 1661, the Virginia General Assembly passed its first law allowing any free person the right to own slaves. The suppression and apprehension of runaway slave labor was the object of 1672 legislation."America and West Indies: September 1672." Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies: Volume 7, 1669–1674. Ed. W Noel Sainsbury. London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1889. 404–417. British History Online. Web. 31 May 2021. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-state-papers/colonial/america-west-indies/vol7/pp404-417. Additional laws regarding slavery of Africans were passed in the seventeenth century and codified into Virginia's first slave code in 1705. Over time, laws denied increasingly more of the rights of and opportunities for enslaved people, and supported the interests of slaveholders.

For more than 200 years, enslaved people had to deal with a wide range of horrors, such as physical abuse, rape, being separated from family members, lack of food, and degradation. Laws restricted their ability to learn to read and write, so that they could not have books or Bibles. They had to ask permission to leave the plantation, and could leave for only a specified number of hours. During the early period of their American captivity, if they wanted to attend church, they were segregated from white congregants in white churches, or they had to meet secretly in the woods because blacks were not allowed to meet in groups, until later when they were able to establish black churches. The worst difficulty was being separated from family members when they were sold; consequently, they developed coping mechanisms, such as passive resistance, and creating work songs to endure the harsh days in the fields. Thus they created their own musical styles, including Black Gospel music and sorrow songs.

In 2007, the Virginia General Assembly approved a formal statement of "profound regret" for the Commonwealth's history of slavery.

Slavery Native Americans

After the first Africans arrived at Jamestown in 1619, slavery and other forms of bondage were found in all the English colonies; some Native Americans were enslaved by the English, with a few slaveholders having both African and Native American slaves, who worked in their tobacco fields. Laws regarding enslavement of Native Americans vacillated between encouraging and discouraging slavery. The number of enslaved native people reached a peak at the end of the seventeenth century.

The colony of Virginia formally ended Indian slavery in 1705. The practice had already declined because Native Americans could escape into familiar territory, and also suffered from new infectious diseases introduced by the colonists, among whom these were endemic. The Atlantic slave trade began to provide numerous African captives to replace them as laborers. The enslavement of indigenous people continued into the end of the eighteenth century; by the nineteenth century, they were either incorporated within African-American communities or were free.

Indigenous people were generally taken in the greatest numbers during battles between the English and Native Americans. They attacked or fought one another for years, partly because of the English people's lack of food and the Native Americans' distress that they were losing their land. On March 22, 1622, 347 or more colonists were killed and English settlements were set on fire during an Indian massacre. Approximately 20 women were taken from Martin's Hundred plantation on the James River and were said to have been put into "great slavery". To prevent escape, the English sent captured Native Americans to British colonies in the West Indies to work as slaves.

First Africans

In late August 1619, twenty or more Africans were brought to Point Comfort on the James River in Virginia. They were sold first in exchange for food and then sold in Jamestown as indentured servants. The Africans came from the Kingdom of Ndongo, in what is now Angola. Angela, an enslaved woman from Ndonggo, was one of the first enslaved Africans to be officially recorded in the colony of Virginia in 1619.

By 1620, there were 32 Africans and four Native Americans in the "Others not Christians in the Service of the English" category of the muster who arrived in Virginia, but that number was reduced by 1624, perhaps due to the Second Anglo-Powhatan War (1622–1632) or illness. William Tucker, born in 1624, was the first person of African descent born in the Thirteen Colonies.

There were 906 Europeans and 21 Africans in the 1624 muster. By 1625, the Africans lived on plantations; many of them were baptized as Christians and took Christian names. In 1628, a slave ship carried 100 people from Angola to be sold into slavery in Virginia, and consequently the number of Africans in the colony rose greatly.

The Atlantic slave trade had been in existence among Europeans before Africans landed in Virginia and according to custom, slavery was legal. Unlike white indentured servants, blacks could not negotiate a labor contract, nor could African Americans effectively defend their rights without paperwork. By the mid-1600s, seven legal suits had been filed by African Americans asserting their claim to a limited period of service. In six of the cases, their enslavers claimed that they were bound for life. Since 1990, after over 30 years of scholarly debate, the dominant consensus is that "the vast majority" of Africans were treated like slaves by their slaveholders. It was very rare for blacks to have a legal indenture, but there were some people who attained freedom in a number of different ways.

Mary and Anthony Johnson were among the few African Americans who were able to gain their freedom, herd livestock, and establish a prosperous farm. In 1640, a black indentured servant, John Punch, ran away and was sentenced by the Virginia courts to slavery for the rest of his life. Two white indentured servants who ran away with Punch had four more years added on to their servitude.

Development of African Slavery

Headright System

Eleven years after its founding, Jamestown became the birthplace of the headright system in America. To solve the problem of labor shortage, the year 1618 saw the British incentivizing permanent settlement in its colonies by offering 50 acres (0.20 km2) for someone newly moving to the area and 100 acres (0.40 km2) for people previously living in the area. Especially pertinent to the development of chattel slavery and indentured servitude, is that a facet of this system counted both African captives and European indentured servants as "heads" moving to the area, meaning that enslavers and masters of indentured servants could see their land acreage expand exponentially - 50 acres for every unpaid servant they brought with them, imported, purchased, or hired out.

Tobacco Monocrop Culture John Rolfe of Virginia broke the Spanish monopoly on tobacco in 1612. He did so by obtaining Nicotiana tabacum and successfully planting and maintaining it until harvest. This transitioned the colony to a cash-crop focused one, monocropping tobacco by 1613, the year the first shipment (of 4 barrels) arrived in London. By 1617, the quality of Virginia tobacco had made it the gold standard in European markets, which have become insatiable- 20,000lbs of tobacco is exported there that year. These exports grew exponentially, doubling to 40,000lbs the following year (the year the first enslaved Africans arrive in America), and reaching 60,000lbs by 1620.

The money obtained from tobacco exports was used, in turn, to fund the purchasing of more indentured servants and enslaved Africans to fulfill the rising labor demand. In the 17th century, 75% of all colonists in Virginia had come as servants, indentured (with a term of 4 to 7 years of service) or otherwise- Africans were often captives of privateer raids on Spanish and Portuguese vessels at this early time, and thus often considered bonded in perpetuity:

First of all, privateers saw Africans as spoils of war: [1619: Virginia's First Africans | https://www.hampton.gov/DocumentCenter/View/24075/1619-Virginias-First-Africans?bidId=]

Secondly, English colonists were aware of this, which may explain why not all of the initial Africans brought to Virginia in 1619 obtained their freedom. The same boat that sold 2-3 Africans to Virginia in 1619, the Treasurer, sold the rest to neighboring English Bermuda, where the Earl of Warwick, a large landowner, made use of their status as enslaved property as opposed to contracted indentured servitude: [1619: Virginia's First Africans | https://www.hampton.gov/DocumentCenter/View/24075/1619-Virginias-First-Africans?bidId=]

Bermuda’s new governor, Nathaniel Butler, made the reasoning explicit when he wrote to Warwick's cousin that [1619: Virginia's First Africans | https://www.hampton.gov/DocumentCenter/View/24075/1619-Virginias-First-Africans?bidId=]

Formalized slavery

A law making race-based slavery legal was passed in Virginia in 1661.

It allowed any free person the right to own slaves. In 1662, the Virginia House of Burgesses passed a law that said a child was born a slave if the mother was a slave, based on partus sequitur ventrem. Specifically, "all children borne in this country shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother." The new law in 1662 was an effort to define the status of non-English subjects in Virginia. It was passed in part because of a freedom suit in which Elizabeth Key, a mixed-race daughter of an Englishman, who had been baptized as Christian, won her freedom by a colonial decision. The law also resulted in freeing white fathers from any responsibilities toward their mixed-race children. If they owned them, they could put them to work or sell them. It also voided the previous prohibition against enslaving Christians. The colonial law was in contrast to English common law of the time that prevailed in England. Slavery created a racial caste associated with African descent regardless of a child's paternal ancestry. The principle became incorporated into state law when Virginia gained independence from Great Britain.