2.6 Slavery in the British Colonies

Most Africans forced across the Atlantic went to the Caribbean and Brazil, where sugar plantations worked people to death and depended on constant new imports. Only a small share, fewer than 4 percent of those who survived the crossing (about 390,000 people), were brought directly to mainland North America.

Yet the enslaved population of mainland British America grew large, because there, unlike in the Caribbean, the enslaved population grew through births as well as imports. That natural increase made slavery in North America self-reproducing, which mattered enormously for later US history.

The first Africans in English Virginia arrived in 1619. For a few decades their status was not always fixed; a small number became free and even owned land, such as Anthony Johnson on Virginia's Eastern Shore. But laws soon hardened the line between Black and white and between slave and free.

Chattel slavery means people are treated as property that can be bought, sold and inherited, and it lasts for life. Virginia's 1662 law said a child's status followed the mother, so children of enslaved women were enslaved from birth. A 1667 law said baptism did not free an enslaved person, closing a door Christianity had seemed to open, and a 1691 law banned marriage between white and Black people. Virginia's slave codes of 1705 gathered these rules together.

Slave codes were laws that controlled enslaved people's lives. They banned enslaved people from carrying weapons, traveling without passes or gathering in groups, and they gave owners nearly unlimited power to punish. Barbados's slave code of 1661 became a model that South Carolina and other colonies copied.

• New England and the Middle Colonies: fewer enslaved people, who worked as household servants, dockworkers, artisans and farmhands. New York City had one of the largest urban enslaved populations. Northern merchants also profited from the slave trade itself.
• Chesapeake: enslaved people became the main labor force on tobacco plantations by the early 1700s.
• South Carolina and Georgia: rice plantations relied on the knowledge of enslaved Africans from West African rice-growing regions. Black majorities and grueling labor in the swamps led to strict controls.
• British West Indies: enslaved people were the large majority on sugar islands, and death rates were extremely high.

Enslaved people resisted every day: working slowly, breaking tools, pretending to be sick, running away, and keeping alive African languages, music, religion and family ties. In coastal South Carolina and Georgia, the Gullah culture blended African languages and traditions.

Some resisted with arms. In New York in 1712, enslaved people set fire to a building and killed several white colonists. The largest uprising in the mainland colonies was the Stono Rebellion of 1739 near Charleston, South Carolina. Led by an enslaved man known as Jemmy (or Cato), a group of enslaved people, many from Kongo, seized weapons, killed more than twenty white colonists and marched south toward Spanish Florida, which promised freedom to runaways. Militia defeated them within a day, and many rebels were killed or executed. South Carolina responded with the Negro Act of 1740, which tightened controls further.