The early Africans in the English colonies in what is today
the USA were from Angola. They were treated as indentured workers, meaning that
they could buy their freedom after 4-7 years.
Anthony Johnson bought his too in 1835
and became a landlord afterward from the strength of his elbows.
The laws
institutionalizing slavery in the English/British colonies in America, more
specifically in the Virginia area (that later became the Southeast), started
coming into place in 1661, nine years before the death of Anthony Johnson. He
would sell his remaining land after the passing of those slave laws in the
1660s and after losing part of his land to a White forger who claimed through a
fake letter that Anthony Johnson owed him. Maryland, which was created as a haven for Catholics and where Virginia's
new slave laws had not taken effect, would become his new home and the home of
his descendants.
In a nutshell, Anthony Johnson, the wealthy landlord who was
captured by the Portuguese and
transported across the Atlantic against his will, who was later seized by
British privateers and traded for food, thereby making him an indentured
servant to his new overlords in Jamestown, Virginia, just like the 1,000 or so English indentured servants
(settlers who were required to work for four to seven years in Virginia to pay
the cost of their passage and maintenance) that were already residing in
Jamestown, never owned slaves as those who are making light of Trans-Atlantic Slavery are
trying to claim today that he was an established slave owner.
He was a landlord all right, but he was not a Slave Owner
because the "relative equality" he enjoyed with White Virginians came
to an end in 1662 after the
Virginia Grand Assembly passed the 1662 slave law stating that the “children born in the colony would take the
social status of their mothers, regardless of who their fathers were (based
on the Roman principle of partus sequitur
ventrem)”, regardless of whether their fathers were free, English,
Christian, and white. That law
contradicted English common law that gave the children of English subjects the status of
their fathers. And the fact that the laws considered Africans as foreigners and thus not English subjects,
made Virginia a hot seat for Anthony Johnson.
Me Before Them
by Janvier Chouteu-Chando,
