Four centuries: Jamestown - the origin of African American history - Advertising Supplement: Virginia

American Visions, June-July, 1994 by Henry Chase

Three centuries before the African-American poet and novelist Claude McKay penned "America," John Rolfe's Jamestown journal of August 20, 1619, recorded that "there came in a Dutch man-of-warre that sold us 20 negars." Traditionally, this Jamestown episode is considered the opening chapter both of slavery in the United States and of the African-American story.

On both counts, tradition deceives. Rather than enslaved, the Africans were compelled into a period of indentured servitude--after which they became landowning members of the community. Nor were they North America's first black arrivals. But the addition of these black men to a Virginia colony that came to be built upon the enormous profits of a labor-intensive tobacco cash crop economy did herald the development of chattel slavery and the mass importation of abducted Africans. Within a generation of the 1619 arrival, lifetime black slavery had become an established custom, though one still lacking explicit legal foundation. By midcentury there were probably fewer than 500 slaves in the entire colony, almost all of whom arrived as slaves from the Spanish Caribbean. However, the expansion of the tobacco economy, the beginning of slave importation directly from Africa in 1672, and the advent of a legal framework for slavery produced a sharply different picture by the century's close.

This process, which came to define America as a nation built on bondage and dispossession, is treated in a permanent exhibit at Jamestown Settlement. Although artifacts relating to African Americans in 17th-century Virginia are extremely rare, Jamestown Settlement's exhibit contains a 1600 English edition of A Geographical Historie of Africa, originally written in Arabic by the African scholar John Leo, and a 1570 hand-colored engraved map of Africa by Abraham Ortelius, illustrating the extent of European knowledge of African geography just prior to the colonization of Virginia. Also on view is the transcript of a 1675 petition to Governor William Berkeley written by the African-American servant Phillip Cowen. Cowen was protesting the arbitrary extension of his indenture--an extension that was racially predicated and that foretold the fate of others of African descent.

In addition to its permanent holdings, Jamestown Settlement is commemorating 375 years of African-American history with an August 20, 1994, special event. "The Arrival, Jamestown 1619: From African to African American" will feature a symbolic landing ceremony, music and dance, folkways, documentary films, and art and crafts. There will also be games, storytelling and educational programs designed for children. These will be produced by Richmond's Museum of the Confederacy--which annually presents a Down Home Family Reunion in Richmond's historically black district, Jackson Ward. (This year's Down Home festival will take place on Sunday, August 21, one day after Jamestown's Saturday event.

Complementing the Saturday event, an African-American history forum and heritage tours of other historical sites in the area that are directly tied to the African-American story are planned for Friday, August 19. Jamestown Settlement is also mounting a temporary exhibit, "Breaking New Ground: Archaeology of 17th-century Virginia," which will run until March 1995. "Breaking New Ground" features a ceramic vessel of probable Afro-Caribbean origin--the first to be discovered in America--and draws attention to the 1992 discovery of what may be the earliest known example of 17th-century slave quarters in Virginia. The exhibit also contains several examples of the "Chesapeake" style of tobacco pipe, which reflects the confluence of African, American Indian and European material cultures.

Jamestown Settlement

Route 31 and Colonial Parkway Drawer JF Williamsburg 23187 (804) 229-1607 Daily, 9am-5pm Adults, $7.50; ages 6-12, $3.75; under 6, free

SURROUNDING SITES

Not far from Jamestown Settlement are several places that explore aspects of the emergence of the African-American people and trace their contributions to the country.

WILLLAMSBURG

Nowhere is the true portrait of plantation life in America better revealed than at Colonial Williamsburg [(800) HISTORY], Virginia's capital from 1699 to 1780 and a city half of whose population was black.

The centerpiece of Williamsburg's African-American interpretation is Carter's Grove plantation. Here, one crosses a footbridge spanning a deep ravine--and two centuries--and enters a scene that is already becoming a textbook classic in African-American history. Reconstructed in the foreground are the only pre-Revolutionary slave quarters to be seen anywhere in the country. Against a backdrop of orchards and cultivated fields stands a cluster of slave houses; in the distance rises the 1755 brick mansion of Nathaniel Burwell, son-in-law of Robert "King" Carter, the largest slaveholder in Virginia.

The 20 or so African Americans who lived at Carter's Grove tended the orchards, raised the cereal crops and made the cider that Burwell sold to hungry and thirsty Williamsburg down the road. Today, living-history interpreters, dressed in the clothes and employing the locutions of the Colonial period, bring to life the reality of those days, demonstrating African Americans' contributions to the plantation economy and dramatizing the African traditions they retained and the Afro-American culture they created when their labors were done.