It’s understood there were varying forms of slavery prior to colonization (see Ancient and Indigenous Slavery), but no one can know for sure which kind Pope Nickolas V actually meant when he wrote the words “perpetual servitude” in his 1452 Papal Bull issued on behalf of Portuguese King Alfonso. We know that Nickolas issued another Bull about a year later with almost identical instructions with the exception that he changed the word “servitude” to “slavery”. Perhaps he wanted to make clear that the slavery he was granting to Alphonso was to be more like ‘prisoners of war’ than ‘domestic workers’.
It is difficult to establish a date when slavery began to represent its more oppressive elements until eventually that was the only way to define it. What makes it hard to find that particular moment in history is that it happened in varying degrees over a long period of time and in widely dispersed geographical areas of the world. And there weren’t easily available recording methods, nor the incentive, to report on the processes that were placing people into slavery. It wasn’t until those people became a commodity and ledgers were needed to record costs and profits. However, for the purpose of tracking slavery as a Colonization Element, its most oppressive form can be presumed to have become an established practice from the very beginning in the conquest of the Western Hemisphere.
It can probably be safely assumed that King Alphonso knew exactly what permission Pope Nickolas V was granting him. He captured and forced the West African Indigenous Peoples into extracting the material wealth from their home lands for his kingdom’s profit. Eventually, he found it was also profitable to captured and transport those same native people to Europe as slave laborers. The Portuguese continued their slavery practices in their Western Atlantic colonies, as did the other European invading nations – Spain, England, France, Netherlands and Denmark/Norway – forcing the Indigenous Peoples into slavery; first for extracting gold and silver, and later for working on the large agricultural plantations. When the invading countries found that the Indigenous Peoples had been diminished to the point that there were no longer sufficient numbers of healthy members available to enslave, they began the importing of African Peoples to become slaves in the Western Atlantic lands they had conquered.
Jamestown in the Virginia Colony was established in 1607. While there probably were individuals in that early Colony who could be classified as slaves, they had arrived with their masters who had moved from England to Jamestown. But in 1619, the first importation of West African Indigenous Peoples occurred in Jamestown and that date is considered the beginning of the ‘slave trade’ to the English colonies. Those first Africans brought to Jamestown were originally bound for Mexico, but two English privateer ships stopped and raided the slave ship and one of them took some of the ‘cargo’ to Virginia. That first instance was not a planned event, but it led to a massive undertaking lasting for years with the expressed purpose of forcefully bringing human beings native to Africa to serve as slaves in the English colonies, and later the United States.
By the mid 1600s, importation of African slaves had become a regular occurrence and a slave-based economy was well established, primarily in England’s southern colonies. Commercial regulations were established to direct and control the capture, transportation, selling and buying of the slaves. Rules and laws concerning the treatment of the slaves were not considered as being as necessary as were those governing the business aspects of slavery. And laws of that nature probably would not have been accepted by the slave holders, in any event. Until a unique question arose in some quarters about the status of children born to women slaves. Specifically, children who’s father was not also a slave. English practice, and in some instances the law, was that the child would hold the status of the father. In 1662 the Virginia colonial government passed the following law which has become known as the “Hereditary Slavery Law of Virginia 1662 – ACT XII”. It states:
“Whereas some doubts have arisen whether children got by any Englishman upon a negro woman should be slave or free, Be it therefore enacted and declared by this present grand assembly, that all children born in this country shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother,….”
Hereditary Slavery fortified the Colonization Practice of slavery and this regulation clearly distinguished this type of slavery from the former ‘Ancient’ slavery, where a child of an enslaved mother was not automatically considered a slave. This law conveniently absolved the white master of any responsibility for his child, and also provided a ‘legal’ way for a master, if he so desired, to create a steady stream of new slaves for his plantation.
While there were laws similar to the 1662 Virginia Hereditary law throughout the English colonies, it wasn’t until 1705 that a uniform set of regulations addressed how slaves should be treated. Again, Virginia became the first colony to pass a ‘Slave Code’ just as it had been the first with a ‘Hereditary Slave Law’. Other colonies, including some in the northern ‘non-slave’ territories, passed similar laws. The Virginia Slave Code is a very long document, some 41 Articles, and it covers just about everything pertaining to how slaves, indentured servants, and even non-christians should be managed and disciplined. The following is Article 34 of that 1705 law, which is representative of the general tone of the other Articles in the Code:
“And if any slave resist his master, or owner, or other person, by his or her order, correcting such slave, and shall happen to be killed in such correction, it shall not be accounted felony; but the master, owner, and every such other person so giving correction, shall be free and acquit of all punishment and accusation for the same, as if such incident had never happened.”
The term, “Chattel Slavery” is often used to explain the status of slaves in the English Colonies and later in the United States. Chattel refers to the legal principle that establishes the ownership of personal property other than real estate and permits the selling and buying of a person’s property, in this case, a human being.