re: #234 HappyWarrior

I haven’t studied Virginia history in some time but we were always told in school here that the first Africans arrived as indentured servants in 1619 via Dutch traders.

Ooops: seems you are right: from Wikipedia

The first 19 or so Africans to reach the English colonies arrived in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619, brought by Dutch traders who had seized them from a captured Spanish slave ship. The Spanish usually baptized slaves in Africa before embarking them. As English custom then considered baptized Christians exempt from slavery, colonists treated these Africans as indentured servants, and they joined about 1,000 English indentured servants already in the colony

Though Wiki also says that it only took a couple of decades for practices to shift to the race-based chattel system…