August 20 - The White Lion Docks in Jamestown

On this day in Labor History the year was 1619.  That was the day that the first ship bearing enslaved people arrived in North America.  It was an English warship called the White Lion, that came to Jamestown in the colony of Virginia.  The ship was a privateer and had captured “twenty and odd” enslaved people from a Portuguese ship in a raid.  Virginian planters were interested in forced labor to work the tobacco fields in the colony.  The laws surrounding slavery in Virginia evolved over time.  Throughout the 1600s statutes replacing indentured servants to race-based slavery for life were written into the law books.  In 1654 John Casor became the first person enslaved under rule of law in North America.  By 1662 a law was passed that children would be considered enslaved or free based on the status of their mother in Virginia.  This meant that slavery could pass down from generation to generation.  This and similar laws ensured slavery would grow.  Historians estimate that 388,000 enslaved people came to what became the United States from Africa.  Due to laws passing down slavery to children, by the Civil War there were nearly 4 million enslaved people in the South.  By the early 1800s enslave people made up about one-third of the Southern population.  Initially enslaved labor worked predominantly to produce crops like tobacco, indigo and also rice.  Some West Africans had developed valuable skills in rice cultivation that white land owners exploited through slavery.  With the invention of the cotton gin in 1793, cotton became increasingly important to the southern economy.  The South’s dependence on slave labor became more entrenched, and spread westward with the growing United States until the Civil War ended the brutality of slavery.