Hello Again Loretta!

It was my intention to leave you some interesting wordage which supports the feeling that American Slave Owners wanted to be known as Slave Owners, it was a definative badge of superiority. In my haste, I neglected to leave you with Excerpts from The PBS Series Africans In America
From The Original Written Book Africans In America (America’s Journey Through Slavery)
1998 by Author(s):
Charles Johnson, Patricia Smith and the WGBH Series
Research Team

I think they more accurately clear up the Ownership vs. Holder debate.

This portion of the PBS vehicle was entitled
"Europeans Transform America With Slavery";

"In 1663, a Virginia court decided that if a child were born to a slave, that child would also be enslaved. An African woman could no longer rejoice in the fact that her child would be born free. Because she was black and the child came from her body, the child would serve a master".

"There were other options
Blacks and Whites could have both retained their indentured status, or both groups could have been doomed to eternal servitude. Standing at the first of many crossroads, the American colonies chose to focus on color difference. The foundation of the agrarian economic system would be the systematic oppression of black people.
Free Blacks were forced to fight continually for their independence, since soon even free blacks could be captured and sold into a lifetime of slavery. No one would doubt a plantation owner’s word if he claimed ownership of a black person, if he insisted that he had a perfect right to sell that person into servitude. Free Africans had no way of proving they were free".

"By the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century, the economic future of the new colonies would be tied to the buying, selling and maintenance of black people, bred to be the lifelong slaves of whites. England became the dominant force in the slave trade".

"The English took particular comfort in the fact that the Africans did not look like them, did not sound like them, and were thoroughly unfamiliar with English customs".
In 1705, the Virginia General Assembly declared:

“All servants imported and brought into this Country… who were not Christians in their native Country…shall be accounted and be slaves. All Negro, mulatto and Indian slaves within this dominion…shall be held to be real estate. If any slave resist his master…correcting such slave, and shall happen to be killed in such correction…the master shall be free of all punishment…as if such accident never happened".

"It was not uncommon to see a man,woman, or child’s back criss-crossed with raw scars, not uncommon to see Africans hobble about with missing feet, to see a ragged stump where a hand should be. It was not uncommon to see their eyes swollen shut, their heads bound in rusty iron contraptions, their bones broken. It was not uncommon to hear that someone alive was now dead, someone who had dared to stand tall before his master and say, in his own language, “No, No more”

It was now legal to kill African Slaves for the sake of discipline, and their deaths were not uncommon".

"The Virginia colony designed laws to hold Africans in eternal slavery—not because they were poor, not because they were vagrant, not because they had been accused and found guilty of crimes, but simply because they were African. The semi-protected status of indentured servitude was no longer available to them. While the indentured servant labored to fulfill a contract, the slave labored for life with no limit to his misery. A slave labored under the burden of knowing that his children, even those yet unborn, were destined to be slaves for the span of their natural lives".

“About the last of August came a Dutch man of warre that sold us twenty Negars”—John Rolf, Jamestown 1619

“The ship emerged as if the violent storm had given it birth, drawing its shape from a clinging mist. It’s shimmering eadges hardened as it dropped anchor at Jamestown. Those aboard were ghosts before they became men.” (No one recorded the ship’s name or investigated its origin.)

The crew offered to trade the Africans for food, and twenty captives were released to their new owners. There had been Africans in North America before, but the first permanent African settlers in an English colony arrived that long ago summer. It was a full year before the Pilgrims reached Massachusetts on the Mayflower.

The blacks who were put to work in Jamestown may have shared the same status as English indentured servants. On that day in 1619 there was probably no distinction made.

Soon after, black indentured servants bought their own freedom, most faced lifelong obstacles in maintaining their freedom, there is a recorded court case in which three male indentured servants ran away from their masters one white Duchman called Victor, one white Scotchman called James Gregory and one black called John Punch ) all three were caught and brought to trial.

Victor and James Gregory was sentenced by the court to “first serve out their times according to their indentures and one whole year apiece after… and after that… to serve the colony for three whole years apiece.

The third man, a Negro named John Punch sentence stated “shall serve his said master or his assigns for the time of his natural life”.

It was John Punch’s physical appearance that sparked the reprimand. In no surviving legal record has any white servant in America been sentenced to spend his life as a slave".

Submitted for your consideration!

Sincerely,
Your Afrigeneas Sister
Angela Molette