How did slavery begin and grow in Virginia?

While the Virginia colonists did not strike gold, they soon found a crop that would earn large sums of money. Indians had taught the British how to plant and cultivate the crop in 1611. In 1617 the colonists first exported tobacco to England. By the late 1630s the colonists exported three million pounds of tobacco each year, and tobacco had become the region's staple crop.

Building a colony and cultivating crops required an enormous amount of labor. From 1607 into the 1670s most of this labor was performed by English servants and settlers. But the colonists soon found another source of labor: slaves. Slavery in North America began in 1619, when a Dutch ship docked in the Chesapeake and sold twenty Africans, transported across the Atlantic against their will, as slaves.

African slavery grew slowly during its first few decades. By 1670, approximately 1,500 African slaves lived in the Chesapeake region. In the 1670s slavery began to grow rapidly. Africans by now had adapted to their new environment, so that they were healthier, lived longer, and produced more children. Also, white servants from England were less willing to come to the Chesapeake because they had heard of the harsh treatment of servants in Virginia and because the economic conditions in England had improved. Tobacco had become very profitable, enabling wealthy landowners to purchase more slaves. By 1750, forty percent of the Chesapeake's residents were African-American slaves.

Between 1492 and 1770, more Africans than Europeans traveled to the Western hemisphere. Between ten million and eleven million Africans were transported across the Atlantic Ocean against their will and sold into slavery. Most of these African slaves were taken to Caribbean islands and to Central and South America, rather than to North America. Still, roughly an equal number of African men and women were taken to North America (while slaveholders elsewhere imported overwhelmingly male slaves), and slaves in North America were somewhat healthier than their counterparts elsewhere. Consequently, the number of slaves in North America ultimately was larger than anywhere else in the Western world.

The growth of plantation slavery in the South marked one of the important differences between southern and northern colonies. In Virginia, white colonists framed new laws to regulate and maintain the institution of slavery. Slaves, unlike servants, did not earn their freedom after working for a few years. Slaves were forbidden from owning property and exercising other freedoms available to white Virginians. Perhaps most important, the status of children born in Virginia was determined by the status of their mother. That is, children born to slaves were slaves, while children born to free women were free. Laws prohibiting relationships between black men and white women were written and strictly enforced, while slave owners frequently had children with slave women. The result of these laws was to maintain slavery as a racial caste system, in which all children with any black ancestry became slaves while only white people were free.