ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, February 22, 1996 TAG: 9602220062
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C4 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: RICHMOND
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
Virginia's first African residents arrived months earlier than historians have believed, newly discovered records show.
Thirty-two blacks were in the Virginia colony in early 1619, said William Thorndale, a genealogist in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Traditionally, August 1619 has been put as the date when the first Africans arrived along the James River in a Dutch ship.
Newly discovered records of the founding Virginia Company of London show that among Virginia's almost 1,000 inhabitants in the census of March-May 1619 were 15 black men and 17 black women.
The census classified the Africans as non-Christians in the service of English planters.
``So it seems the colony acquired African labor earlier and more deliberately than implied by the chance appearance of a Dutch privateer,'' Thorndale wrote in the Magazine of Virginia Genealogy.
The 1619 census hints at what the Africans' legal condition might have been in Virginia, and what part the English might have had in creating slavery in their American colony, Thorndale said in an interview.
Europeans believed ``you couldn't enslave a Christian, but you could enslave a non-Christian. And the census explicitly says they were not Christian. And it also says they were in servitude to Christians.
``This makes the English more a party to slavery than the chance appearance of the Dutch ship would make it appear,'' Thorndale said.
``What this shows,'' said Karen O. Kupperman, a New York University history professor and expert on the young Colonial period, ``is that the early history of the colony was a lot more fluid than we earlier thought.
``Presumably what it means is a lot of people were trading with the colony, a lot of people were moving in and out that we may not have known about.''
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