ABSTRACT
Africans were first introduced into the English colony at Jamestown in 1619. There were Africans and men of mixed European and African ancestry on the ships that came with Columbus and on many of the ships of later conquistadors, merchants, pirates, and immigrants. There is a tradition in American history that rightly connects race and racism with slavery and thus focuses on the relationship between the two peoples who were most entangled in that institution, Africans and Europeans. In the 1620s, claims Theodore Allen, some colonist's already acquiring wealth from tobacco had transformed the immigrant European labor force from "tenants and wage laborers to chattel bond-servitude in Virginia". Edmund Morgan argues that, from the standpoint of the English in Virginia, they did not have to actively enslave anyone: "they converted to slavery simply by buying slaves instead of servants". Intermarriage among black and white servants was not unusual and was apparently accepted.
