ABSTRACT
W hen the first “twenty negars” were dragged by John Rolfe from a “dutch man of warre” onto the Virginia shore in 1619, they no doubt had been slaves, but under English law they were simply servants like the vast majority of seventeenth-century migrants to the colony. When it became economically more feasible to pur-chase Africans than white indentured servants, the colonists codified their law, at first limiting the behavior of the African Americans and then eventually creating a status, previously unknown to the Common Law, of chattel slave for life. Briefly there had been a handful of white slaves in Maryland— free-born women who had married slaves—but in time the new status became associated solely with African Americans. As a result, the worldview of British North Americans moved toward a bipolar racial optic in which people were seen as either black or white.
