ABSTRACT
In 1619, Virginian John Rolfe, a tobacco planter and recent widower of Pocahontas, wrote that "about the last of August came a Dutch man of war that sold us twenty negroes". Although few Virginians recorded this historic moment, the arrival of twenty Africans to Jamestown marked the beginning of black America. In 1680, six decades after the initial arrival of black immigrants, African-Americans formed only seven percent of Virginia's non-Indian population. The earliest slaves in America arrived through the Atlantic slave trade, which had its roots in Africa, where rival kingdoms enslaved war captives generations before the arrival of Europeans. The journey from freedom in Africa to slavery in America was a horrific one. The three-thousand-mile sea voyage to the Americas—the Middle Passage—extracted a cost beyond human comprehension. Surviving the Middle Passage normally resulted in a lifetime of slavery.
