I am writing about Jamestown, VA because not only is it the place of my earliest ancestors but in honor of Black History Month, it is also the place of the earliest documented African’s arrival.
By the time the English decided to try again in 1607 after their failed Roanoke Colony, Europeans had been trading and trying to settle in the Americas for 500 years. You can read more about Jamestown here. With the end of the Anglo-Powhatan Wars in 1614, the colony enjoyed relative peace and more settlers started to slowly arrive. The Great Migration started in 1618, my ancestor, Lord Edward Bryant was born in Denbigh, Wales. He and his wife Lady Anne, along with their eight children arrived aboard the Mary Gold in the spring off 1618. In their brood of eight was a set of four-year-old twin boys, my 10x great grandfather was one, Richard Thomas Bryant.
I know nothing of what the family did in Wales, but since no trade is noted for Edward he probably became a tobacco farmer.
Both as a means for planters to gain more land and as a way to populate the colony, the Virginia Company developed a new policy of land ownership in 1618. Instead of Company controlled plantations, land began to be allotted to individuals. Settlers who had arrived before 1616 (“ancient planters”) were granted 100 acres of land for their own use. Investors also received 100 acres for every share. The new plantations were called “hundreds” or “particular plantations.” These plantations were allowed some self-government, an added incentive for new investors to risk their capital. Those who arrived after April 1616 and paid their own passage received 50 acres for themselves and another 50 for every person they transported. This arrangement, known as the “headright” system, became the primary means by which laborers were recruited and sent to the colony for the rest of the century.
This new land allotment scheme meant Edward received 100 acres for himself and his wife Anne and 400 acres for the children. 500 acres is not an insignificant amount of land. The colony had bricklayers and much of the housing being built had sturdy brick foundations and were timber and mud construction with thatched roofs, looking very much like the homes they left in England. They probably lived inside the fortified area for safety. Since children worked and families lent stability to the colony, families were encouraged to migrate.
Tobacco was very lucrative, but it was also labor intensive. Many indentured workers came to the colony, but having sufficient labor was an ever-present problem. Between 1618 and 1622 Jamestown grew from 400 citizens to 4500, the influx of population required a more formal governing body and in 1619 the House of Burgess was created.
Following instructions from the Virginia Company of London, the sponsors of the colony, the Assembly’s main purpose was to introduce “just Laws for the happy guiding” of the people. It met as a single body and was made up of the Governor, Sir George Yeardley, his four councilors, and 22 burgesses chosen by the free, white male inhabitants of every town, corporation, and large plantation throughout the colony. Henceforth, settlers were able to participate in their own government and promote measures for the general good.
The Assembly’s work covered a wide range of business including commercial and economic arrangements for the colony, regulating moral offences, overseeing matters of religion, and relations with the Powhatan Indians. As well as acting as a legislative body, the Assembly served as a court and adjudicated between settlers and cases involving Indian peoples. The Assembly was an important part of the Great Reforms that swept away the existing military government and created a new democratic society based on the rule of law and consent of the governed.
In session from July 30 to August 4, 1619, the General Assembly was the first representative governing body to meet in North America, or anywhere in the Americas, and has continued to meet to the present day.
In August of 1619, the first Africans arrived at Jamestown. They arrived aboard the White Lion and the Treasurer, two English Corsair privateers who had been raiding ships in the Caribbean. One of those ships, a Portuguese slaver called the San Jao Bautista. The Bautista was on it’s way from Luanda Africa to Veracruz Mexico full of slaves.
Tribal societies can be very similar, this was true with the Africans from Angola and the Powhatan. The Africans also had skills tending and raising common farm animals like chickens; goats and cattle; additionally, they knew how to make cloth from bark and vines, and how to work iron. So even with so much in common, they were still in a strange country with strange customs and language.
The White Lion landed at Point Comfort, the location of present-day Hampton VA, they bartered with colony officials, trading about 20 Africans for food and supplies. The Treasurer docked a few days later and likely barter away up to 9 additional Africans, including a woman named Angela. Records show 32 Africans in 1620 but only 23 five years later.
It isn’t known what happened to the missing Africans, some may have escaped, or gone to live with the Powhatans. The remaining were scattered among the farms and plantations of the colony bound in servitude, either as indentured servants or as de facto slaves.
On the east side of the island, the household of Richard Kingsmill included an African named Edward, who — like the others in the 1624 and '25 tallies — was listed as a "servant." This group grew in September 1625 when another African joined the Yeardley household and — according to court records — was paid 40 pounds of "good tobacco" per month for his labor. Still another African shows up in October, when a new servant named Brass joined the household of Gov. Francis Wyatt near what is now the 1907 Jamestown Monument.
Some African's did earn their freedom and lived out their lives as tobacco farmers like Anthony Johnson. Johnson is listed as the patriarch of the first community of African property in America. The indentured could earn their freedom by working off their term or converting to Christianity.
Though surviving wills, inventories and other records show that some Africans were being held as servants for life as early as the 1630s, others gained their freedom after serving out the term of their indenture. But in 1640, the Governor's Council sentenced a runaway black servant named John Punch to life service, marking the first official step in a legal process that transformed the uncertain status of blacks into near-universal bondage.
Among the milestone laws passed at Jamestown was a 1662 statute declaring that any child born to an enslaved mother would be considered enslaved, too. Five years later, the General Assembly voted to prevent baptism from being used as an avenue for black slaves to obtain their freedom.
Among those working to promote and pass such legislation were many Jamestown power brokers whose outlying tobacco plantations had become increasingly dependent on slave labor — and who often also served as the Virginia agents for the Royal African Co. and its London-based traders.
By tightening the restrictions placed on these “servants” they became for all purposes enslaved altho slavery wasn’t legalized in Virginia until 1662. In 1682 a law passed making all imported Africans slaves for life. Tobacco while a lucrative crop was also very labor intensive with each field worker handling about 10,000 plants a year. !0,000 times of bending over to plant, to weed, to replant and to cut, it was literally back-breaking labor. This never-ending need for labor drove the slave trade to Virginia.
There is also evidence showing Africans being part of the Spanish effort to colonize North America 100 years before Jamestown and of the being part of the Roanoke Colony. Many of the Africans who came to early Virginia came by way of Bermuda where they were growing tobacco. Their knowledge of tobacco farming was invaluable. I do not know if my Bryants owned slaves or hired them as indentured. I have found dozens of Black Bryants listed on the rolls of freemen and women starting in the mid-1700s when the records start.
My ancestor Richard Thomas Bryant became a doctor, my assumption is he learned from one of the two doctors in Jamestown. He eventually moved to Stafford, Virginia where in 1651 he married Keziah Arroyah of the Powhatan Indian Patawomeck Tribe and niece of Pocahontas. This marriage is immortalized by the tribe along with the marriages of the Elkins and Meese families into the Powhatans. Dr. Richard Bryant's children married into the Elkins and Meese families a generation later. These three families are important to the Patawomeck because they represent all that is left of Chief Wahanganoche, King of Patawomke DNA. He lives in their progeny and comes to me through the Swearingen line and my 2X great grandmother Mary Elizabeth Swearingen. You have only to document your line back to one of the three families to be a member of the tribe and many who carry that DNA and live around Stafford, VA. are tribal members.
This is the grandmother many thought full-blooded Cherokee, she wasn't but her 8X great aunt was Pocohantas. The family lore has always been a distant ancestor came to this country, settled in South Carolina, he then married the daughter of a Cherokee Chief. As with most family lore passed down it gets garbled. Wrong state, wrong time period, wrong tribe, but the rest was right. Oh, and the ancestor was Welsh, not Irish or Scottish.
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