Jon Casor wasn’t the first Enslaved African on North American soil just on Paper, 1526 Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón, a wealthy sugar planter brought 100 enslaved Africans to South Carolina ( Spanish colony ) San Miguel de Guadalupe, By mid-July 1526, Ayllón had organized an expedition of 600 settlers and 100 horses to found a colony. He lost one of his three ships in the river that Capt. Quexos had named the Rio Jordan; whether it was the Santee[21] or the Cape Fear River[22] is still debated by scholars.[23] The remainder of the expedition landed in Winyah Bay, near the site of present-day Georgetown, South Carolina, on 29 September (the “Feast of Archangels“). Francisco de Chicora left and escaped into the woods. Ayllón’s party proceeded 40 or 45 leagues, partly overland and partly by boat, visiting the “king” of Duahe en route, according to expedition historian Peter Martyr.

Slavery and rebellion

Together with hundreds of settlers, Ayllón had brought a group of roughly 100 “seasoned”, enslaved Africans and natives from Hispaniola[30] to labor at the mission, to clear ground and erect the buildings. After Ayllón’s death, some of the settlers mutinied against his successor. They mistreated the local Guale people and the enslaved Africans. The natives attacked the settlers and the enslaved Africans rebelled, many of them escaping to take refuge in Guale settlements.[31] This 1526 incident is regarded as the first documented slave rebellion in North America, and the surviving enslaved Africans are considered the first non-native settlers.[4]

1539

  • 30 May 1539: Hernando de Soto, following reports from Cabeza de Vaca, lands on the coast of Florida. Of about 1200 men in his expedition, around 50 were African slaves. After exploring modern Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina, the expedition ended in disaster.

Slavery Timeline 1501-1600

A Chronology of Slavery, Abolition, and Emancipation in the Sixteenth Century

This page contains a detailed timeline of the main historical, literary, and cultural events connected with British slavery, abolition, and emancipation between 1501 and 1600. It also includes references to the most significant events taking place outside of the British zone of influence (in the sixteenth century that was most of the world) as well as key events in the history of European exploration and colonisation.

While there is plenty of detail in this timeline, it is of course impossible to record every event related to slavery in this period. The following selection is thus intended to provide an overview of the topic only. If there is something I have left out that you think should be included, please let me know.

Click on a date in the list below, or scroll down the page, for information. Links are given to pages on this website only. For my sources and for further reading, look at the page Further Reading: Slavery, Abolition, and Emancipation.

1400-1500 | 1501 | 1525 | 1550 | 1575 | 1600 | 1601-1700 | 1701-1800 | 1801-1900 | 1901-2003

1502

  • 1502: Juan de Córdoba of Seville becomes the first merchant we can identify to send an African slave to the New World. Córdoba, like other merchants, is permitted by the Spanish authorities to send only one slave. Others send two or three.

1504

  • 1504: a small group of Africans – probably slaves captured from a Portuguese vessel – are brought to the court of King James IV of Scotland.

1505

  • 1505: first record of sugar cane being grown in the New World, in Santo Domingo (modern Dominican Republic).

1509

  • 1509: Columbus’s son, Diego Cólon, becomes governor of the new Spanish empire in the Carribean. He soon complains that Native American slaves do not work hard enough.

1510

  • 22 January 1510: the start of the systematic transportation of African slaves to the New World: King Ferdinand of Spain authorises a shipment of 50 African slaves to be sent to Santo Domingo.

1513

  • 2 April 1513: Juan Ponce de Leon becomes the first European to reach the coast of what is now the United States of America (modern Florida).

1516

  • 1516: the governor of Cuba, Diego Velázquez, authorises slave-raiding expeditions to Central America. One group of slaves aboard a Spanish caravel rebel and kill the Spanish crew before sailing home – the first successful slave rebellion recorded in the New World.
  • 1516: in his book Utopia, Sir Thomas More argues that his ideal society would have slaves but they would not be ‘non-combatant prisoners-of-war, slaves by birth, or purchases from foreign slave markets.’ Rather, they would be local convicts or ‘condemned criminals from other countries, who are acquired in large numbers, sometimes for a small payment, but usually for nothing.’ (Trans. Paul Turner, Penguin, 1965)

1518

  • 18 August 1518: in a significant escalation of the slave trade, Charles V grants his Flemish courtier Lorenzo de Gorrevod permission to import 4000 African slaves into New Spain. From this point onwards thousands of slaves are sent to the New World each year.

1519

  • 20 September 1519: The circumnavigation expedition of Ferdinand Magellan sets out from San Lucar de Barameda. In December 1520, Magellan discovered the ocean which he named the Pacific. Magellan died in the Philipines, 27 April 1521. Only one of the five ships to set out returned to Spain, on 8 September 1522.

1521

  • 13 August 1521: with the capture of King Cuahutemotzin by Hernan Cortés and the fall of the city of Mexico, the Aztec empire is overthrown and Mexico comes under Spanish Rule.

1522

  • 1522: A major slave rebellion breaks out on the island of Hispaniola. This is the first significant uprising of African slaves. After this, slave resistance becomes widespread and uprisings common.

1524

  • 1524: 300 African slaves taken to Cuba to work in the gold mines.

1526

  • 1526: Hieronymous Seiler and Heinrich Ehinger of Konstanz become the first Germans we know to have become involved in the slave trade.

1527

  • 1527: earliest records of sugar production in Jamaica, later a major sugar producing region of the British Empire. Sugar production is rapidly expanding throughout the Caribbean region at this time – with the mills almost exclusivly worked by African slaves.

1528

  • November 1528: a slave called Esteban (or Estevanico) becomes the first African slave to step foot on what is now the United States of America. He was one of only four survivors of Pánfilo de Narváez’s failed expedition to Florida. He and the other three took eight years to walk to the Spanish colony in Mexico. After their return in 1536, the group’s leader, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, published an account of their journey through modern Texas and Mexico (1542).

1530

  • 1530: Juan de la Barrera, a Seville merchant, begins transporting slaves directly from Africa to the New World (before this, slaves had normally passed through Europe first). His lead is quickly followed by other slave traders.

1532

  • 1532: William Hawkins of Plymouth becomes the first English mariner to visit the coast of West Africa, although he does not take part in slave trading.
  • 22 January 1532: Martim Afonso de Souza founds the first Portuguese colony in Brazil at São Vicente. Sugar production begins almost immediately.
  • 15 November 1532: Francisco Pizaro massacres the Incas at Caxamalca (modern Caxamarca) and captures King Atahuallpa, an event that marks the Spanish conquest of Peru.

1539

  • 30 May 1539: Hernando de Soto, following reports from Cabeza de Vaca, lands on the coast of Florida. Of about 1200 men in his expedition, around 50 were African slaves. After exploring modern Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina, the expedition ended in disaster.

1541

  • September 1541: on his third voyage to Canada, Jacques Cartier establishes the first French colony in the New World at Charlesbourg-Royal, close to modern Québec.

1555

  • 1555: the Portuguese sailor Fernão de Oliveira, in Arte de Guerra no mar(The Art of War at Sea), denounces the slave trade as an ‘evil trade’. The book anticipates many of the arguments made by abolitionists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
  • 1555: Queen Mary of England, under pressure from the Spanish, forbids English involvement in Guinea.
  • July 1555: a small group of Africans from Shama (modern Ghana) described as slaves are brought to London by John Lok, a London merchant hoping to break into the African trade.
  • 10 November 1555: a group of Norman and Breton sailors, under the command of Nicolas de Villegagnon, found the first French colony in South America. The settlement, close to modern Rio De Janiero in Brazil, is named La France Antarctique.

1556

  • 1556: The Italian city of Genoa tries to prevent trading in slaves – not for any humanitarian reasons – but only in an attempt to reduce the numbers of Africans in the city.
  • 1556: Domingo de Soto, in De justicia et de jure libri X (Ten Books on Justice and Law), argues that it is wrong to keep in slavery any person who was born free.

1562

  • October 1562: John Hawkins of Plymouth becomes the first English sailor that we know about to have obtained African slaves – approximately 300 of them in Sierra Leone – for sale in the West Indies. Hawkins traded the slaves illegally with Spanish colonies, but the trip was profitable and others followed. These contributed to increasing tensions between England and Spain. (As well as initiating the English slave trade, Hawkins also introduced both the potato and tobacco to England.)

1569

  • 1569: a Sevillian Dominican, Tomás de Mercado, publishes Tratos y contratos de mercaderes (Practices and Contracts of Merchants), which attacks the way the slave trade is conducted.

1571

  • 1571: the Parlement of Bordeaux sets all slaves – “blacks and moors” – in the town free, declaring slavery illegal in France.

1573

  • 1573: a Spanish-Mexican lawyer, Bartolemé Frías de Albornoz, publishes Arte de los contratos (The Art of Contracts), which casts doubt on the legality of the slave trade.

1575

  • 20 February 1575: Paulo Dias de Novães founds the Portuguese colony of São Paulo de Luanda on the African mainland (modern Angola). The colony soon became a major slave-trading port supplying the vast Brazilian market.

1577

  • 13 December 1577: Sir Francis Drake sets out from Plymouth on his circumnavigation of the globe. (Returns 26 September 1580)

1579

  • 29 January 1579: with the Union of Utrecht, the northern provinces of the Low Countries unite to create a Calvinist republic free from Spanish rule. The United Provinces (modern Netherlands) soon becomes an important slave-trading nation and an aspiring colonial power.

1580

  • 1580: Following the death of King Henry of Portugal, and a short campaign by the duke of Alva, Spain and Portugal are united under Philip II of Spain. Spain thus becomes the most important colonial power – and the largest participant in the slave trade.

1585

  • 27 July 1585: the first English colony in the New World is established at Roanoke Island (modern North Carolina), organised by Sir Walter Raleigh and governed by Ralph Lane. It was not successful, and the colonists withdrew in June 1586.
  • 16 November 1585: In the first of a series of attacks on Spanish colonial interests, Sir Francis Drake sacks the slave-trading settlement of Santiago in the Cape Verde Islands.

1586

  • 11 January 1586: Sir Francis Drake sacks the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo (modern Dominican republic). He goes on to sack Cartagena (modern Columbia) and St. Augustine (modern Florida). These acts of piracy are among the factors that precipitate war between England and Spain.

1587

  • 23 July 1587: A second English colony is founded at Roanoke Island, again organised by Sir Walter Raleigh. When it is revisted by English ships in August 1590, it has vanished without trace.

1588

  • July-September 1588: the failure of the Spanish Armada (an intended Spanish invasion of England, largely destroyed by bad weather) provides a boost for English maritime power and for English colonial ambitions, although the boost may have been more psychological than actual.

1592

  • 1592: Bernard Ericks becomes the first Dutch slave trader.

1594

  • 1594: L’Espérance of La Rochelle becomes the first French ship positively identified as participating in the slave trade. However, French merchants may have been involved in small scale slave trading since the 1540s.

1595

  • 1595: in a pattern that was to be adhered to for several decades, Philip II of Spain grants Pedro Gomes Reinal, a Portuguese merchant, a near monopoly in the slave trade. Reinal agrees to provide Spanish America with 4250 African slaves annually, with a further 1000 slaves being provided by other merchants.

1596

  • 11 July 1596: Queen Elizabeth I of England sends a letter complaining that ‘there are of late divers blackmoores brought into this realme, of which kinde of people there are allready here to manie … Her Majesty’s pleasure therefore ys that those kinde of people should be sent forth of the lande”. Accordingly, a group of slaves were rounded up and given to a German slave trader, Caspar van Senden, in ‘payment’ for duties he had performed.

1597

  • 1597: Francis Bacon writes On Plantations which becomes an important early text of British colonial discourse.

1600

  • 1600: Pedro Gomes Reinal dies. The Spanish slave-trading monopoly is passed to Jaão Rodrigues Coutinho, Governor of Angola.
  • 1600: King Philip III of Spain outlaws the use of Native American slaves in Spanish colonies.

1400-1500 | 1501 | 1525 | 1550 | 1575 | 1600 | 1601-1700 | 1701-1800 | 1801-1900 | 1901-2003

* This page last updated 24 July 2013 *

Main Slavery Page

Page 2 of 2

This page contains a detailed timeline of some of the main historical, literary, and cultural events connected with British slavery, abolition, and emancipation between 1601 and 1700. It also includes references to the most significant events taking place outside of the British zone of influence. In the early seventeenth century that was most of the world, but British influence grew throughout the century so that, by 1700, we might talk of an informal British Empire.

While there is plenty of detail in this timeline, it is of course impossible to record every event related to slavery in this period. The following selection is thus intended to provide an overview of the topic only. If there is something I have left out that you think should be included, please let me know.

Click on a date in the list below, or scroll down the page, for information. Links are given to pages on this website only. For my sources and for further reading, look at the page Further Reading: Slavery, Abolition, and Emancipation.

1400-1500 | 1501-1600 | 1601 | 1625 | 1650 | 1675 | 1700 | 1701-1800 | 1801-1900 | 1901-2003

1601

  • 1601: The Jesuits build their first sugar mill in Brazil.

1604

  • 1604: Shakespeare’s play Othello: the Moor of Venice first performed. The play features the figure of Othello, an African general, now working for Venice, who has previously suffered enslavement.

1607

  • 14 May 1607: Jamestown, the first permanent British colony in North America, is founded in modern Virginia.

1611

  • November 1611: Shakespeare’s play The Tempest first performed. The play includes the figures of Caliban and Ariel, both enslaved.

1612

  • 1612: The first permanent, although non-official, British colony is founded in Bermuda.

1613

  • 1613: Lorenzo Pignoria publishes De Servis et Eorum apud Veteres Ministeriis, a history of slavery in classical Rome.

1614

  • 23 November 1614: Bermuda colony becomes a Crown possession.

1617

  • 1617: first records of slaves in Bermuda.

1621

  • 3 June 1621: Dutch West India Company chartered and granted a monopoly to trade in the Caribbean. (Dutch slave traders had been operating with varying degrees of success since about 1600.)

1624

  • 28 January 1624: Thomas Warner founds the first British Colony in St Christopher, now normally known as St Kitts.

1625

  • 1625: Foundation of the Danish West India Company.
  • 14 May 1625: Captain John Powell lands on Barbados and claims the island for King James I.

1627

  • 1627: a Spanish-Peruvian Jesuit, Alonso de Sandoval, publishes Naturaleza, Policia, … Costumbres i Ritos, Disciplina, i Catechismo Evangelico de todos Etíopes (The Nature, Policy, … Customs and Rituals, Disciplines, and Gospel Catechism of all Ethiopians), which argues that slavery combines all the world’s evils.
  • 17 February 1627: Henry Powell, John Powell’s brother, along with 80 British settlers and 10 African slaves, found a colony on Barbados at Jamestown (modern Holetown).

1632

  • 1632: Montserrat, originally claimed by Christopher Columbus for Spain in 1493, falls under English control (although there may have been earlier small English settlements).

1635

  • 1635: Foundation of the French Compagnie des Îles de l’Amérique (Company of the Isles of America). The organisation is not a financial success and is restructured in 1642.

1644

  • 25 February 1644: A group of 11 enslaved people in New Amsterdam (modern-day New York) successfully petition the government there in what is the first group manumission in a North American colony.

1647

  • 1647: Foundation of the Swedish African Company.

1651

  • 1651: First written mention of slaves being imported into Montserrat.

1655

  • May 1655: British forces under the control of Admiral Sir William Penn take control of Jamaica.

1657

  • 1657: Richard Ligon publishes A True and Exact Historie of the Island of Barbadoes in London. The book contained one of the first detailed descriptions of a British slave plantation, and gave rise to the story of Inkle and Yarico.
  • 1657: George Fox, the Quaker leader, writes a letter ‘To Friends beyond sea, that have Blacks and Indian Slaves’. This is the first letter written by a Quaker expressing some doubts about slavery in the New World.

1660

  • 1660: The newly restored King Charles II of England charters the ‘Royal Adventurers into Africa’, the first English state-sponsored slave trading company.

1664

  • 1664: The financially troubled French Company of the Isles of America is replaced by the Compagnie des Indes Occidentales (West India Company). This survives for less than ten years.

1671

  • 1671: A group of Quakers, including George Fox and William Edmundson, visit Barbados and appear to have come into conflict with the Barbadian plantocracy for suggesting that slave-owners should treat their slaves with humanity and attempt to convert them to Christianity.

1672

  • 1672: The financially troubled Royal Adventurers into Africa, founded in 1660, is restructured and given a new charter as The Royal African Company. The company remains England’s major slave-trading organisation into the 1730s.

1673

  • 1673: The Puritan Richard Baxter publishes antislavery material in A Christian directory, or, a summ of practical theologie, and cases of conscience (London, 1673).
  • 1673: The financially troubled French West India Company is replaced by the Compagnie du Sénégal (Senegal Company). Under various name changes, this remains the main French slave trading company into the 1720s.

1676

  • 1676: the Quaker George Fox publishes Gospel Family-Order, being a short discourse concerning the Ordering of Families, both of Whites, Blacks and Indians, which urged Quakers in America to treat their slaves humanely. The book, although published in London, appears to have been based on a sermon he delivered in Barbados in 1671.
  • 1676: the Quaker Alice Curwen visits Barbados and, in a letter to the slave-holding Barbadian Friend Martha Tavernor, becomes the first Quaker to unambiguously denounce slavery.

1680

  • 1680: the Anglican Morgan Godwin publishes The Negro’s and Indians advocate, suing for their admission into the Church (London, 1680).

1681

  • 4 March 1681: Pennsylvania Colony, later to become a centre of antislavery thought, was founded by a grant to William Penn by King Charles II.

1682

  • 26 January 1682: Birth of Benjamin Lay in Colchester. Lay would later move to Pennsylvania and become an important antislavery campaigner in the 1730s.

1684

  • 1684: In London, Thomas Tryon publishes two tracts on slavery: ‘The Negro’s Complaint of Their Hard Servitude, and the Cruelties Practised upon Them’ and ‘A Discourse in Way of Dialogue, between an Ethiopean or Negro-Slave and a Christian, That Was His Master in America’. These appeared as parts II and III of Friendly Advice to the Gentlemen-Planters of the East and West Indies (London, 1684).

1688

  • 18 February 1688: The Germantown Protest, sometimes also referred to as The German Mennonite Resolution against Slavery, the first formal protest against slavery to be made in the British American colonies, is delivered in Germantown, Pennsylvania.
  • 1688: Aphra Behn publishes Oroonoko, or, the Royal Slave, the first novel to discuss the rights and wrongs of slavery.

1689

  • 1689: John Locke publishes Two Treatises of Government (London, 1689) which arguably offers a justification for slavery – although few scholars now believe that Locke’s arguments were intended to be applied to the Atlantic slave trade.

1691

  • 1691: Cotton Mather’s biography of John Eliot includes antislavery sentiment: The life and death of the renown’d Mr. John Eliot, who was the first preacher of the Gospel to the Indians in America (Boston?, 1691)

1693

  • 1693: The anonymous An exhortation and caution to Friends concerning buying or keeping of Negroes (New York, 1693) becomes the first printed pamphlet explicitly denouncing slavery and the slave trade. Arising from political controversies in early Pennsylvania, it is directed towards Quakers in Philadelphia.

1696

  • 1696: Thomas Southerne in London publishes his dramatic version of Behn’s Oroonoko, or, the Royal Slave.
  • 23 October 1696: Philadelphia Quakers rule that Friends ‘be Careful not to Encourage the bringing in of any more Negroes, & that such that have Negroes be Careful of them, bring them to Meetings, or have Meetings with them in their Families, & Restrain them from Loose, & Lewd Living.’ This is probably the first institutional attempt to limit slave trading in America.

1698

  • July 1698: Five ships of the Company of Scotland for Trading to Africa set sail from Leith to found a colony in Darien (modern Panama). The venture was a disaster, with the death of most of the colonists.

1400-1500 | 1501-1600 | 1601 | 1625 | 1650 | 1675 | 1700 | 1701-1800 | 1801-1900 | 1901-2003

* This page last updated 24 July 2013 *

Main Slavery Page

Virginia Slave Breeding/State We Demand Reparations Now! Human Breeding For Profits – Haki Kweli shakur

Petitions sign please‼️ Virginia Slave Breeding/State We Demand Reparations Now! Human Breeding For Profits

https://www.change.org/p/united-states-government-virginia-slave-breeding-state-we-demand-reparations-now-human-breeding-for-profits

Virginia John Punch 1640: In 1640, a black indentured servant named John Punch was sentenced to “servitude for natural life” for running away with two white servants, who were given extended terms of service. Punch’s case was one of the first documented examples of lifelong enslavement, The practice of holding Africans as slaves evolved and preceded laws that codified slavery. Racial hierarchies hardened with the passage of the first slavery laws. Although Maryland and Massachusetts were the first colonies to legalize slavery, it was the Virginia slave code, a series of laws enacted between 1662 and 1705, that became the standard that the other colonies followed. In 1661, slavery was officially acknowledged in Virginia statutory law.

John Casor was legally declared a slave for life on March 8th, 1655, thus becoming the first person ever to receive this treatment.

Indentured servants ( Enslaved Africans )

Britain’s first colony in North America was Virginia. There, the officials of this state offered land for free to those colonist who would bring more colonists to Virginia. Many people were ready to take advantage of this offer, but they couldn’t afford the cost of the trip across the ocean. In order to attract more people, the wealthy colonists of Virginia offered to pay the expenses of the voyage for those who will work for them to repay the debt. The term for people who paid for their journey through labor was ‘indentured servants.‘ Most of these servants learned a trade during the time in which they worked for the debt, and they could earn money through it after the debt was repaid.

One of the first servants to clear his debt was an African named Anthony Johnson who worked from 1619 to 1623 and attained his freedom this way.

Anthony Johnson was from Angola and was one of the first black colonists in America. After gaining his freedom and becoming a “free N*gro,” Johnson soon acquired 250 acres of land and started farming it.

During these four years, he became an accomplished tobacco planter and later employed five indentured servants of his own, one of them being John Casor. For bringing in servants, Johnson was given another 250 acres of land as headrights.

After completing seven years of his service, Casor asked for his freedom, which he was refused by Johnson. But, in the mid-time Johnson was persuaded by his family members to allow John Casor to work for a white colonist named Robert Parker.

Johnson v Parker

Johnson didn’t stick to his decision and chose to take matters to court and demand that John Casor is returned to him for service. County Court of Northampton County, Virginia decided to give the ownership to Johnson on March 8th, 1655 after Johnson claimed that Parker took his “n*gro servant” and that by rights “Thee had ye N*gro for his life.”

Lifelong slave – John Casor

John Casor was returned to Johnson, and as result of this decision, he was the first person ever to be legally declared a slave. Another consequence of this is that Anthony Johnson this way become the first slaveholder in the history of the United States. Casor remained a servant to Johnson for the rest of his life. What Johnson did was a precedent that led to the years of slavery in North America.

Legal implications of the court’s decision were vast, as it set several precedents. It was the first recorded instance of a man being declared slave without committing a crime. John Punch, who was declared indentured servant for life previously has earned his sentence by trying to escape his servitude, and the court found him guilty of breaching the contract. Casor, on the other hand, hasn’t done anything wrong. Several laws were based on his case namely the 1670 act barring “free and baptized n*groes and Indians” from owning Christians, meaning white Europeans. They did, however, retain the right to purchase members of their own race as slaves.

As racism became more prevalent in Virginia, Johnson decided to sell his farm and move to Maryland, where he leased 300 acres for tobacco growing.

After his passing in 1670, Johnson’s 300 acres were passed to white colonists and not to his children. The reason was that as a black man Anthony Johnson was not a citizen of the colony.

By this time, the slave trade was developing into a major business, and slave ships brought more and more African men and women to satisfy the ever-growing need for labor in the colonies. Having other black men as slave owners was considered a bad example that may provoke other slaves to revolt, so in 1699, the Virginia Assembly passed the law expelling all “free N*groes” from the colony, thus declaring that only way for an African to live in Virginia is to be a slave.

Blog: Haki Kweli Shakur August Third Collective New Afrikan Independence Movement National Spokesman/Historian

Source: http://www.brycchancarey.com/slavery/chrono3.htm

Follow Me At Instagram

https://www.instagram.com/haki_kweli_…

Facebook

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?…

Youtube

http://www.youtube.com/hakikwelishakur