“The Substantiall Planters Have of Those Negro Slaves": The Transformation of Elite Labor Forces and the Development of Slave Society in Early Colonial Virginia

John C. Coombs

Historians have, of course, long been aware of the importance of Virginia’s seventeenth-century conversion from white to black labor. But while scholars have devoted considerable effort to explaining why this pivotal transition occurred, a detailed analysis of how it happened does not exist, nor has the question of how the “process of conversion” influenced the cultural orientation of African American communities ever been fully considered. Because of their limited access to the transatlantic slave trade, even the wealthiest Virginians initially found it difficult to procure slaves and for decades elite-owned labor forces remained racially mixed. Early African immigrants consequently faced enormous pressure to acquire the language and conform to the behavioral norms of the dominant Anglo-American society, giving the cultural compromises that they ultimately reached with each other an assimilationist bent. As the founding generations relinquished community leadership to their native-born children and grandchildren, African-American society in the colony acquired an anglicized veneer that continued to persist and shape life in slave quarters even after the advent of large direct deliveries in the early eighteenth century.

[WP# 04CR020]