I thought this was an interesting and informative presentation of the role of African-Americans in the early days at the Jamestown settlement in VA. I hope it does not offend anyone. My comments are added in brackets [...] for clarification. Betty Pace --------- Forwarded message ---------- From: "Roy Johnson" <roy.w.johnson@worldnet.att.net> To: PACE-L@rootsweb.com Date: Thu, 19 Sep 2002 09:09:08 -0500 Subject: [PACE-L] Some historical surprises I taught history for 31 years of my life, and my history books told of the first blacks brought to Jamestownin 1619 by a Dutch slaving ship that ran aground and then sold their cargo to the colonists. The books said that the Jamestown residents were quite startled as they had never seen blacks before. I have a copy of the marriages performed in St. Dunstan parish [Stepney, London] in 1608, which included the Richard Pace marriage [the Pace patriarch at Jamestown, VA]. Imagine my surprise as I looked at the other marriages of that year to find "Sam and Mary, nigers." First, I was surprised at the word "nigers". I had been under the impression that the term "nigger" was derived from a corruption of the Spanish word "Negro", meaning simply "black", evolving first into "Nigra" then "nigger". However, the word "niger" is LATIN for "black". It now appears that this term pre-dated the Spanish "Negro", which came into use only later when most slaves were acquired from Spanish sources. I would guess that the older term then took on a negative connotation which it probably did not have in the beginning. Secondly, the assumption that Richard Pace and the other Jamestown residents had never seen blacks is obviously untrue. Richard and Isabella Pace, William Perry, and others from the St. Dunstan area were undoubtedly familiar with Africans before they came to America. Slavery did not exist in English law at that time, but indentured servitude did. Most servants had a contract for x number of years, but the law set a limit on how long servitude could be in the absence of a contract--I think it was 16 years. So those early African-Americans were released after their term of servitude and became free men. There is a record of at least one of them taking up some land and paying the passage of some white servants from England, thus acquiring indentured servants of his own. Not too many Americans realize that there was once a time when blacks could own whites. Also, there are descendents of these early black servants whose ancestors (in that line, at least) were never slaves. It took 100 years for American law to create our "peculiar institution" of slavery. In the 1600s when a person said he owned "slaves" he was referring to his indentured servants, and they could be white, black, or native American. Gradually laws were passed extending the term of servitude for blacks and shortening it for whites, until it eventually became a lifetime obligation. Other laws forbade black-white and slave-free marriages, and eventually, required that the children of slaves also be the property of the master, making American slavery unlike slavery in ancient Rome or in Africa, where this was not the case. It would be most interesting to know where Richard Pace was when those first blacks were brought ashore in 1619, and what he thought. Of course, we can only speculate. I suspect that his kindness to the Indian boy Chanco [saved Jamestown settlers in 1622 Massacre by warning Richard Pace of impending attack] would presuppose a similar attitude toward the Africans. I wonder if he knew Sam and Mary back in England. Roy Johnson ==== PACE Mailing List ==== Help this list grow - tell other Pace researchers about it. Also, the Pace Society of America home page is located at: http://www.pacesociety.org - check it out!