Just a few words in a letter of John
Rolfe's mark the arrival of the first Africans to Virginia in 1619. Four
hundred years later, historians know little about the “20. and odd negroes” who
arrived aboard the White Lion. They know their journey began in the Angolan
capital of Luanda, a port city and slave trading hub, when they boarded the San
Juan Bautista. In the Gulf of Mexico, the vessel was attacked by two English
privateer ships, whose sailors confiscated 50-60 of the enslaved people. One of
the ships sailed to Port Comfort, Va., now known as Fort Monroe in Hampton. The
Africans were then sold to wealthy colonists.
Though much of the rich history of these
men and women is lost, John K. Thornton, a professor of history and African
American Studies at Boston University, believes the homeland of the enslaved
people suggests they were Catholics. Thornton presented his work at the George
Washington Symposium at Mount Vernon in Alexandria Nov. 2.
Christians arrived in that part of
Africa more than a century before 1619, when a fleet of Portuguese explorers
made contact with the Kongolese people. The king of Kongo sent a group of
ambassadors to Lisbon and at the end of visitors’ three-year stay, they
converted to Christianity. In 1491, the king of Kongo was baptized, too.
His son, King Alfonso I, totally
embraced Catholicism. “Alfonso took the project of making his country a
Christian country really seriously,” said Thornton. The Portuguese sent
missionary priests to administer the sacraments to the people. “One priest who
came down said he thought Alfonso was an angel sent from heaven who knew the
lives of the saints better than we ourselves knew,” said Thornton.
The people also embraced Christianity in
the Portuguese colony in Angola, said Thornton. “There was something about this
Angolan region, not just the Portuguese colony but the surrounding region as
well, that had an Afro-European blending (different) than anywhere else,” said Thornton.
Catholic missionaries were also present in the neighboring Kingdom of Ndongo to
the south, but some there resented Catholicism as a sign of Portuguese
domination.
Around the time the first slaves were
brought to Virginia, there were two wars going on in that part of Africa, said Thornton.
The larger of the two was between the people of Ndongo and the Portuguese and
their allies. The Portuguese were the victors. “They sacked the capital city,
the king fled to an island in the river and (the Portuguese) hauled off a whole
set of people. That governor exported 50,000 slaves in three years,” said Thornton. At the same time, Kongo had a civil war, and those
defeated in that conflict may have been marched to Luanda and sold into
slavery.
Thornton believes the group of Africans
who arrived at Point Comfort probably included many Ndongolese people who might
have been Catholic, and a few of the Kongolese people, who were Catholic.
However, said Thornton, technically all the enslaved people were baptized
Catholic before their transatlantic journey. “The Portuguese law required that
all slaves to be exported were to receive a catechism and baptism before they
got on the ship,” he said. But the odds are that many already had been baptized
and would’ve been sincerely Christian.
In 1628, even more Africans were brought
to Virginia, most of whom Thornton suspects were Catholic Kongolese — the
defeated people in a conflict between a duke and the king of Kongo. The
baptismal records in Dutch-controlled regions of the East Coast, known then as
New Netherlands, also indicates the Christian faith of the enslaved Africans.
“In Dutch New York, where they’re receiving people from exactly the same area
in 1626, the fact that people were Christians was pretty clear because the
baptismal records are full of Africans baptizing their children, all of them
bearing surnames like Angola or Congo,” said Thornton.
Thornton and his wife, fellow scholar
Linda Heywood, believe that may explain the high rate of manumission, or
freeing of slaves, in Virginia at that time, as some Englishmen felt it was
immoral to hold a fellow Christian as a slave. “Some of the masters (may have)
decided, ‘I think this person has been held for long enough, he is a Christian,
I’m letting him go,’ ” said Thornton. Again, records from up north seem to support
this theory. At one point, 11 Africans who had been held for 18 years
petitioned for their freedom and the governor of New Netherlands agreed to let
them go, said Thornton.
As much as Thornton would like to know
more about the colony’s earliest slaves, the historical record hasn’t left
much. “We have almost no eyewitness testimony about the lives and personalities
of this first generation of Africans. And nothing at all isn’t much to work
with,” he said. But it is clear that the first enslaved people in Virginia came
from a largely Catholic part of Africa and they may have relied on their faith
in God to withstand the difficult moments of their life in the New World. It also
may have been their earthly salvation, the reason they lived the last of their
days as free women and men.