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underpants

(182,793 posts)
2. Yep - according to Wikipedia- John Punch from my home county
Sun Feb 10, 2019, 03:50 PM
Feb 2019
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Punch_(slave)

John Punch was a servant of Virginia planter Hugh Gwyn, a wealthy landowner, a justice, and a member of the House of Burgesses, representing Charles River County (which would become York County in 1642).[13]

In 1640, Punch ran away to Maryland accompanied by two of Gwyn's European indentured servants. All three were caught and returned to Virginia. On 9 July, the Virginia Governor's Council, which served as the colony's highest court, sentenced both Europeans to have their terms of indenture extended by another four years each. However, they sentenced Punch to a life of servitude. In addition, the council sentenced the three men to thirty lashes each.[1]

wishstar

(5,269 posts)
4. He is correct in that the earliest Africans were indentured and freed after years of servitude
Sun Feb 10, 2019, 03:54 PM
Feb 2019

They were granted land along with their freedom as were the white indentured servants. However, later in the 1600's discrimination against Africans took hold and outright slavery became institutionalized.

underpants

(182,793 posts)
5. As Howard Zinn points out most indentured servants left after completing their time
Sun Feb 10, 2019, 04:17 PM
Feb 2019

Their place in society was already cemented so they took off from at least where they had lived. If I remember correctly, a lot returned to their home country too.

obamanut2012

(26,069 posts)
6. No need to mock him -- he is right
Sun Feb 10, 2019, 04:18 PM
Feb 2019

And, indentured servants are also usually erased from American history, esp the girls and women who were basically sex trafficked. Many were taken from debtors prisons. Many died in servitude.

 

lancelyons

(988 posts)
7. You are wrong in saying he isn't getting out in front of this and an example of
Sun Feb 10, 2019, 04:22 PM
Feb 2019

Dems eating their own. Go tweet jim Jordan and help dems

WhiskeyGrinder

(22,334 posts)
8. He also said "whether it be good or bad."
Sun Feb 10, 2019, 04:25 PM
Feb 2019
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ralph-northam-interview-virginia-governor-tells-gayle-king-im-not-going-anywhere-in-face-of-calls-to-resign-2019-02-10/

GAYLE KING: And why you think you still deserve this job and so many people are calling for you to step down?

GOV. RALPH NORTHAM: Well again we- we have worked very hard. We've had a good first year. And and I'm a leader. I've been in some very difficult situations. Life and death situations taking care of sick children. And right now--

GAYLE KING: Because you're a doctor, yes?

GOV. RALPH NORTHAM: --right now, Virginia needs someone that can heal. There's no better person to do that than a doctor. Virginia also needs someone who is strong, who has empathy, who has courage and who has a moral compass. And that's why I'm not going anywhere. I have learned from this. I have a lot more to learn. But we're in a unique opportunity now. Again the 400 year anniversary of the history whether it be good or bad in Virginia to really make some impactful changes--

GAYLE KING: Of slavery in this country?

GOV. RALPH NORTHAM: Yes.

maxrandb

(15,326 posts)
10. Sell that right wing drivel somewhere else
Sun Feb 10, 2019, 05:00 PM
Feb 2019

He's taking about 400 years of Virginia history , not 400 years of slavery.

Just like any other state in this country, there is good and bad history.

FDR interred Japanese Americans. I suppose by the logic some use, we should abolish social security and the New Deal.

Blue_true

(31,261 posts)
9. He is correct.
Sun Feb 10, 2019, 04:53 PM
Feb 2019

The first Black people to arrive in servitude in America were indentured servants. They were to work a certain time for their freedom. Eventually enslaving Black people became more profitable and insured a supply of workers. Before Blacks, Whites that were in debt were indentured, but they could not withstand brutally difficult field and other manual work.

bullwinkle428

(20,629 posts)
11. Racists often use a talking point related to indentured servitude, which essentially states
Sun Feb 10, 2019, 05:04 PM
Feb 2019

the following: "My "Irish/Italian/German/fill-in-the-blank European ancestors came to America as indentured servants, and I don't see how that's not slavery, so why are all these blacks still whining and crying about it 400 years later?"

Northam isn't using this direct argument in the clip, but it's somewhere in the neighborhood. I don't want to use the phrase "dog whistle"...but...

former9thward

(32,002 posts)
15. Depite posters claiming blacks were "indentured servants" in 1619 they were not.
Sun Feb 10, 2019, 08:38 PM
Feb 2019

That is the problem with using Wiki for your history. Real historians don't use it. They use the actual documents (sparse as they are).

History of Black Americans
From Africa to the Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom
Philip S. Foner

Some historians hypothesize that the appearance of Negroes in the territory that later became the United States predates the casual passage in John Rolfe’s journal for 1619: “About the last of August came in a dutch man of warre that sold us twenty Negars.” Apart from the fact that Rolfe does not say that the Dutch ship brought the first Negroes to Virginia, and apart from the theory that Negroes were in the New World before Columbus, there is evidence that the first black slaves arrived with Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon, a Spanish colonizer, who founded a town in what is now South Carolina, at the mouth of the Pedee River, in 1526. The Negroes rebelled, marking the first slave revolt within the present borders of the United States; the colony failed, and the whites sailed away, leaving the blacks behind, who thus became the first permanent immigrants to this country, predating the Virginia settlers by almost a century.

Who were the Negroes who arrived in Virginia in 1619? From where did the “dutch man of warre” come? Little is known definitely about so important an event in American history. It appears from available records that in the summer of 1618, the Treasurer, an English vessel, sailed from Virginia “under pretense of getting salt and goats for the colony.” But its equipment clearly showed that it was a privateer bound on a marauding expedition directed against Spanish galleons with gold and silver from Mexico and Peru. Somewhere off the coast, the Treasurer joined forces with a Dutch vessel, and the two ships came upon and captured one of the few Spanish frigates directly engaged in the slave trade, loaded with Africans destined for the Spanish West Indies. Finding no gold or silver, the captors seized the slaves, transferred them to their own hatches, and set sail for Virginia. Adverse winds overtook them, and when the provisions ran out, a number of the Negroes died. Violent storms then caused the ships to lose one another, and the Treasurer may even have landed one of several Africans in Virginia before the Dutch vessel arrived. Finally, in the latter part of August 1619, after several weeks at sea, the Dutch man-of-war came to Jamestown with twenty survivors of the hundred or so Africans she had transferred from the Spanish frigate.

Despite the labor shortage, only a few Negroes were imported by Virginians in the first thirty years after 1619. This was not because of any reluctance to use black labor, but rather because the Virginia planters had to accept the white indentured servants furnished by the Virginia Company, which cooperated with the government in ridding England (erroneously considered to be overpopulated) of “undesirable elements” such as convicts and beggars. Then again, the supply of Africans for Virginia was limited since the Dutch, who at this time virtually dominated the slave trade, obtained higher prices for Africans in the Spanish West Indian colonies. In 1625 there were only 23 blacks in the whole colony of Virginia, and as late as 1671, Virginia counted only 2,000 Negroes in a population of 40,000.

https://web.archive.org/web/20131014135617/http://testaae.greenwood.com/doc_print.aspx?fileID=GR7529&chapterID=GR7529-747&path=books%2Fgreenwood

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