In 1609 and 1610, the European colonists were cannibalizing their dead because they were starving to death. Only 24 years later, in 1634, they began to enact punitive legislation to remedy the shortage of people willing to do the back-breaking work of clearing and farming the land. There are several instances of slavery, including white slavery, which began appearing in the Maryland colony. Slavery in North America began through laws enacted by colonists, creating the legislative framework for human bondage.
On May 13, 1607 A.D., the first lasting European colony was established by the Virginia Company. By 1609, the colonists were practicing cannibalism to the extent that they were digging up dead bodies and eating them in order to survive. Even though they were trading with the Algonquin, they still were not able to sustain themselves. In 1610, they were about to abandon the colony when supply ships returned with provisions.
In 1638, the Maryland colony issued the first public proclamation called "The Doctrine of Exclusion". The policy determined that no one of African descent nor their offspring shall be permitted to enjoy the fruits of white society. By 1663, the policy was enlarged to stipulate that "black" people shall constitute a life-long, available, uncompensated, non-competitive, well-disciplined, permanently subordinated work force, which shall be separated from white society.
That law also demonstrates that in the early years there were large numbers of dark-skinned people moving about throughout the colony. If there was no active importation of slaves at the scale later claimed, who were the people of African descent that they were talking about? They had to have been talking about the heavily melanated people whom they labeled as "Indians"—who were already here before the colonizers arrived—and whom they later called "negros". They merely applied the label African because of dark skin tone.
Historical records demonstrate that indigenous, dark-skinned populations were systematically re-labeled under colonial laws to strip them of land rights, heritage, and nationality.
Nearly 100 years after the first colony was established, in 1705, the Virginia colony codified a set of laws applying to slaves called the 'Slave Codes', standardizing public policy on slaves as well as white behavior towards slaves. Virginia also conferred the status of personal property to "blacks".
1710 saw the introduction of a law designed to turn our ancestors against one another to gain temporary privileges. The Meritorious Manumission Act provided that any 'negro' could gain freedom by: (1) Saving a white person's life, (2) Protecting a white person's property, or (3) Inventing something that a white person could profit from. Many slave rebellions were suppressed or thwarted before they could begin because of this law. Most who informed were not actually freed, but merely given easier labor assignments.
In 1740, in response to the South Carolina Stono Rebellion of 1739, the Negro Act of 1740 was passed by the South Carolina legislature and subsequently adopted across most southern slave-holding states. The act made it illegal for slaves—whether African or Indian—to travel, assemble in groups, raise food, earn money, or learn to read and write. It also legalized the killing of rebellious slaves by slave owners.
Territorial conflicts between the British and French caused further disarray among fractured indigenous nations. Rather than remaining neutral in foreign disputes, indigenous groups took sides, fighting each other from 1756 to 1763 in the French and Indian War and losing massive numbers of people. Colonial history books mislabeled this conflict to obscure the British role and the underlying indigenous political dynamics.
In 1779, following the Revolutionary War, the formal reconstruction and rewrite of history began. This was a continuation of the deliberate destruction of indigenous culture—teaching enslaved indigenous people that they were exclusively from Africa rather than native to America. The long-term result of that systematic indoctrination is our modern identity crisis.
In 1786, the unbroken Moroccan-American Treaty of Peace and Friendship was negotiated. In 1790, fifty years after the Negro Act of 1740, four Moroccan citizens turned prisoners of war—Francis, Daniel, Hammond, and Samuel, along with their wives Fatima, Flora, Sarah, and Clarinda—petitioned the South Carolina legislature. Sold illegally into slavery by a European captain, they bought their freedom and demanded to be tried as Moroccan citizens rather than under slave laws. This resulted in the Sundry Free Moors Act of 1790.
The act recognized that "no Law of this State can in its Construction or Operation apply to them, and that persons who were subjects of the Emperor of Morocco being Free in this State are not triable by the Law for the better Ordering and Governing of Negroes and other Slaves." Coincidentally, 1790 also marked the development of the first federal immigration and naturalization acts.
In 1856, the landmark Dred Scott v. Sandford case was decided, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. Constitution had no power to make those of African descent or nativity into citizens of a state, and that states themselves had no power to make them national citizens.
In 1863, the structural collapse of the original constitutional order occurred when slaveholding states walked out of Congress sine die (without setting a date to reconvene according to Article I, Section 4, Clause 2).
In 1868, Congress forced the ratification of the 14th Amendment. This act created a separate corporate federal citizenship ("U.S. citizen") distinct from state citizenship, granting corporate entities constitutional protections while placing natural people into a status of perpetual federal jurisdiction.
In 2008, following centuries of systemic disenfranchisement, formal congressional acknowledgments and apologies for slavery were officially entered into the House and Senate records.
