Anthony John was a black Angolan held as an indentured servant by a merchant in the Colony of Virginia in 1620, but later freed to become a successful hemp farmer and property owner. Notably, he was the first true slave owner—that is, the first to hold a black African servant as a slave in the mainland American colonies. Upon his death in 1670, his property passed to his children who later lost the land for the non payment of taxes.
Slavery was established in Virginia in 1655, when Johnson convinced a court that his servant John Casor (also a black man), was his for life. Johnson himself had been brought to Virginia some years earlier as an indentured servant but he had saved enough money to buy out the remainder of his contract and that of his wife. The court ruling in Johnson’s favor resulted in Casor becoming the first state-recognized slave in the Colony of Virginia. Slavery in Virginia was officially enacted in state law for free whites, blacks, and Indians in 1661.
Typically, young men or women would sign a contract of indenture in exchange for transportation to the New World. The landowner received 50 acres of land from the state (headrights) for each servant purchased (around £6 per person in the 17th Century) from a ships captain. The status of indentured servants in early Virginia and Maryland was similar to slavery. Servants could be bought, sold, or leased. They could be physically beaten for disobedience or running away. Unlike slaves they were freed after their term of service expired or was bought out, their children did not inherit their status, and on their release from contract they received “a year’s provision of corn, double apparel, tools necessary” and a small cash payment called “freedom dues.”—John Hammond Indentured Servitude. Johnson himself had arrived in Virginia as an indentured servant.
The practice of importing Africans to the North American colonies started in the Virginia area in 1619, though slavery in the Spanish New World colonies brought African slaves to the Americas as early as the 1560s.
