Word: jamestown
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...Powhatan started to show. For one thing, after 1610, Chief Powhatan began to feel his age. He became less decisive and more wishful for peace in his last years (he died in 1618). Meanwhile, the English population advantage back home began to take effect after 1610, when a reorganized Jamestown colony with better supply lines began to establish satellite settlements on Powhatan farmland. The squatters, as the Powhatan saw them, became so numerous that they could not be repelled. Even all-out war, which raged twice, did not stanch the flow of invaders...
...there were two peculiar features of Jamestown's, and more broadly Virginia's, transition to a fully functioning slave society that were to have fateful consequences for black Americans. One was the presumption, by the end of the 17th century, that a black person was a slave. The second was the hostility toward manumission and freed blacks generally, leading to laws requiring freed persons to leave the colony. In all the other slave societies of the hemisphere, including those of the French and British, manumission was not uncommon and resulted in the growth of significant freed nonwhite populations, some...
Rountree, an anthropologist, is the author of Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown...
Less than a dozen years after the founding of Jamestown, about 20 Africans from what is now Angola were sold to settlers of the fledgling colony. They found themselves in a raw, chaotic frontier society in which the English settlers were still trying to figure out the best way to survive and turn a profit...
...great contradictions in the growth of American democracy. The region with the most vibrant democracy, and the largest electorate, was deeply committed to large-scale slavery and the strong conviction that there was no inconsistency between liberty and slavery. For black Americans the consequences were tragic and lasting. Jamestown's creation instilled in the broader culture the belief that African Americans, even though they were among the earliest arrivals, did not belong to the body politic and were to be permanently excluded from all basic rights of citizenship...