Barbadians carry the plantation system to South Carolina

English settlers and enslaved Africans from Barbados were among the first people to settle South Carolina in 1670. The English brought decades of experience in producing lucrative staple crops through the enslavement of human beings, and they brought the system entire. That is the mechanism by which Caribbean slavery arrived on the North American mainland fully formed. The slave societies that grew on both sides of the water shared a high ratio of Africans to Europeans, and in both, people of mixed descent occupied a legal status that varied by place and period. The link between the Caribbean and the British colonies of North America, and then the United States, has run for roughly four hundred years, through slavery, emancipation, independence and migration, and it has made for uneasy social bonds the whole time. It began with planters who already knew exactly what they were doing.

Bertrand d'Ogeron reached Tortuga in February 1665 and set about converting hunters and pirates into settled colonists. He pushed cocoa as a crop that paid, and lent money at low interest out of his own pocket to men starting plantations. He also arranged the shipment of about one hundred women from French jails, recorded as orphans, to be married to the settlers. The count of planters rose from 400 to 1,500 by 1669. In June 1670 the colonists revolted briefly over the prices charged by the chartered company, and it passed. When d'Ogeron died on 31 January 1676 the economy of the French west had shifted from raiding to farming, and the civil and religious institutions of a permanent colony were in place. Read the measures together and the shape is plain. Credit for the planters, a crop that sells, and women delivered like stock. The workforce for these fields was already being bought on the African coast.

After Ambuila the Portuguese moved to crush Soyo, the coastal province that had grown rich on direct trade through the port of Pinda and had been drifting away from the Kongo crown for a generation. A Portuguese army beat the Soyo forces in 1670 and killed their prince. Soyo regrouped and destroyed that army in a surprise attack on 18 October, the feast of St Luke. Nobody threatened Soyo like that again. St Luke's Day became a national festival of deliverance with processions and war dances, and the church took a full part in it. Soyo was also the one place in the whole country with an almost unbroken Capuchin presence from 1645 into the eighteenth century, and it developed something like a settled Christianity, with eight churches in its capital, lay brotherhoods whose membership was near compulsory for high office, and princes who could read and write Portuguese.

Large planters in Virginia began buying enslaved Africans in quantity during the 1670s, as the flow of white indentured servants out of Britain thinned. The reversal took about twenty years. In the late 1670s white servants in the colony outnumbered enslaved black people four to one. By the early 1690s enslaved black people outnumbered servants by the same margin. What replaced indenture differed in kind. A servant served a term and then walked free. A slave served for life, so did the children, and the condition was fixed to skin. Virginia was writing that attachment into statute across these same decades. The pattern repeated across the North American mainland, and it had already taken hold in the Caribbean. I keep it on a Haitian timeline because Saint-Domingue was built on the same logic at greater scale, and because the racial law the mainland invented in the 1670s was still on the books of the United States when Haiti declared independence.