Virginia swaps indentured servants for slaves in twenty years

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.

On 30 October 1665 the army of the Kongo met the Portuguese forces of Loanda at Ambuila and was destroyed. The king, Antonio I, died there, along with his son, the dukes of Mbamba, Mbata, Nsundi and Gorimba, the marquess of Mpemba, and ninety five title holders altogether, as well as a Capuchin who had come against his prefect's orders. Antonio had brought his crown, his sceptre and the royal archives with him. Everything was lost. Angola's expansion had made a strong independent kingdom to its north unacceptable, and Angola's economy was the traffic in slaves feeding Brazil. The kingdom that had existed since Afonso I, and the Christian ruling class that had formed inside it, never recovered. Succession disputes multiplied between rival clans, and in 1678 one of the contending armies sacked Mbanza Kongo itself. The churches and palace were left in ruins and nobody lived in the city for twenty five years.

About 1670 buccaneers crossed from the island of Tortuga and founded the settlement on the northern coast of Hispaniola that became Cap Francois and is now Cap-Haitien. They had been trading with the Spanish towns of the north since the middle of the previous century. The houses they put up were rectangular and built by a method the French called the Indian style: forked posts driven straight into the earth, carrying the plates and the ridge, with walls of wattle or of split palm bark and roofs of thatch. Almost everything in the town was made of plant material. When Pere Labat passed through in 1701 he found a place laid out on a rectangular grid holding about three hundred houses. The city that a century later would be the richest in the Caribbean, with its theatre, its printing presses and its learned societies, began as a row of earthfast huts thrown up by men who lived off raiding.

On 23 March 1668 William Willoughby, governor of Barbados, concluded a treaty with several Carib captains of St Vincent. The island lies directly upwind of Barbados, so a boat pushed off from the sugar plantations there would come ashore on the Vincentian coast with almost no steering required. Enslaved people had worked this out. The treaty obliged the Caribs to seize and deliver up anyone arriving as a fugitive from Barbados or any other English island, and to acknowledge themselves subjects of the English king. In return the English would leave them St Vincent and St Lucia. The Caribs honoured none of it. Thirty two years later the missionary Jean Baptiste Labat found a great number of escaped Africans living on the island, and recorded that the Caribs had stopped selling such people back and now treated them as members of one nation with themselves. The refuge the treaty was written to close stayed open for another century.