# data[].attributes.body
In the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia & Egypt captured enemies after war are forced to work in monumental building .

# data[].attributes.body
Herodotus, a Greek, in the 5th c. BCE (father of history) observed various regions on his travels and noted that Ethiopians, meaning "burnt skin" were the most beautiful people in the world. Greeks believed their culture was more civilized and all others were barbarians; this was because of how they lived, not because of the color of their skin. The Greeks, Romans, Chinese, West African Kingdoms, Islamic empires all practiced forms of slavery. Eastern Europeans were often in bondage that the word slave comes from "Slav." Slaves were prisoners of war, captured by pirates, or captured foreigners. The were normalized into the social structure and partly valued as they contributed to infrastructure and the household. Bondage often involved people that looked like you (Romans having "white" slaves).

# data[].attributes.body
In the late medieval period, slaves were brought into Europe from the Middle East and North Africa to fill labor shortages. The Arab slave trade that extended into Africa placed people in bondage  as field workers, teachers or harem guards (which required male castration). In Africa, people were traded in markets to serve as domestic slaves for the wealthy, or as female sex slaves. There were instances of a serf system to provide relief or protection, and to pay debts.

# data[].attributes.body
King of Portugal's uncle, Prince Henry the Navigator biographer was the first major slave trader to exclusively trade in African people from Portugal in mid-1400s. Prince Henry would claim that enslaving Africans brought them to Christianity from living "like beasts" and made no distinction between ethnic groups, only that they were Black and inferior. The start of "sugar-slave complex" emerges and the plantation system. Pope Nicholas V issues "Romanus Pontifex" of 1455 for King Afonso V  of Portugal to enslave any non-Christian and "reduce their persons to perpetual slavery" (source: https://www.papalencyclicals.net/nichol05/romanus-pontifex.htm)

# data[].attributes.body
Spanish explorers bring the first 100 African slaves to settlements in what would become the United States. These first African-Americans stage the first known slave revolt in the Americas -

# data[].attributes.body
Chattel slavery in which African people were enslaved based on race and bought / sold as property. 14% would die on the ship across the Atlantic.
Brazil - 3.650,000
Spanish C. America - 1.500,000
Dutch America - 500,000
British N. America - 500,000
Europe - 175,000
British West Indies - 1,660,000
French West Indies - 1,660,000

# data[].attributes.body
Enslaved people were NOT PASSIVE in their capture and journey across the Atlantic. There are accounts of nearly 2000 voyages in which a slave uprising took place, 1 out of 10 ships with roughly 100,000 enslaved people dying.

Source: http://slaveryandremembrance.org/articles/article/?id=A0035

# data[].attributes.body
John Rolfe wrote to Sir Edwin Sandys, of the Virginia Company, that in August 1619, a “Dutch man of war” arrived in the colony and “brought not anything but 20 and odd Negroes, which the governor and cape merchant bought for victuals.” These were the first slaves in the British colonies that would become the United States.

# data[].attributes.body
"...nor was this all; masters were soley annoyed by the frequent desertions of their slaves; for Boston men held slaves, and not only black slaves, but white ones" - early emergence of "policing" in the colonies that would become the United States

# data[].attributes.body
On July 9, 1640, members of the General Court decided the punishment for three servants - a
Dutchman, a Scotsman, and an African - who ran away from their master as a group.

The court proceedings reveal an example of interracial cooperation among servants at a time when the colony's leaders were starting to create legal differences between Europeans and Africans. John Punch became the first African sentenced to slavery for life by law in Virginia.

# data[].attributes.body
As a biracial daughter of a white legislator in Virginia and an unnamed African woman. She married an indentured servant with some legal training in England and together they sued for her freedom. According to English common law, the paternity or the status of a child derives from the father and it is against the law to enslave a Christian. Elizabeth won her challenge and was freed, which angered the ruling, white elite.

# data[].attributes.body
New hereditary slavery meant that a child born to an enslaved mother inherits her slave status, even if a Christian.

Other laws in the 1670s banned interracial marriages and sexual relations and deprived blacks of property. Other laws prohibited blacks from bearing arms or traveling without written permission. In 1669, Virginia became the first colony to declare that it was not a crime to kill an unruly slave in the ordinary course of punishment. That same year, Virginia also prohibited masters from freeing slaves unless the freedmen were deported from the colony. Virginia also voted to banish any white man or woman who married a black, mulatto, or Indian.

# data[].attributes.body
Nathaniel Bacon was a wealthy white property owner and relative of Virginia’s governor, William Berkeley. But Bacon and Berkeley did not like each other, and they disagreed over issues pertaining to how the colony should be governed, including the colony’s policy toward Native Americans.

Bacon organized his own militia, consisting of white and black indentured servants and enslaved black people, who joined in exchange for freedom, and attacked nearby tribes. A power struggle ensued with Bacon and his militia on one side and Berkeley, the Virginia House of Burgesses, and the rest of the colony’s elite on the other. Months of conflict followed, including armed skirmishes between militias. In September 1676, Bacon’s militia captured Jamestown and burned it to the ground.

Virginia’s wealthy planters were shaken by the fact that a rebel militia that united white and black servants and slaves had destroyed the colonial capital. Virginia lawmakers would soon create laws to give more rights to indentured servants and poor white farmers and permanently enslave those of African descent.

# data[].attributes.body
There was ethnic diversity among the enslaved Africans  in the colonies (West & Central Africa) which white planters believed would deter revolts. However, through trial and error, they were able to create nuclear families and kin relations. They established family names, traditions and knowledge - a "Nation within a Nation"

Enslaved people would form a newer cultural identity. They played drums and a stringed instrument that would become the banjo.

# data[].attributes.body
The colonial era presented enslaved Africans with more opportunities to escape than did the more settled and legally restrictive American society of the nineteenth century.  More runaways before the American Revolution than afterward may have tried to form maroon societies.  Large sections of all the colonies were uninhabited by whites.  Vast tracks of forests and swamps, not yet claimed and settles, offered deep cover for runaways.  Colonies were only just beginning to develop laws to protect slaveholders.

Maroon societies were bands of communities or fugitive slaves who had succeeded in establishing a society of their own in some remote areas, where they could not easily be surprised by soldiers or slave catchers.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Inside the Historic Swamp Refuge for African-American Slaves

# data[].attributes.body
Limits citizenship to Europeans. Non-Europeans - "Negroes, Moors, Mollatoes, and Indians" could be "slaves to all intents and purposes"

Full citizenship given to Whites as long as they did not marry outside of their so-called race, otherwise they would be banished.

# data[].attributes.body
Stories of runaway slaves to Spanish Florida gaining freedom spread in SC. Spain had issued a proclamation encouraging any slave to desert to St. Augustine and gain freedom.

On September 9, around 50 enslaved African Americans took weapons and killed about 20 white settlers (after a Securities Act that encouraged all white males to carry guns on them on Sundays). Their numbers grew to around 100 as they traveled south and 20 or so more whites were killed along the way. Shortly after, most were killed or captured. Those tried were later executed and displayed as a warning. The impacts led to the Negro Act of 1740 which restricted enslaved peoples activities, ability to assemble, grow food, play drums, earn money, and read. Additionally, slave-owners needed government approval for manumission, or freeing of their slaves.

Because many of the enslaved peoples, especially those from the Kongo who had become militarized after years of slave raiding in the region, the slave imports were cut and discipline tightened on the plantations. The colonies would focus on generational servitude from within.

# data[].attributes.body
In 1758 Carolus Linnaeus (Systemae Naturae), and later Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in Germany began the taxonomy of "races." Linneaus named 4, Blumenbach settled on 5.  Linnaeus based the races on appearance and geography; Blumenbach based it on psuedoscientific ideas of skull size and beauty - people that looked like him he believed were the most beautiful and coined the term "Caucasian" based on Caucasus region.

The racial science theories that would emerge in this time would be used to justify enslaving Africans and the Atlantic slave trade. US "scientists," such as Samuel Morton were using their racist ideology to find biological differences between whites and blacks (and subsequently reds - Native Americans, and yellow - Asians); Morton went so far as to say that the great civilization of Egypt was constructed by "white" rulers.