Directly or indirectly, the economies of all 13 British colonies in North America depended on slavery. By the 1620s, the labor-intensive cultivation of tobacco for European markets was established in Virginia, with white indentured servants performing most of the heavy labor. Before 1660 only a fraction of Virginia planters held slaves. By 1675 slavery was well established, and by 1700 slaves had almost entirely replaced indentured servants. With plentiful land and slave labor available to grow a lucrative crop, southern planters prospered, and family-based tobacco plantations became the economic and social norm.
Among the first documented Africans in British North America were approximately 20 men and women who arrived at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. They were captives, likely from the kingdom of Ndongo in present-day Angola. Privateers had seized them from a slave ship bound for Mexico and traded them in Virginia. The Africans worked the tobacco fields in Jamestown alongside white indentured servants, but it is not clear if they were considered slaves.
Overview of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1501–1867. Yale University Press
By 1700 there were 27,817 enslaved Africans in British North America. In 1740, there were 150,024. By 1770, the number of slaves had grown to 462,000, about one-fifth of the total colonial population.
The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Minutes
Animation by Slate Magazine, 2015
Virginia, Coastal Plain and Piedmont, showing the fall line
Around 1720, after English immigrants had claimed the land along Virginia’s navigable rivers and within the coastal plain, colonial settlement spread west toward the Blue Ridge. In the 1730s, Thomas Jefferson’s father, Peter, became one of the first settlers in what later became Albemarle County. There he established the tobacco plantation that he called Shadwell and his son would call Monticello. Through Peter Jefferson and other early settlers, the slave-based plantation culture of the Tidewater region extended ever westward and became further entrenched in colonial American life, as the Atlantic slave trade expanded.
Thomas Jefferson inherited his father’s plantation, slaves, and livelihood. Peter Jefferson was a planter, surveyor, county justice, member of the colonial Virginia legislature, and a loyal citizen of the British Empire. Jefferson’s mother, Jane Randolph Jefferson, belonged to one of the colony’s most prominent families.
The intellectual and material character of his parents’ household at Shadwell shaped Thomas Jefferson in childhood and young adulthood. Peter and Jane Jefferson owned books, scientific and drafting instruments, fashionable furniture and table wares, over 7,200 acres of land, and 60 slaves. At Shadwell the young Jefferson learned the customs of an elite, slaveholding society while developing a great curiosity about the wider world.
Shadwell, where it all started
The economy of the Chesapeake region was based on growing tobacco with slave labor, exporting it to Britain, and acquiring British goods in return. Elite colonial Americans were enthusiastic consumers of imported goods that signaled wealth, gentility, and status: carved hardwood furniture, Chinese porcelain, silk waistcoats, creamware teapots, silver spoons, books, works of art, and exotic foodstuffs such as tea, spices, and sugar. Along with goods, colonial elites acquired British cultural knowledge, such as familiarity with classical architecture, dining and tea-drinking rituals, and the art of polite conversation.
St. James’s Square: Wedgwood and Byerley Showroom, York Street, 1809. Courtesy Guildhall Library, City of London/Bridgeman Art Library International