Featuring Larry Kenneth Alexander
Discover the hidden truth about colonial slavery and its legal abolition before 1776 in our Deep Dive video series.
Learn how corruption and racial repression shaped America’s slave-based economy, violating British law and the Treaty of Paris of 1783. Explore the legal case for restitution and reparations for 500,000 wrongfully enslaved Black colonials.
Restitution and Reparations Transcript
English law made the first 19 Africans that arrived in the colony of Virginia indentured servants—not slaves in 1619.
Colonial slave practices in the 13 British American colonies during the mid-1600s were products of colonial government corruption, graft, and racial tyranny.
These colonial slave practices in the British American colonies were unlawful, unprecedented, and uniquely an American creation as they violated the English Magna Carta (1215)—English law and all royal charters.
Furthermore, Parliament enacted the English Bill of Rights (1689) and Lord Chief Justice John Holt of England’s Court of the King’s Bench—its highest court ruled in the case of Smith versus Browne & Cooper (1702) “As soon as a Negro comes to England he is free; One may be a villain in England; but not a slave” which bound the 13 British American colonies to this controlling English legal precedent.
Many have conflated the Atlantic Slave Trade with British America’s hereditary slave practice of partus sequitur ventrem: however, this is a false narrative and untrue.
During the transatlantic slave trade between the 16th and 19th centuries, it is estimated that around 12.5 million people were forcibly taken from Africa. Approximately 10.7 million survived the Middle Passage and were enslaved in the Americas.
Historians estimate that about 388,000 to 400,000 Africans were directly brought to British North America, but under English law all such captive Africans brought to the British American colonies could only have the legal status of indentured servants, not slaves under English law. In fact, the British imperial government passed the American Colonies Act (1766) which legislatively abolished all colonial American slave codes and hereditary slave laws ten years before the Declaration of Independence, which made all people of African ancestry living in the 13 British American colonies legally free people by English law and entitled to freedom once America’s Congress ratified the Treaty of Paris of 1783.
Under England’s Magna Carta, slavery on British soil was prohibited by law.
Further, America’s Founding Fathers during colonial times were legally bound by an immutable doctrine established by Sir Edward Coke, the Court of Common Pleas in the Case of Proclamations (1611), that declared any pretended legislative act done without proper authority within the British Kingdom was void from the start and could not gain legitimacy over time.
Coke’s judicial ruling limited the legislative authority of England’s King, precluding him from acting beyond his prerogative, and foreclosed the English Crown from making new laws or altering existing laws.
This 1611 decision applied also to lesser English legislative bodies such as colonial legislatures, and Coke also found that such legislative powers belong exclusively to the British Parliament.
Further, the colonial American legislatures were bicameral, with the Crown serving as the upper house and the lower houses being the colonial American assemblies, which did not have the legislative authority to codify any colonial statutes, laws, or ordinances without the Crown’s formal approval.
The so-called colonial slave codes and their hereditary slave practices enacted in the American colonies were never lawfully sanctioned, as they lacked the required formal approval of the British monarch and Parliament—making them void ab initio—legal nullities.
During the English Civil War in the early 1640s, while conflict raged between Parliamentarians and Royalists in England—colonial American assemblies enacted slave laws without formal approval from England’s imperial government.
The corruption of the 13 colonial governments in British America and racial tyranny allowed colonial American slavery to exist and become endemic throughout the Atlantic World society.
However, legislative acts outside the scope of the legal authority of a British official were invalid and irredeemable—a legal certainty that foreclosed the lawfulness of colonial American slavery enacted by the 13 colonial American assemblies during these times.
Furthermore, following England’s Civil War, Parliament reasserted its supreme legislative authority throughout the Kingdom with the passage of the English Bill of Rights of 1689 and reaffirmed Parliament’s exclusive power to legislate on all critical matters throughout the Kingdom.
Moreover, Parliament also codified and granted fundamental liberty and civil rights for all ethnic Englishmen including those of African heritage.
Slave practices in the 13 American colonies violated the English Bill of Rights of 1689—and all colonial slave codes and their hereditary slave laws were legislatively abolished by the British imperial government’s American Colonies Act of 1766 “for all purposes whatsoever,” as these colonial laws denied and questioned Parliament’s supreme legislative power over the American colonies and its constitutionally authorized authority throughout the Kingdom—ten years before the Declaration of Independence.
Yet, the institution of slavery in the American colonies persisted, not because Parliament faltered but because the corrupt hands of colonial governance clung to their exploitation and graft.
However, justice was persistent, and it found a resolved voice in the darkest times and a champion in the unlikeliest places.
In June 1772, the case of James Somerset v. Charles Stewart reached the highest court in England, and Lord Chief Justice Mansfield delivered a verdict that would echo across the Atlantic and down the ages.
He called slavery “odious” and that it had no legal basis in the Kingdom.
Mansfield’s words struck at the heart of slavery’s moral and legal deficiencies: slavery could not exist in the Kingdom or its territories without a “positive law”—a deliberate and explicit act of Parliament.
And Parliament never passed such a law.
In his Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774), Thomas Jefferson called the Crown’s legislative acts an overreach, writing: “By one Act they have suspended powers of American legislatures and by another have declared they may legislate for us themselves in all cases whatsoever.”
These two Acts alone formed a basis broad enough whereon to erect despotism of unlimited extent.
Yet, despite his warnings, the Founding Fathers and all 13 state legislatures refused to abandon Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence and English law, unwilling to fully commit to the legal preservation of colonial hereditary slavery.
Restitution and reparations are distinct legal concepts, and the descendants of enslaved British colonials are entitled to both restitution and reparations.
Together, these legal remedies are necessary first steps for restorative justice which is long overdue.
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