Featuring Larry Kenneth Alexander
Discover the hidden truth about colonial slavery and its legal abolition before 1776 in our Deep Dive video series.
Uncover how the United States violated international law by sustaining hereditary slavery after British law had abolished it. Learn how Afrofuturism reexamines history and offers speculative storytelling as a means of justice and historical correction.
Something Old, Something New Part 2: The Criminal Enslavement of 500,000 Black Colonials and Afrofuturism in the 21st Century Transcript:
This is part 2 of the 3 part series titled: Something Old, Something New: The Criminal Enslavement of 500,000 Black Colonials and Afrofuturism in the 21st Century by Larry Kenneth Alexander
The History of Colonial Slavery
America’s historiography has conflated its hereditary slave scheme with the Atlantic Slave Trade practice to mask the unlawfulness of enslaving and exploiting legally free Black Englishmen after the American Revolution ended in 1783.
Enslaving 500,000 Black colonials, denying them fundamental due process of law, and establishing a hereditary slave-based economy, making them the cornerstone of America’s economy, were all wildly outside the English rule of law and international norms as slaves under colonial slave codes and Negro Laws were abolished before the Declaration of Independence by way of the American Colonies Act (1766).
However, colonial slavery’s origin and the English rule of law eviscerate these long-standing narratives.
Further, it is reasonable to conclude that an objective review of Parliament’s legislative act in 1766 will evidence that the British imperial government “abolished” all repugnant colonial “resolutions” and resulting hereditary slave ordinances and Negro Laws enacted by the colonial assemblies in the American colonies because they “denied” and “questioned” Parliament’s exclusive legislative power and authority to legalize slavery in the Kingdom, which returned enslaved black colonials to status quo ante, a legal free Englishman status possessed when independence was declared in 1776.
Future readers must understand that the Atlantic Slave Trade was a separate and distinct form of human exploitation from what was being practiced within the 13 British American colonies during colonial times.
Under the English Magna Carta of 1215 and English common law, slavery was rejected as a lawful practice on “British sovereign soil.” The 13 colonies in America were all “British sovereign soil” as England’s monarch granted them a colonial charter—but without the legislative authority to enact slave laws.
English law was why the first 19 Africans who arrived in the colony of Virginia in 1619 were indentured servants, not slaves.
Moreover, colonial slavery in the American colonies violated the English Magna Carta of 1215 and English common law.
It was an extralegal slave practice within the 13 British American colonies because such slave laws enacted by a sole House of each colonial Legislature violated colonial charters and were legal nullities.
The extralegal practice of colonial American slavery began in the early 1640s and spread throughout the 13 American colonies due to colonial government corruption and racial tyranny.
Furthermore, the British imperial government legislatively abolished all colonial American slave codes and Negro Laws by way of Parliament’s American Colonies Act of 1766, ten years before America’s Declaration of Independence.
Parliament’s supreme law-making authority over colonial America’s slavery was affirmed by England’s Court of the King’s Bench in the landmark James Somerset v. Charles Stewart case in 1772.
Colonial America’s slave codes and Negro Laws violated each colonial charter and the English Bill of Rights of 1689, as they denied and questioned Parliament’s exclusive “positive” lawmaking power, and as well, England’s Magna Carta of 1215, Article 39.
This provision in the Magna Carta provided: “No freemen shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised [sic] or exiled or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him nor send upon him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.” This clause enshrined England’s common law principle of personal liberty and due process of law.
These principles laid the groundwork for later legal and substantive arguments against the institution of slavery.
Future abolitionists came to rely on the Magna Carta to argue that slavery in the Kingdom violated the natural right to liberty and the rule of law that the English Magna Carta announced.
While England’s Magna Carta distinguished between “free men” and others (e.g., serfs, who were tied to the land), its principles of freedom were later extended in legal and moral debates to argue that no person, regardless of status, could be enslaved under English law.
This interpretation aligned with rulings like the Cartwright’s Case (1569), an essential early English legal decision that established that slavery was not recognized under English common law.
Specifically, this case held that a person cannot be held as a slave in the Kingdom.
The report of the Cartwright’s Case allegedly states: “The air of England is too pure for any slave to breathe,” and this principle essentially declared that any person who set foot on English soil could not be considered a slave, as slavery was inconsistent with England’s common law.
This legal ruling became a significant precedent in English jurisprudence and contributed to the abolitionist movement decades later, influencing cases like the Smith v. Browne & Cooper case (1702).
Thus, in 1619, when the first 19 or 20 kidnapped Africans arrived in colonial Virginia, the lawgivers in Virginia applied the English common law, explaining why the original Africans became indentured servants—not slaves.
Indentured servitude was a brutal and deadly status… many people died well before their terms were over.
But indentured servitude was temporary, with a beginning and an end, typically six to nine years.
Afterward, these Africans, no different from other immigrants, became British subjects when they completed their term of indenture.
Thus, these original 19 Africans became members of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution.
They were treated no differently than other colonists, such as Benjamin Franklin, who served as an indentured servant in colonial America.