1670s

The Royal African Company, chartered in 1672 with a monopoly on English slave trade, transported an estimated 100,000 enslaved Africans to the Americas between 1672 and 1713. Company records document mortality rates of 20–25% during the Middle Passage. The RAC established the infrastructure of the British slave trade — forts on the West African coast, standardized trading relationships with African kingdoms, and transatlantic shipping routes. Its operations institutionalized mass enslavement at an industrial scale.

Ship records from the late 17th century document the systematic violence of the Middle Passage. Enslaved people were packed in holds with roughly 18 inches of headroom, chained together in pairs. Mortality rates on Royal African Company ships averaged 20–24%. Dysentery ('the flux'), smallpox, and dehydration were leading causes of death. Ship logs record numerous instances of enslaved people dying by jumping overboard — an act of final resistance. Slave ship captains recorded 'melancholy' and starvation among captives who refused to eat. The Hannibal (1693) lost 320 of 700 captives to disease during passage.

Bacon's Rebellion (1676) in Virginia saw Black enslaved people and white indentured servants fight together against the colonial government. Enslaved and indentured people were among the last to lay down arms. Virginia planters, alarmed by this cross-racial solidarity, responded by systematically expanding race-based slavery and offering racial privileges to poor whites. Legislators accelerated the transition from indentured servitude to African chattel slavery, reasoning that enslaved Black people — permanently bound and with no expectation of freedom — were less likely to form dangerous alliances with white workers. The rebellion thus accelerated the hardening of racial slavery as a social control system.

Poor white servants and enslaved Black people united in Bacon's Rebellion against Virginia's planter elite. In its aftermath, planters replaced white indentured servitude with African slavery and extended small privileges to poor whites, binding them to racial hierarchy over class solidarity.

Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia united poor white indentured servants and Black enslaved people against the planter elite. The alliance terrified Virginia's ruling class. In its aftermath, planters systematically replaced white indentured servitude with African slavery and extended small privileges to poor whites — binding them to the racial hierarchy rather than class solidarity. Historians consider it a turning point in the formation of American racial slavery.

Colonial estate inventories and court records from the late 17th century document the systematic separation of enslaved families through sale, inheritance division, and debt payment. Enslaved people appeared in wills as individual property items, routinely split among heirs regardless of family relationships. Plantation records from Virginia and Maryland show mothers separated from children, husbands from wives. One documented case: a 1672 Maryland estate divided four enslaved adults and three children among three heirs, splitting a family unit across different households. No colonial law recognized or protected enslaved family bonds.

By the 1670s, the Atlantic slave trade had profoundly disrupted West African societies. The Royal African Company's demand for enslaved people incentivized wars between African kingdoms to generate captives for sale. Dahomey, Asante, and other polities expanded militarily in part to capture people for sale to European traders. Coastal communities were raided by slave catchers. Scholars estimate that between 1650 and 1700, roughly 400,000 to 500,000 people were enslaved and transported across the Atlantic, with mortality during capture, holding, and transport meaning the actual human cost was far higher.

Royal African Company records and ship logs from the 1670s–1690s document multiple shipboard revolts by enslaved Africans during the Middle Passage. The 1672 voyage of the English ship Robert saw a revolt in which enslaved captives killed several crew members before being suppressed. The frequency of such revolts — estimated at one aboard every 8–10 slaving voyages — meant that slave ships were extensively armed and crewed with violence-suppression in mind. These acts of collective resistance, often organized by captives who shared languages and communities, were the first systematic armed resistance to the transatlantic slave trade.

King Charles II charters the Royal African Company with a monopoly on the English slave trade. Between 1672 and 1713 the RAC transported approximately 100,000 enslaved Africans to the Americas. All slaves carried by RAC ships were branded 'DY' (Duke of York, later James II) on their chests, marking the intimate involvement of the English crown in the trade.

After Anthony Johnson died around 1670, a Virginia court ruled that his son Richard Johnson's inherited land — originally part of Anthony's 250-acre grant — could be seized by the colonial government on the grounds that as a Black man, Anthony Johnson had been an 'alien' and therefore could not have held land under the same terms as English subjects. The ruling retroactively stripped the Johnson family of property accumulated over decades, demonstrating how colonial courts weaponized racial redefinition to dispossess free Black families.

Quaker founder George Fox, visiting Barbados in 1671, addressed a meeting of Friends and called on Quaker slaveholders to treat their enslaved workers with Christian consideration and to free them after a period of service. Fox stopped short of demanding immediate abolition but planted an ideological seed: that Christian conscience had obligations toward enslaved people. His Barbados address was circulated among Quakers and contributed to the growing antislavery testimony that would produce the Germantown Petition of 1688 and later abolitionist movements.

Virginia's 1672 act formally authorized the killing of enslaved people who resisted recapture, with no legal consequence for the killer. It offered bounties — paid in tobacco — for the capture or killing of runaway enslaved people. The law responded to persistent and growing resistance through flight, and its passage documented both the scale of the problem (from the slaveholders' perspective) and the violence used to maintain the system. It also absolved those who killed enslaved runaways of any civil liability, ensuring that violence against enslaved people carried no legal risk.

By the 1670s, colonial records reference communities of escaped enslaved people ('outlyers' in Virginia parlance) living in swamps, forests, and the backcountry. Virginia laws of 1672 explicitly addressed 'negroes that run away and lie out,' suggesting persistent maroon communities. These proto-maroon settlements — precursors to the more organized maroon communities of the 18th century — represented collective resistance and self-determination, with runaways pooling skills and resources to sustain themselves outside the slave system. They raided plantations for food and supplies and offered refuge to newly escaped enslaved people.

Colonial Virginia records from the 1670s document an extensive pattern of enslaved people running away. Court records show slaveholders filing for reimbursement of costs incurred pursuing runaways; newspaper notices described individuals by name, appearance, skills, and last known location. Some runaways sought to reach Native American communities in the interior; others attempted to pass as free in coastal towns. Virginia laws of 1672 and 1680 authorized the killing of runaways who resisted recapture and offered bounties for their return, reflecting how common and threatening flight had become.

Virginia's 1670 law prohibited free Black people from owning white indentured servants, a direct legislative attack on figures like Anthony Johnson who had built economic lives within the colonial system. The law began constructing a racial hierarchy in which whiteness conferred economic privileges denied to all Black people regardless of their freedom status. Combined with other restrictions of this era, it systematically dismantled the small community of free Black landowners that had existed on Virginia's Eastern Shore.

Maryland's 1671 law, following Virginia's 1667 precedent, declared that the baptism of enslaved people as Christians did not grant them freedom. The law addressed slaveholder reluctance to allow their enslaved workers to be baptized, reassuring them that religious conversion would not legally complicate their property claims. It reflected the colonies' systematic effort to sever Christianity from liberty and entrench permanent hereditary enslavement.

England grants a monopoly on the West African trade to the Royal African Company, which ships tens of thousands of enslaved people to its American colonies.

An interracial uprising whose aftermath pushed Virginia toward hardened, race-based slavery.