Thursday, December 11, 2014

Boehner Hoodwinked AGAIN!

Brilliant! Absolutely masterful! Boehner just got snookered in the most fashionable way yet! He and the GOP don't even know what hit them. This was another Obama Parlor game and he won this one big. There was a head fake alright. The ploy was to full court press to turn his Progressives, ostensibly that is. The game was to make it look that way so Boehner would have to go to the well and give up chits to garner votes from his own party. They bit on it. Now, the Progressives can say, hey look, we voted against the Bill. The nasty GOP rolled us. Brilliant!

Sunday, December 7, 2014

First Africans to Colonial America

In 1619, the House of Burgesses met; the first representative assembly in the New World. Also, in 1619, the first Africans arrived on a Dutch trade ship that had run low on food and traded the Africans for food supplies. These Africans became indentured servants, as slavery did not develop in Virginia for another sixty plus years. Prior to 1700, many indentured women had children with African fathers. These mulatto children were born free.

Around 1700 a law was passed that punished white women who had children by African men. After 1700, the children of these women were often taken away from their mothers and sold as "indentured servants" until they were of age 21. Many if not most of the non-gentlemen colonists also arrived as indentured servants. Indentured servitude generally lasted seven to eight years and was usually ended with payment in the form of land. Most of our ancestors arrived as indentures.

For most of the 1600s, white indentured servants worked the colony's tobacco fields, but by 1705 the Virginia colony had become a slave society.

1619. The ship Treasurer arrived in Bermuda from Virginia, with Africans brought via Jamestown by Captain Daniel Elfrith (sic?). It was reported that acting Governor Miles Kendall had about 29 Africans from that ship locked up because he believed they were stolen from a Spanish ship in the West Indies. It was later discovered they came originally from Angola. Those who arrived in Jamestown on this ship were the first black Africans to be imported to the USA.

In 1650, there were about 300 "Africans" living in Virginia, about 1% of an estimated 30,000 population. They were not slaves; any more than were the approximately 4,000 white indentured servants working out their loans for passage money to Virginia. Many had earned their freedom, and they were each granted 50 acres (200,000 m2) of land when freed from their indentures, so they could raise their own tobacco or other crops. Although they were at a disadvantage in that they had to pay to have their newly acquired land surveyed in order to patent it, white indentured servants found themselves in the same predicament. Some black indentured servants, however, went on to patent and buy land. Anthony Johnson, who settled on the Eastern Shore following the end of indenture, even bought African slaves of his own. George Dillard, a white indentured servant who settled in New Kent County after his servitude ended, held at least 79 acres (320,000 m2) of his own land and was able to marry despite a dearth of women in the colonies at that time.

Between 1618 and early 1619, the governor of the Portuguese colony of Angola, Luis Mendes Vascelos, captured thousands of Africans from the kingdom of Ndongo. These captives were likely the cargo for six slave ships that sailed from Angola to Mexico between 1619 and mid-1620. In early 1619, one of those slave ships, Sao Joao Bautista, left Angola to sail for Vera Cruz. In its cargo were 350 African slaves. While en route to Vera Cruz, the Sao Joao Bautista was intercepted by two Dutch ships, theWhite Lion and the Treasurer off the coast of Mexico. Roughly fifty slaves were stolen by the Dutch ships that then set their sails for Virginia with the intent to sell their recently ascertained cargo.

The White Lion arrived in Virginia in late August 1619. John Colyn Jope, the White Lion’s captain, sold 20-and-some-odd Negroes in exchange for food. These were some of the first Africans to enter the Virginia colony. In 1623 Anthony and Isabella, who arrived on the White Lion in 1619, gave birth to William Tucker, the first documented child of African descent born in English North America.

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