Bondage, Freedom & (and) the Constitution: The New Slavery Scholarship and Its Impact on Law and Legal Historiography

Twenty or so Africans, the first to arrive in British North America, were put ashore at Jamestown in 1619. Within seventy years, their labor, and that of the thousands who followed in their shackled train, had become the mainstay of the colonial economy. Once established by law, the perpetual bondage of Africans and African-American Creoles, in tandem with the notion of freedom it served to highlight and underscore, exerted a profound and lasting influence upon the economic, moral, and political life of the early European settler population and its creolized descendants.