The First Slave (And Why He Matters)

This Article has two purposes. The narrower, straight historical purpose is to explore in further detail the status of blacks in the earliest years of Britain's colonies in the New World. The second, more legal aim is to explore what is, for many of us, still the hardest question in American legal history: namely, to understand the route by which slavery came to be legal in the early seventeenth century, in a culture that had long rejected unfree status and that seemed to retain that view.