Not if a 17th-century Portuguese king hadn’t dreamed of a trans-African empire if an obscure African kingdom had been more stable if two pirate ships looking for gold hadn’t, in the vastness of the Gulf of Mexico, stumbled instead on a slave ship if the pirates hadn’t sold the enslaved to settlers in a colony desperately short of labor. How and why slavery, America’s original sin, came to these shores and took hold is a story of accident and coincidence. The contradiction would shape the nation that emerged from the Virginia colony. Slavery alongside democracy oppression amidst freedom. The other was the first recorded arrival of enslaved Africans in mainland English America. One was the inaugural meeting of the General Assembly of the Virginia colony – the first elective representative body of its kind in North America. Four hundred years ago this summer, a few weeks and 35 miles apart, two epochal events occurred.
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