Legal Slavery in America: A Precedent Set by a Black Plaintiff

The legal precedent for slavery in America was set by a free black in a case decided by a seventeenth-century court granting the ownership of a black defendant to a black plaintiff. Slavery was not introduced by the arrival of the first Africans at Point Comfort in 1619. Ironically, it was introduced by precisely one of these first African arrivals to the New World. From this point, it developed into the known institution of slavery that later had to be quelled by a Civil War.