Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

Byrd recounts the story of Samuel Sewall, a white businessman recording a transaction record for his slave ship. He was conflicted about slavery but didn’t stop participating in it. He comforted himself with biblical precepts stating that bondage could be divine and could provide redemption. When America joined the slave trade, the numbers of captured Africans were so extreme that he couldn’t pretend that slavery could have redeeming qualities, especially not in a society founded on the idea of liberty. He wrote, “These strangers will be the end of our experiment” (74). He worried that greedy men were willfully misinterpreting scripture to justify the profits of slave holding.

As those profits increased, Samuel forgot about his impassioned resistance to slavery: “Capital was the real god of this new world, he thought. The future belonged to him” (75).

Wright introduces his essay by stating “We see the past as far more distant than it is in reality” (77).

In 1662, Mary and Anthony Johnson petitioned the court for tax relief. They were free after their long enslavements and had prospered. They died by the time the baptism laws—which took away the guaranteed freedom previously resulting from a Christian baptism—were passed.

Wright believes the 1705 Act Concerning Servants and Slaves was a meticulous effort to remove Black freedom and any potential future hopes for it.