Slave breeding and trading gradually became more lucrative than exporting tobacco during the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century. Tobacco was the key export of the colony in the seventeenth century. There were also a class of white people who oversaw the work of enslaved people, and a poorer class of whites that competed for work with freed blacks. By the eighteenth century, plantation owners were the aristocracy of Virginia. Colonial Virginia became an amalgamation of Algonquin-speaking Native Americans, English, other Europeans, and West Africans, each bringing their own language, customs, and rituals. Africans were first brought to colonial Virginia in 1619, when 20 Africans from present-day Angola arrived in Virginia aboard the ship The White Lion.Īs the slave trade grew, enslaved people generally were forced to labor at large plantations, where their free labor made plantation owners rich. Slavery in Virginia began with the capture and enslavement of Native Americans during the early days of the English Colony of Virginia and through the late eighteenth century.
