The Colonial Era 1600 – 1770s 

1603: Mathieu Da Costa, a free black explorer, guides the French through parts of Canada and the Lake Champlain region of what is now New York state.

1607: Jamestown is founded in Virginia.

1613: Jan Rodriquez, a free black sailor working for a Dutch fur trading company is assigned to live with and trade among the Native Americans on the island of Manhattan.

1619: August 20th, Twenty Africans arrived in Jamestown, Virginia, aboard an English warship named the White Lion. They were the first blacks to be forcibly settled as involuntary laborers in the North American British Colonies.

1620: The Pilgrims reach New England.

1624: The first African American child born free in the English colonies, William Tucker, is baptized in Virginia.

1625: The first enslaved Africans arrive in the Dutch Colony of New Amsterdam (modern day New York) with the Dutch West India Company. They quickly become the city's first municipal labor force, clearing land of timber, cutting lumber, cultivating crops, and constructing roads and fortifications.

1629: The first enslaved Africans arrive in what is now Connecticut

1634: Slavery is introduced in Maryland.

1636: Dutch minister Everadus Bogardus summons a teacher from Holland to Manhattan Island to provide religious training to Dutch and African children. This is the first example of educational efforts in Colonial North America which are directed toward persons of African descent.

1641: Massachusetts explicitly permits slavery of Indians, whites, and Negroes in its Body of Liberties. It is the first mainland British colony to legalize slavery.

1641: Mathias De Sousa, an African indentured servant who came from England with Lord Baltimore, is elected to Maryland's General Assembly.

1642: Virginia passes a fugitive slave law. Offenders helping runaway slaves are fined in pounds of tobacco. An enslaved person is to be branded with a large R after a second escape attempt.

1643: The New England Confederation reaches an agreement that makes the signature of a magistrate sufficient evidence to re-enslave a suspected fugitive slave.

1645: Merchant ships from Barbados arrive in Boston where they trade their cargoes of enslaved Africans for sugar and tobacco. The profitability of this exchange encourages the slave trade in New England.

1645: Dutch colonists transfer some of their landholdings in New Amsterdam to their former enslaved Africans as compensation for their support in battles with Native Americans. A condition of the land transfer, however, is the guarantee of a specified amount of food from those lands to their former owners.

1650: Connecticut legalizes slavery. Rhode Island by this date has large plantations worked by enslaved Africans.

1650: The Dutch West India Company introduces new rules concerning slavery in New Netherlands. After gaining freedom, former slaves, for example, are required to give fixed amounts of their crops to the company. After the English capture of the colony, greater restrictions are imposed on free blacks and enslaved people.

1651: Anthony Johnson, a free African American, imports several enslaved Africans and is given a grant of land on Virginia's Puwgoteague River Other free African Americans follow this pattern

1652: Massachusetts enacts a law requiring all African American and Native American servants to undergo military training to be able to help defend the colony.

1652: Rhode Island enacts first anti-slavery law in the British colonies. The law limits slavery to ten years.

1653: Enslaved African and Indian workers bulid wall across Manhattan Island to protect the Dutch colony from British invasion. The site of the wall is now Wall Street.

1655: Anthony Johnson successfully sues for the return of his slave John Casor, whom the court had earlier treated as an indentured servant.

1656: Fearing the potential for slave uprisings, Massachusetts reverses its 1652 statute and prohibits blacks from arming or training as militia. New Hampshire, and New York soon follow.

1657: Virginia amends its fugitive slave law to include the fining of people who harbor runaway slaves. They are fined 30 pounds of tobacco for every night they provide shelter to a runaway slave.

1660: A Connecticut law prohibits African Americans from serving in the militia.

1662: Virginia reverses the presumption of English law that the child follows the status of his father and enacts a law that makes the free or enslaved status of children dependent on the status of the mother.

1663: Black and white indentured servants plan a rebellion in Gloucester County, Virginia. Their plans are discovered, and the leaders are executed.

1663: Maryland slave laws rules that all Africans arriving in the colony are presumed to be slaves. Free European American women who marry enslaved men lose their freedom. Children of European American women and enslaved men are enslaved. Other North American colonies develop similar laws.

1663: In South Carolina every new white settler is granted twenty acres for each black male slave and ten acres for each black female slave he or she brings into the colony.

1664: In Virginia, the enslaved African's status is clearly differentiated from the indentured servant's when colonial laws decree that enslavement is for life and is transferred to the children through the mother. Black and slave become synonymous, and enslaved Africans are subject to harsher and more brutal control than other laborers.

1664: Maryland establishes slavery for life for persons of African ancestry and enacts the first law in Colonial America banning marriage between white women and black men.

1664: New Jersey and New York also recognize the legality of slavery.

1667: England enacts strict laws regarding enslaved Africans in its colonies. An enslaved African is forbidden to leave the plantation without a pass, and never on Sunday. An enslaved African may not possess weapons or signaling mechanisms such as horns or whistles. Punishment for an owner who kills an enslaved African is a 15-pound fine.

1667: Virginia declares that baptism does not free a slave from bondage, thereby abandoning the Christian tradition of not enslaving other Christians.

1670: The Massachusetts legislature passes a law that enables its citizens to sell the children of enslaved Africans into bondage, thus separating them from their parents.

1670: The Virginia Assembly enact law that allows all non-Christians who arrive by ship to be enslaved

1671: A Maryland law states that the conversion of enslaved African Americans to Christianity does not affect their status as enslaved people.

1672: King Charles II of England charters the Royal African Company, which dominates the slave trade to North America for the next half century.

1672: Virginia law now bans prosecution for the killing of an enslaved if the death comes during his or her apprehension.

1673: The Massachusetts legislature passes a law that forbids European Americans from engaging in any trade or commerce with an African American.

1675: An estimated 100,000 Africans are enslaved in the West Indies (the Caribbean) and another 5,000 are in British North America.

1676: Nathaniel Bacon leads an unsuccessful rebellion of whites and blacks against the English colonial government in Virginia.

1681: Maryland laws mandate that children of European servant women and African men are free.

1682: A new slave code in Virginia prohibits weapons for slaves, requires passes beyond the limits of the plantation and forbids self-defense by any black person against any white person.

1682: New York enacts its first slave codes. They restrict the freedom of movement and the ability to trade of all enslaved people in the colony.

1685: New York law forbids enslaved Africans and Native Americans from having meetings or carrying firearms.

1688: Quakers in Germantown, Pennsylvania denounce slavery in the first recorded formal protest in North America against the enslavement of Africans.

1690: By this year, all English colonies in North America have enslaved Africans.

1690: Enslaved Africans and Native Americans in Massachusetts plan a rebellion the plan is discovered, and the leaders are punished

1690: South Carolina enacts its first laws regulating slave movement and behavior.

1691: Virginia enacts a new law which punishes white men and women for marrying black or Indians. Children of such interracial liaisons become the property of the church for 30 years.

1693: King Charles II of Spain issued a decree freeing any escaped slaves from the British colonies that make it to the Florida colony. The escaped enslaved people were required to convert to Catholicism and do a stint in the Spanish military to fight against the indigenous tribes in the colony. The Spanish King was not offering emancipation from benevolence but to disrupt the colonial life of the British colonies

1694: The success of rice cultivation in South Carolina encourages the importation of larger numbers of enslaved laborers especially from Senegal and other rice producing regions of West Africa.

1695: Rev. Samuel Thomas, a white cleric in Charleston, South Carolina, establishes the first school for African Americans in the British North American colonies.

1696: Quaker religious leaders warn that members who own slaves may be expelled from the denomination.

1700: The publication of Samuel Sewall's "The Selling of Joseph", is considered the first major condemnation of slavery in print in British North America.

1702: The New York Assembly enacts a law which prohibits enslaved Africans from testifying against whites or gathering in groups larger than three on public streets.

1704: French colonist Elias Neau opens a school for enslaved African Americans in New York City.

1705: The Colonial Virginia Assembly defined as slaves all servants brought into the colony who were not Christians in their original countries as well as Indians sold to the colonists by other Native Americans.

1708: Blacks in South Carolina outnumber whites, making it the first English colony with a black majority.

1711: Great Britain's Queen Anne overrules a Pennsylvania colonial law prohibiting slavery

1711: A public slave market opens in New York City at the east end of Wall Street.

1712: The New York City slave revolt begins on April 6. Nine whites are killed, and an unknown number of blacks die in the uprising. Colonial authorities execute 21 slaves and six commit suicide.

1712: New York City enacts an ordinance that prevents free blacks from inheriting land.

1716: The first enslaved Africans arrive in Louisiana.

1721: New Orleans founded by the French in 1718, has more enslaved black men than free white men

1721: South Carolina limits voting to free white Christian men

1724: The French colonial government in Louisiana enacts the Code Noir, the first body of laws that govern both enslaved and free blacks in North America.

1735: South Carolina passes laws requiring enslaved people to wear clothing identifying them as slaves. Free blacks are required to leave the colony within six months or risk re-enslavement.

1737: An indentured black servant petitions a Massachusetts Court and wins his freedom after the death of his master.

1738: The first permanent black settlement in what will become the United States is established by fugitive slaves at Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose (Fort Mose), Florida.

1739: The first major South Carolina slave revolt takes place in Stono on September 9. A score of whites and more than twice as many black slaves are killed as the armed slaves try to flee to Florida.

1739: Nineteen white citizens of Darien, Georgia petition the colonial governor to continue the ban on the importation of Africans into the colony, calling African enslavement morally wrong.

1741: During the New York Slave Conspiracy Trials, New York City officials execute 34 people for planning to burn down the town. 13 African American men are burned at the stake and another 17 black men, two white men and two white women are hanged.

1741: South Carolina's colonial legislature enacts the most extensive slave restrictions in British North America. The laws ban the teaching of enslaved people to read and write, prohibits their assembling in groups or earning money for their activities.

1746: Lucy Terry, an enslaved woman, composes Bars Fight, the first known poem by an African American. A description of an Indian raid on Terry's hometown in Massachusetts, the poem will be passed down orally and published in 1855.

1752: Twenty-one-year-old Benjamin Banneker of Maryland constructs one of the first clocks in Colonial America, the first of a long line of inventions and innovations until his death in 1806.

1758: The African Baptist or Bluestone Church is founded on the William Byrd plantation near the Bluestone River, in Mecklenburg, Virginia, becoming the first known black church in North America

1760: Briton Hammon publishes “A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings and Surprising Deliverance of Briton Hammon in Boston”. This is believed to be the first autobiographical work written by an enslaved African living in British North America.

1761: Jupiter Hammon, a Long Island enslaved person, publishes a book of poetry. This is believed to be the first volume of poetry written and published by an African American.

1762: Virginia restricts voting rights to white men.

1770: On March 5, Crispus Attucks, an escaped slave of African and Native American ancestry, becomes the first colonial resident to die for American independence when he is killed by the British in the Boston Massacre.

1773: “Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral”, written by Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved woman is published in that city. It is the first book written by a black woman published in what would become the United States.

1773: The Silver Bluff Baptist Church, the oldest continuously operating black church, is founded in Silver Bluff, South Carolina near Savannah, Georgia.

1774: A group of enslaved blacks petition the Massachusetts General Court (legislature) insisting they too have a natural right to their freedom.

1774: First African Baptist Church, one of the earliest black churches in the United States, is founded in Petersburg, Virginia.

1775: African Americans participate on the Patriot side in the earliest battles of the Revolution, Concord, Lexington, and Bunker Hill. Two of the first of these Patriot soldiers were Peter Salem at the Battle of Concord and Salem Poor at the Battle of Bunker Hill

1775: Commander of the Continental Army George Washington prohibited Black men from serving in the Army. Lord Dunmore the British governor of Virginia heard about Washington’s decision and immediately offered freedom to any enslaved person willing to serve the British war effort. Sensing the stupidity of his decision Washington quickly changed his tune and ordered any black men that wanted to fight to be enlisted.

1775: The Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully held in Bondage holds the first of four meetings in Philadelphia on April 14. This is the first abolitionist meeting in North America. In 1784 the organization becomes the Pennsylvania Abolition Society

1776: A passage in the Declaration of Independence authored by Thomas Jefferson at the Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia, condemned the slave trade. The controversial passage is removed from the Declaration due to pressure from the southern colonies

1776:  Approximately 450,000 enslaved black people comprise 20% of the population of the colonies at the time of the Declaration of Independence

1777: On July 8, Vermont becomes the first political jurisdiction in the United States to abolish slavery.

1778: Paul Cuffee, a Boston merchant and shipowner, leads six other free blacks in petitioning Massachusetts to end their taxation without representation.

1780: Massachusetts abolishes slavery and grants African American men the right to vote.

1780: Pennsylvania adopts first gradual emancipation law. All children of enslaved people born after Nov. 1, 1780, will be free on their 28th birthday.