Who Started the Slave Trade in North America?

The United States did not exist when the transatlantic slave trade came to North America.

• The Timeline: The first recorded enslaved Africans were brought to Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619 aboard a Dutch pirate ship, though Spanish and Portuguese empires had been trafficking enslaved people to the Americas and the Caribbean since the early 1500s.
• The Imperial Engine: For over 150 years before the Declaration of Independence, the American colonies operated under British imperial law, which aggressively expanded and legally institutionalized chattel slavery to maximize colonial output.

The economic system of the colonies is called mercantilism. Under this system, the colonies were strictly desig ...