Born: Unknown, Angola (assumed)
Died: Unknown
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Angelo
The following is shared from the Encyclopedia Virginia, in line with the Creative Commons licensing.
Angela (also Angelo) was an enslaved laborer and among the first Africans to arrive in the Virginia colony in 1619. She appears in the census of 1624 as “Angela a Negar” and the next year as “Angelo a Negro Woman in the Treasurer.” Likely born in present-day Angola, Angela was one of 350 African men and women captured by Portuguese raiders and their African allies in 1619 and sold to a Portuguese slave trader. On the way to America, however, two English ships, the White Lion and the Treasurer, attacked the slave ship and stole about fifty of its Africans, sailing them to Virginia. There Captain William Peirce likely purchased Angela. By 1625, having survived the violence of Africa and the Middle Passage, disease in Virginia, and a deadly attack by Virginia Indians, she was living in his household with Mrs. Peirce and three white indentured servants. Little else is known of Angela’s life, although archaeologists excavating the Peirce residence in 2017 and 2018 have discovered at least one artifact, a cowrie shell, they believe may have been connected to her labor there. Her date of death is unknown.
In the Historical Record
Angela appears in the historical record just twice, as part of censuses conducted in the Virginia colony on February 16, 1624, and January 24, 1625. In the first she is one of the colony’s twenty-one Africans, identified as “Angela a Negar” and living in James City. The second muster provides more detail, grouping residents according to household and including, when possible, their ages. In this list she is located in the James City household of Captain William Peirce, with Peirce’s wife and three presumably white indentured servants. One of twenty-three Africans in the colony, she is identified this time as “Angelo a Negro Woman in the Treasurer.” In subsequent histories of Jamestown and early Virginia she is referred to as both Angelo and Angela, and historians are unsure of why the census associated her with a traditionally male name. It could have been a mistake on the part of census takers, or it may have been that her name was a corruption of Angola, Angela’s likely birthplace. The name also may have reflected an anglicization of her birth name.
Africa and the Middle Passage
Angela and her fellow enslaved Africans aboard the Treasurer likely were Kimbundu-speaking people from a West African polity known as Ndongo. Part of present-day Angola, the region had long been unstable as a result of climate, geopolitics, and the economy of the transatlantic slave trade. In 1575, the Portuguese military had entered a bay near the mouth of the Kwanza River in the hopes of eventually finding silver in the interior. Subsequent Portuguese raids, along with a drought that dispersed communities in search of food, left the people who remained particularly vulnerable. In 1580 Portugal and Spain were united under the same crown, opening Spain’s lucrative Caribbean slave market to the Portuguese. As a result, the Portuguese and their African allies sometimes provoked violence for the purpose of capturing men and women, such as those in Ndongo, and selling them to slave traders.
Angela likely had a rural upbringing in Ndongo, raising crops such as millet and sorghum and tending cattle. It is possible, because of the Portuguese presence in the region, that she had had at least some contact with Christianity. She may even have been baptized, her name being evidence of this fact. The Portuguese required that slaves be baptized before they arrived in America, but it was generally a pro forma gesture. Angelia likely did not practice the religion at the time of her capture. Sometime in 1619 she was one of 350 enslaved Africans sold to Manuel Mendes da Cunha, captain of the the São João Bautista at the port of São Paulo de Luando. The Portuguese ship was bound for Vera Cruz, New Spain (present-day Mexico), where its human cargo would be sold as slaves, with the vast majority going to labor in the sugar plantations of the Caribbean and South America.
Somewhere in the Atlantic, however, the São João Bautista was attacked by two English ships, the Treasurer and White Lion. They were sailing with letters of marque, which provided official sanction from foreign governments to prey on Spanish and Portuguese ships, stealing valuable cargo. When it arrived in Vera Cruz, the São João Bautista carried only 147 slaves, having lost 203 along the way. Many of these people likely died from disease; others may have taken their own lives or been killed in the English ships’ attack. The remainder—between forty-five and fifty enslaved Africans—had been stolen by the Treasurer and White Lion. The two ships promptly sailed for Virginia, with the White Lion arriving at Point Comfort sometime late in August. John Rolfe, the colony’s secretary, noted that it carried “20. and odd Negroes,” who were “bought for victualle [food] … at the best and easyest rate they could.” Some, perhaps all, of the Africans were then transported to Jamestown and resold. The fact that these men and women were “bought” suggests to many historians that they were treated as slaves and not indentured servants.
The Treasurer arrived three or four days later and carried another twenty-five to twenty-nine Africans. The colony’s deputy governor, Sir George Yeardley, sent Rolfe, Captain William Peirce, and another man to meet the ship, but by the time they arrived the Treasurer had fled. Because his letter of marque had expired, the captain feared arrest. He later sold fourteen slaves in Bermuda, suggesting that he had unloaded between eleven and fifteen in Virginia. (These numbers vary somewhat among historians.) It is likely that Peirce purchased at least one of these Africans, the woman Angela.
In Virginia
Angela’s age when she arrived in Virginia is unknown, but already she had survived the violence of Portuguese and African slave hunters, the horrors of the Middle Passage, during which as much as 43 percent of São João Bautista‘s Africans had died, and the attack of the Treasurer and White Lion. In March 1620, a muster counted thirty-two Africans in Virginia, but only twenty-one remained five years later, suggesting that Angela lived through the disease and illness that affected nearly all newcomers to the colony. And on March 22, 1622, coordinated surprise attacks by Virginia Indians killed nearly a third of Virginia’s non-native population, an event that Angela also survived.
Little is known of Angela’s life in Virginia. Her owner, William Peirce, was captain of the Governor’s guard and commander of Jamestown Island and its blockhouses, the small fortified structures that dotted the perimeter of the settlement. He was elected a burgess in 1624 and served on the governor’s Council from 1632 to 1643. A planter and entrepreneur, Peirce ran a store in Jamestown and was heavily involved in the tobacco business initiated by his son-in-law John Rolfe, who had been the first Virginian to cultivate a marketable form of the plant. In 1625, the Peirce household included Mrs. Joane Peirce and the servants Thomas Smith, aged seventeen, and Henry Bradford, aged thirty-five, both of whom had arrived aboard the Abigaile in January 1625. Ester Edrife worked as a maidservant and had been in the colony since 1619 or 1620.
Although Peirce patented land outside of James City on several occasions—for instance, 650 acres on Mulberry Island in December 1619—the 1625 muster indicates that Angela lived in an urban household. She may have cooked, cleaned, and in other ways helped care for the Peirces. In 2017 and 2018, archaeologists excavating the Peirce residence at Jamestown found at least one artifact, a cowrie shell, that has generally been associated with an African presence at other sites in Virginia and may be evidence of her labor. She was not among those laborers—six white men and one African man—who attempted to escape from Peirce on July 18, 1640. In 1635, Peirce played an important role in the ousting of Sir John Harvey from the governor’s office. Harvey regained power two years later, and in 1640 the king summoned Peirce to England, where he was detained and his personal estate seized but eventually returned. It is unknown whether Angela was part of that estate. Peirce returned to Virginia and died after 1644 but before June 22, 1647. The death date of Angela is unknown.
TIMELINE
1575: The Portuguese send a military expedition to the mouth of the Kwanza River in central Africa in search of silver.
1580: The death of King Henry, of Portugal, leads to a dynastic union with Spain and Spanish access to Portugal’s sources of slaves in Africa.
1618—1619: Luis Mendes de Vasconçelos leads campaigns against Kimbundu-speaking people in West Central Africa, capturing thousands. These Africans likely provided the cargo for six slave ships that arrived in Mexico from June 1619 until June 1620.
1619: Sometime in the first half of the year, the Portuguese slave ship São João Bautista leaves the port of São Paulo de Loanda, a Portuguese military outpost in West Africa, and sails for Vera Cruz, New Spain (present-day Mexico). It carries a cargo of 350 enslaved Africans.
July—August 1619: Two English ships, the White Lion and the Treasurer, both sailing out of the Netherlands, intercept the Portuguese slaver São João Bautista off the coast of Campeche in present-day Yucatán. After stealing about sixty enslaved Africans, the ships sail to Virginia with the intention of selling them.
Late August 1619: The White Lion, captained by John Colyn Jope, arrives at Point Comfort, where Jope sells “20. and odd Negroes” in exchange for food. These are the first Africans to enter the Virginia colony. Four days later, the Treasurer arrives and its captain, Daniel Elfrith, sells two or three of the enslaved Africans aboard.
August 30, 1619: Manuel Mendes da Cunha, captain of the Portuguese slave ship São João Bautista, arrives in Vera Cruz, New Spain (present-day Mexico), with only 147 slaves. He left West Africa with 350, but some were stolen off the coast of Campeche and transported to Virginia for sale. Others probably died en route.
March 1620: Virginia’s first muster, or census, is compiled and lists 892 Europeans and, among “Others not Christians in the Service of the English,” four Indians and thirty-two Africans. Fifteen of the Africans are male and seventeen are female.
February 1624: The population of Europeans in the Virginia colony is 906. A muster, or census, lists twenty-one Africans, down from thirty-two in 1620. Twelve of the Africans are identified by name, suggesting they have been baptized.
February 16, 1624: The Jamestown muster lists “Angelo a Negar,” an African woman, as living in the household of William Peirce.
January 20—February 7, 1625: The population of Europeans in the Virginia colony is 1,232. A muster, or census, lists twenty-three Africans and one Indian, all of them servants. They live on plantations scattered from the mouth of the James River to Flowerdew Hundred.
January 24, 1625: The Jamestown muster lists “Angelo a Negro Woman” as living in the household of William Peirce.