Anthony Johnson Oddity

Slavery and the involuntary servitude of millions of native Africans is one of the greatest stains on the history of the United States. Yet, what might further deepen the dark nature of America’s slaveholding past is the assertion that it was a complete invention of American society in the name of increased monetary profits, not a historical trend which was simply duplicated by a fledgling nation. In the mid-seventeenth century, a black man, Anthony Johnson, achieved his freedom after a term of indentured servitude, and henceforth lived, farming his plantation, within a community filled with a majority of inhabitants of Anglo-European heritage. It would be somewhat unscholarly however, to judge Johnson by standards developed in retrospect, or simply by the relative numerical rarity of people in his condition. Anthony Johnson was, as demonstrated by Myne Owne Ground’s account of the context in which he lived, not treated in any aspect of sociopolitical life as an oddity, and thus, he cannot be termed as such in retrospect.
Socially and economically, it is obvious that Johnson was not treated, by any means, as an oddity in his community. Johnson was not prevented from dealing with his white neighbors, …show more content…
However Virginia’s Eastern Shore was, in Breen’s own concession, not the only locale in Colonial America that lacked inherent racial prejudice. The Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam (at present-day New York) was home to many free Africans, who purchased land and established families just as did Johnson and his counterparts in Virginia. New Amsterdam also similarly did not recognize race in cases of indentured servitude, as Breen notes it was socially acceptable for a white woman to serve a freed black man