This post was spawned by one of Heather Cox Richardson’s “Letters from an American” which was also posted on Facebook.
She wrote about the tragic 1955 murder of Emmett Till, an innocent 14-year-old boy, and about the hateful and unrepentant attitude of J. W. Milam, one of Till’s two killers.
“What else could we do?” Milam said. “He was hopeless. I’m no bully. I never hurt a n* in my life. I like n*s, in their place (emphasis mine). I know how to work ’em. But I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice. As long as I live and can do anything about it, n*s are gonna stay in their place.”
Milam’s attitude had it roots in 1620 when a Dutch man-of-war traded “20 and odd Negroes” for “victualle,” according to a letter from Virginia Colony secretary John Rolfe to Sir Edwin Sandys. From there, it evolved into a system of utter oppression and cruelty by whites, who used the principle of human bondage to treat their unfree laborers as less than cattle for their own petty satisfaction. These attitudes and the economy which arose as a result – largely the growing of cotton in the South – were officially and legally repudiated by the Civil War and subsequent amendments to the Constitution which guaranteed “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” to all citizens, and not just wealthy white landowners – but the attitudes in the hearts of many in the South clearly did not die, as witnessed by the conditions that Blacks dealt with prior to the Civil Rights area, predominantly in the South.
While thinking about John Rolfe’s letter, I kept having flashbacks to elementary school, and of vague memories of learning about the arrival of the Dutch ship in Jamestown. I could have sworn that the text was recorded as “20. and odd negars,” (at that time the word was simply a corruption of the Portuguese word for “black,” and had not yet become the hateful slur of later times). So I started doing some digging, and was intrigued to find that I was not the only one who remembered things erroneously.
The following websites commemorating the 400th anniversary of the beginning of human bondage in America quote that passage from Rolfe’s letter in that manner:
https://cbc.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=2097
News from The Congressional Black Caucus, 9/11/2019: “Congressional Ceremony Marks 400 Years Of Slavery In America”
https://www.wm.edu/as/history/news/news-archive/2019-20-archive/1619-2019-from-trauma-to-triumph.php
William and Mary news archive 23 August 2019, “1619-2019: From Trauma to Triumph”
https://wydaily.com/latest/local/2019/02/08/researchers-seek-fuller-picture-of-first-africans-in-america/
Williamsburg Yorktown Daily, February 8, 2019, “Researchers seek fuller picture of first Africans in America”
https://asalh.org/commemorating-400-years-of-black-history-in-hampton-virginia/
The Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) – Commemorating 400 years Of Black History In Hampton, Virginia, August 27, 2019
https://www.voanews.com/a/researchers-seek-fuller-picture-of-first-africans-in-america/4777243.html
Voice of America, “Researchers Seek Fuller Picture of First Africans in America,” 7 February 2019
https://web.archive.org/web/20190920233856/www.bet.com/news/features/1619/400-years-since-beginning-of-american-slavery.html
1619-2019: From Trauma to Triumph (www.bet.com, retrieved from the Internet Archive)
These are all respected institutions, and it made me even more curious as to how the discrepancy in nomenclature arose.
In The Encyclopedia Virginia, a partial transcript of John Rolfe’s letter is presented, along with transcription, in “Records of the Virginia Company, Volume 3, Page 241“.
Here is plainly transcribed “20. and odd Negroes.” If you were not sure about the accuracy of the transcription, below we can see a scan of the original letter:
Having been unsuccessful in finding any explanations on the Internet for the discrepancy, I turned to Perplexity, an AI search engine which provides references with everything it is able to find. What I asked:
“The first arrival of African slaves in America is recorded in a letter by Virginia colony secretary John Rolfe, in which he recounted – according to some – that a Dutch Man o’ War traded “20 and odd Negars” for “victuals.” But a scan of the letter itself shows that the word Rolfe used was “negroes,” and the Encyclopedia of Virginia provides an accurate transcript of the letter from Rolfe to Sir Edwin Sandys. Even a report from the Congressional Black Congress in 2019 uses the phrase “20 and odd Negars.” I want to know how Rolfe’s “negroes” was changed to “negars” in some reports.”
I was not unhappy with the result [emphasis added to the salient parts]:
John Rolfe’s 1619 letter documenting the first arrival of Africans in Virginia describes the sale of “20. and odd Negroes.” This exact phrase—using “Negroes”—is confirmed by direct transcripts from reputable sources such as the Encyclopedia of Virginia and republished excerpts of the letter, all of which indicate Rolfe wrote “Negroes” and not “Negars”.
The origin of the spelling “Negars” or its substitution for “Negroes” in some later reports seems to trace to evolving English usage and to historical misreadings or reinterpretations over time. Several factors contribute to this confusion:
- The early 17th-century English language was not standardized, and words referring to people of African descent included a range of spellings—such as “negroes,” “negers,” “negars,” and, later, “[n-word]” — all derived from the Spanish and Portuguese “negro” (meaning black), and ultimately from the Latin “niger”.
- The spelling “negars” appears in several 18th and 19th-century works, and was sometimes used interchangeably with “negroes” or as an early variant in American English, especially in regions influenced by Dutch or non-standard English dialects.
- Some secondary sources and later historical writings incorrectly retrojected¹ these variant spellings into the context of 1619, perhaps due to faulty transcription practices, unfamiliarity with the original manuscript, or confusion regarding the shifting terminology used to describe African-descended people in colonial records.
In summary, John Rolfe’s original letter used the word “Negroes,” but through later historical reinterpretations, variances in early English spelling, and repeated citation errors, the term “Negars” emerged in certain secondary sources and reports. But direct examination of Rolfe’s correspondence confirms that “Negroes” was his actual word choice in the context of the 1619 arrival.
Sources:
https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/africans-virginias-first/
https://library.schlagergroup.com/chapter/9781961844087-book-part-002
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/teachers/huck/section1_2.html
https://scholarworks.smith.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=hst_facpubs
At least, at this point, I know that my original memory from my grade-school days was not imagined up, and have a good idea of what happened between John Rolfe’s penning his letter and subsequent reporting.
The Old Wolf has spoken.
Footnotes
¹ I love the word “retrojected,” to project into the past.
Playing in the World Game 