Earliest Asian Immigrants In America: South Asians In Colonial Virginia (Part1) By Francis C. Assisi

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Here 104 men and boys came on May 14, 1607 -- backed by the investors in the Virginia Company, the private British firm that financed the effort -- looking for gold and dreaming the American dream before there was an America. Prosperity finally came not from gold or silver, but from the golden leaf: tobacco.

This would become what historian and writer Nathaniel Philbrick calls “the rightful birthing ground of America,” its soil eventually sprinkled with the blood of Native Americans, Euro-Americans and Afro-Americans.

With the arrival of the English, Jamestown also laid the foundation for two more of American history's less exalted experiences: grabbing Native American Indian land and bringing African slaves to work it, thus marking the roots of black enslavement and Native American genocide. That’s why this time, we must remember not just the founding of the US, but of "the displacement of the Indians" and of "human bondage"

The voice of Steven Atkins, Chief of Virginia’s Chickahominy tribe is loud and clear: “It didn’t all begin in 1607 …our people had been here for thousands of years.” He reminds us: “A whole nation was annihilated - a nation who befriended strangers and ultimately died at the hands of those same strangers, and as we commemorate Jamestown 2007 and the birth our nation today, those of Native American heritage in Virginia are also reminded of this history.” Assistant Chief Warren Cook adds: “We’re not quite the good little Indians they want us to be.”

Malik Shabazz president of the D.C. based Black Lawyers for Justice has claimed that there is "no reason to celebrate the founding of Jamestown." Shabazz said. "The no-good, so-called Jamestown settlers ... have nothing but blood on their hands." Shabazz, along with the New Black Panther Party for Self Defense, and the American Indian Movement, voiced their opposition to what they call a "whitewash of history" by Jamestown organizers. "The African wasn't bothering the white man at all. The African wasn't bothering anybody at all. Here comes the white man to the shore of Africa with his slave ships," Shabazz said.

Chief Wabun Inini of the American Indian Movement remarks poignantly: "It's been a 400 and some year holocaust."

That’s why Saturday brought about 100 protesters, some wearing all black and carrying banners and shouting: "Black power, red power, shame on Jamestown." And last weekend during the British Queen's tour, American Indian and radical activists protested the 1607 Jamestown settlement in a public demonstration. The title for their weekend effort: "Shame on Jamestown's 400th." Their theme: "Jamestown, VA 400th Anniversary of Genocide." This group – which has close ties to the New Black Panther Party – declared: "Make no mistake about it, our … rally … and demonstration … [are] designed to crash this illegitimate party and pursue the overdue case for reparations and justice for the victims of slavery, mass murder and genocide. … The ill affects of what happened at Jamestown still fester in the community today."

Meanwhile, a recent Virginia state resolution has acknowledged that government-sanctioned slavery "ranks as the most horrendous of all depredations of human rights and violations of our founding ideals in our nation's history, and the abolition of slavery was followed by systematic discrimination, enforced segregation, and other insidious institutions and practices toward Americans of African descent that were rooted in racism, racial bias, and racial misunderstanding."

True, commercialism, slavery, and subjugation of Native Americans aren't Jamestown's only legacies. Its settlers also developed a new system of local government. "They were acting locally on local problems, to solve them in a way that benefit everybody's interests, the common good," claims Dennis Montgomery of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, co-author and compiler of the newly published ‘1607: Jamestown and the New World.’

Thus, while many people will celebrate the birth of America at the 400th anniversary of the Jamestown settlement in Virginia, one group of people, the Native Americans, known as American Indians, will be involved in that celebration as a reminder that America is really much older than that. And African Americans have reason to remind themselves of that abomination known as slavery.

But another group of people, Asian Americans - specifically Indian Americans or South Asians or East Indians will not be commemorating or protesting the event because they are unaware that they were the earliest Asians to come to colonial America – brought as indentured workers and as slaves.

They are unaware of this legacy of more than 380 years in America because they have melded – as workers, as slaves – into the American ethnic cauldron, along with African Americans and Native Americans.

For it is here in Virginia that recent research has identified the earliest Asian immigrants in America – people from the Indian subcontinent who were brought to Jamestown and Williamsburg by the English colonists during the 17th and 18th centuries.

It’s a legacy that I have uncovered by probing documents available at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and the University of Virginia’s Geography of Slavery Project.

THE FIRST ASIAN: AN EAST INDIAN

The best evidence suggests that the people from India arrived in colonial America in one of two ways. They were taken aboard as lascars or helpers aboard the trading ships of the British East India Company from Indian ports, and, on reaching England, succumbed to the promises of agents who were taking indentured workers to the New World. Or else they were taken as servants by the British “Nabobs” who amassed their fortunes in India and subsequently returned home to England and thence to the newly established colony in America – where they took their servants with them as a sign of their status.

A 2003 study prepared by Martha W. McCartney, a project historian for the National Park Service’s Jamestown Archaeological Assessment reveals that Captain George Menefie, who was assigned 1200 acres of land in Jamestown in 1624 used “Tony, an East Indian,” as a headright. This is further confirmed in a 2006 report from the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation which identifies Menefie as a wealthy English merchant who arrived in Virginia in 1622, and obtained legal right to the land by paying passage for 24 immigrants, including an East Indian.

At the heart of the early migration to colonial America was the headright system designed to encourage immigration. Every Englishman who “imported” a laborer or servant to the colony received a fifty-acre land grant.

What the evidence from Jamestown/Williamsburg suggests is that the first East Indians were brought to Virginia within less than a generation of the arrival of European settlers in Virginia – and within a decade after the Mayflower landed in Plymouth.

Social historian Thomas Brown, a faculty member at Lamar University, Beaumont, Texas has corroborated this in a 2004 research paper. Brown explains that many East Indians were imported to the American colonies by way of England, arriving already Christianized and fluent in English. Others arrived as slaves who had been captured and sold. “It is impossible to confidently estimate the size of the South Asian population in the Western Shore counties, but “East Indians” outnumber “Indians” in the extant colonial records after 1710 or so,” acknowledges Brown.

Furthermore, he claims: ‘In 18th century Chesapeake, South Asians stood out from sub-Saharan slaves both in culture and appearance. Since South Asians were a minority among the slave population, the community’s perception of their distinctiveness persisted for a longer period of time.' And most surprisingly, Brown adds: ‘there was a significant contingent of “East Indian” slaves in the colonial Chesapeake.’

The other evidence I have uncovered comes from runaway slave advertisements in 18th century colonial Virginia newspapers.

RUNAWAY SLAVE ADVERTISEMENTS

Consider this. The Virginia Gazette of 4 August 1768 describes one young "East Indian" as "a well made fellow, about 5 feet 4 inches high" who had "a thin visage, a very sly look, and a remarkable set of fine white teeth." Another is identified as "an East India negro man” who speaks French and English.

On 13 July, 1776, the Virginia Gazette reported the run away of a “Servant Man named John Newton, about 20 Years of Age, 5 feet 5 or 6 Inches high, slender made, is an Asiatic Indian by Birth, has been about twelve Months in Virginia, but lived ten Years (as he says) in England, in the Service of Sir Charles Whitworth. He wears long black Hair, which inclines to curl, tied behind, and pinned up at the Sides; has a very sour Look, and his Lips project remarkably forward. He left his Master on the Road from Williamsburg, between King William Courthouse and Todd's Bridge, where he was left behind to come on slowly with a tired Horse...” The advertisement by slave owner William Brown goes on: “he is a good Barber and Hair-Dresser, it is probable he may endeavour to follow those Occupations as a free Man. Whoever takes up the said Servant, and secures him in Gaol, giving me information thereof, so that I may get him again, shall have eight dollars Reward; and if delivered to me at Westwood, in Prince William, further reasonable Charges, paid by William Brown.” Another advertisement placed in the 19 July edition of the paper by the same William Brown, ups the reward amount to ten dollars with the added information that John Newton “shaves and dresses well, but is much addicted to liquor.”

The above information is culled from a digital collection of advertisements for runaway slaves and servants found in 18th century Virginia newspapers. There are many more such references to “East Indians” to be found in “The Geography of Slavery” project in Virginia. Compiled by Thomas Costa, Professor of History, University of Virginia's College at Wise, for the Virginia Center for Digital History and Electronic Text Center, the database is available online http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/subjects/runaways/allrecords.html

With these findings from 17th and 18th century documents, including American newspapers, Indian Americans or South Asian Americans or Desis, as many of them like to identify themselves, stand on the cusp of rewriting their history by acknowledging the full complement of their heritage - including that of indentured servants and slaves in America.

(This series is dedicated to Zadie Jivan and Riya Jivan - 3rd generation Indian Americans who provided the inspiration)

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