The Washington Post looks back at America’s first slaves, the bounty of a Portuguese slave ship seized by the British on the high seas and brought to Jamestown, Virginia.
The involvement of the Portuguese is a reminder of the fact that the U.S. was hardly the only slaveowning country in the Western Hemisphere. Simon Bolivar was a slaveholder, if (like a number of America’s Founding Fathers) one who recognized the evils of slavery and promised to do something about it, but never did. Slavery wasn’t abolished in the Bolivarian states in northern South America until 1854, Cuba in 1886, Brazil in 1888.