Thank you, Mike. The fact that there was no "legal framework" for slavery in Virginia in most of the first half of the 17th century, only indentured servitude, doesn't mean the conditions and brutality were not indistinguishable from slavery elsewhere in the Americas.  In addition, those first Africans were taken as slaves by Europeans, and they arrived with no ability whatsoever to determine their own fate.  Their work was brutal, as would be the work and suffering of future slaves in the south. To say that they were not slaves, but indentured servants, is to give full weight, again, to only one side of event, the European side, the side of magical labels, the side that forces all understanding through a single, limited worldview.  I'm pretty sure the Africans couldn't tell much difference between the two states, especially given that they were captured into slavery, not indentured servitude.