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.ÿþ20.African Americansthe human face of Virginia was transformed in the course of the eighteenthcentury by the rapidly increasing presence of slaves.Of Virginia s total popu-lation, roughly estimated at 53,000 persons in 1690, African Americans com-prised a few more than 9,300, or about 18 percent.By 1780 blacks accountedfor over 220,000 persons in a total population of 538,000, or slightly over 40percent.1 Almost without exception African Americans in Virginia were heldin bondage; free persons of color black or mulatto were at most 4 to 5 per-cent of persons of African descent.If the perspectives of gender and class areessential to making sense of eighteenth-century Virginia, even more so, then,is the perspective of race.African Americans, whether slave or free, male or female, were parishioners.In some Tidewater parishes they constituted a majority of the parishioners.They were parishioners even if few among them would have considered them-selves as such.2 And they were parishioners even if few, if any, of the dominantwhite inhabitants would have been willing to acknowledge it.Many of thelatter might well have found preposterous or outrageous the notion that theirbondservants were fellow parishioners.They would not have found prepos-terous, however, the identification of the African Americans in their midst aslaborers.Work was what brought them into the Chesapeake in the first placeand what justified to contemporaries their being held as slaves.Black male andfemale workers sixteen years and older were counted as tithables along withwhite males.Slaves made up a sizable portion of the workforce in many par-ishes and the largest portion in a majority of parishes.As tithables, their annualtax obligations to parish and county authorities were paid by their owners.The income that made possible the payment of taxes was largely earned offthe backs of African Americans.259
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