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In August 1619, a slave ship captained by Manuel Mendes da Cunha carried 350 Africans toward Vera Cruz, New Spain. Before it arrived, Captain Cunha’s ship was attacked and robbed by an English corsair that then sold about twenty of those Africans in Virginia. It was the first recorded transaction of its kind in the colonies, and thus began slavery in what would become the United States of America. When the first Africans were sold in the colonies, conscience and tradition gave at least some of …