Slavery in the United States is the ultimate hypocrisy in a nation-state founded on freedom, and it is the root of American racism today. Yet at the establishment of the English North American colonies, no one could possibly have conceived of that future. Many civilizations in the world maintained some form of slavery in the sixteenth century. The principle of trading slaves out of Africa had been perpetuated by the Ottoman Empire and people in the Arabic peninsula for two centuries previous. Like everywhere else, Native Americans enslaved prisoners of war and occasionally traded them from one tribal community to another. And the Spanish, Portuguese, and French had all tapped into the African slave trade by the time the first Africans arrived in Jamestown in 1619, as recorded in John Rolfe's letter to Sir Edwin Sandys. The idea of maintaining slaves as a labor force and trading them like any other piece of property was common in the seventeenth century. What would later become uncommon would be the political, economic, and social organization of the colonial societies that developed in North America and their commitment to what they defined as freedom but denied it to others.